Rethinking Language and Culture on the Institutional Borderland

Abstract

um, but also the failure of the system to implement expectations for students that acknowledge or nurture the strengths they have brought with them or that challenge their capacity for intellectual growth.Ann Del Principe's piece, "Paradigm Clashes" also considers expectations, both the constricted expectations that some BW teachers or programs have for students and the correspondingly low expectations for those hired to teach basic writing.Del Principe speaks for those teachers of courses labeled "remedial," "developmental," or "basic" (and often assigned zero credits) who conceive of their work as the beginning of students' college experience, and not as a precollege trial period.Rather than settle for the minimum competence often encouraged by standardized tests, they design curriculum characterized by rigor, intellectual challenge, and high expectations, as well as by carefully structured scaffolding and support.Del Principe considers the substantial obstacles to making this approach the norm, and while she is unable to offer a conclusive solution, she offers a deeply felt and strongly argued statement of the problem.Both Virginia Crisco in "Rethinking Language and Culture on the Institutional Borderland" and Sara Biggs Chaney in "A Study of Teacher Error: Misreading Resistance in the Basic Writing Classroom" discuss expectations with an eye to repositioning students in the institution so that they may not only assume genuine authority over their own education but also have a discernible impact on the institution and the experience of students overall.Like Bernstein, Crisco looks specifically at a Latino/a population, while Chaney's essay moves from a case study of a resistant student to a more general analysis of the place colleges and universities assign to students and the possibilities for repositioning them.Jane Maher's subject, teaching in a women's prison, involves the most complex and controlling set of physical and psychological constraints.Maher describes students whose lives, even before prison, were subject to the buffeting of every imaginable negative force, and who now experience almost total control by their environment.Still, here where expectations might be the lowest, education can be, as Maher demonstrates, truly transformative.Like Bernstein's piece, these essays by Crisco, Chaney, and Maher show .students reflecting on their own education, as well as on their goals, their learning, and the obstacles to learning.In many ways, Basic Writing as a field has moved from dependence on a set program of study to a recognition that students need to engage the process, as Chaney, Crisco, and Bernstein argue.In a way, we have resisted the enforced contingency that characterizes BW programs by embracing instead a deliberate contingency in our theorizing.This is not because we lack knowledge, but rather because we now understand the need to 4

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