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Mary Soliday
From the Margins
to the Mainstream:
Reconceiving Remediation
Shaughnessy'sthoughtsaboutre-
Minamediation
were prophetic when she
published them in 1977:
We already begin to see that the remedial model, which isolates the student
and the skill from real college contexts, imposes a "fix-it station" tempo and
mentality upon both teachers and students. And despite the fine quality of
many of the programs that have evolved from this model, it now appears
that they have been stretched more tautly than is necessary between the
need to make haste and the need to teach the ABC'sof writing in adult ways.
We cannot know how many students of talent have left our programs not for
want of ability but for the sense they had of being done in by short-cuts and
misperceptions of educational efficiency. (293)
What Shaughnessy could already begin to see about the remedial
model-its
potential for ghettoizing programs, for labeling students, and
for simplifying views of how adults learn language-now
occupies the
center of our vision as we debate the usefulness of remediation and experiment with various forms of mainstreaming remedial students into college
courses.1 However, because remedial programs usually serve the most socially diverse groups of students within an institution, mainstreaming can
threaten the educational careers of students who otherwise might not be
in college. Remedial programs create sheltered educational pockets for academically marginal writers, and as a result some scholars have argued
that mainstreaming could eliminate these writers along with the programs. For this political reason, even scholars who have critiqued remedial
Mary Soliday is an assistant professor of English at the City College of New York. She was formerly the director of the CCNY Writing Center and is currently the co-director, with Barbara
Gleason, of a FIPSE-sponsored pilot project, "An Enrichment Approach to Language and Literacy." She is writing a book about this project and the politics of remediation.
CCC 47.1/February
1996
85
86
CCC47/February 1996
writing courses and documented their weaknesses do not necessarily advocate mainstreaming. The politics of remediation that composition scholars have discussed also get played out in the mainstream media's debates
about the validity of-and continued funding for-urban open admissions
and the remedial education that sustains it. This debate is particularlyrelevant to the remedial writing program at the City College of New York,
where I teach, because in recent months journalists have attacked our
program and others within the City University system and have suggested
that in the interest of raising standards, the City University should abolish
special programs.2Unsurprisingly given the history of writing instruction
in the US and popular debates about it, today's debate doesn't center upon
the slender resources available to teachers in public institutions, but instead focuses upon the alleged illiteracy of working-class, culturally diverse students. In this context, a proposal to mainstream could constitute
a capitulation to those who believe that remedial programs should be
abolished because the students they serve should not be in college anyway. Moreover, if universities want to protect themselves from these attacks and the loss of funding which can result, mainstreaming represents
one of the obvious educational short-cuts that Shaughnessy feared.
It was within this volatile atmosphere that Barbara Gleason and I received support from FIPSEfor a three-year mainstreaming project called
the Enrichment Approach. Fully aware of the ambivalent potential of
mainstreaming, we aimed to address the weaknesses in remedial education that Shaughnessy describes while at the same time strengthening our
commitment towards open admissions students. We proposed to bypass
the test scores which sort students into two remedial and one freshman
course and place them with college students in a two-semester composition course for equal amounts of college credit.3 Bypassing test scores is
only the most rudimentary step of the project, however, for we also aimed
to reconceive instruction for multilingual, urban students. Central to the
Enrichment project is a two-semester course carrying six college credits
and a curriculum that is responsive to writers with diverse language and
cultural backgrounds.
It is outside the scope of this essay to document all the supports involved in this project-for example, the collaboration between full-time
professors and adjunct instructors in workshops or between teachers and
Writing Center tutors in the classroom. Instead, I will argue for a progressive version of mainstreaming by focusing upon one basic writing student
in my course who benefited from the curriculum and the two-course sequence. While this kind of qualitative evaluation reveals the curriculardimensions of mainstreaming and its impact upon classroom life, it cannot
by itself justify a broad institutional change which takes place outside the
Soliday/FromtheMargins
87
classroom. Reconceiving remediation involves both the significant challenges of curriculum development and those of negotiating the political
conflicts that fundamental institutional change will provoke. To comment
on the project's future-and that of mainstreaming in general-I will end
by discussing the political dimensions of mainstreaming which are an indelible aspect of writing program administration.
From Impromptu to "Around the Way Music"
Our curriculum begins with the language variety and cultural differences
that City College students bring to the classroom. By foregrounding students' language experience and the everyday use of language in social
contexts as resources for teaching writing (see Kutz, Groden, and Zamel),
we try to enhance students' awareness of the complexity of their spoken
language and its relationship to written language. In the first half of my
class, for instance, we discussed dialects, code-switching, and the grammatical characteristics of and relationships between spoken and written
language. Students watched films about language (EducatingRita;YeahYou
Right), read literacy narratives, and transcribed portions of their spoken
language which they then compared to written samples. This focus on language use aims to enhance students' awareness of how their language
styles inflect their academic writing and to promote their self-consciousness as writers.
Throughout the year we also try to build upon the sociocultural differences in class, race, and ethnicity that scholars argue teachers tend to ignore even though these differences might influence the quality of
students' writing and the tenor of daily classroom experience (Brodkey;
Stygall; Coles and Wall; Shor). One way to do this is to encourage students
to use the unfamiliar language of the academy to describe and analyze familiar aspects of everyday language use and cultural experience, as for example through ethnographic projects conducted within students'
communities or on the college campus. In the second semester, when we
ask teachers to stress reading and writing about cultural themes such as
work, urban life, education, or the family, I turned to the theme of popular
culture-which I thought would give students the opportunity to raise issues about social difference and to explore these using conventional academic ways of thinking such as description, analysis, and interpretation.
Included in the curriculum are supports oriented not only towards realizing a set of theoretical principles but also towards meeting the needs of
students with diverse levels of preparation. We assigned an undergraduate
peer tutor to each course and required teachers to hold a public reading
hour with one other class, and we made technologies such as a videocam-
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CCC47/February1996
era available to teachers who wanted to experiment with alternative forms
of instruction. Along with asking all the teachers to use portfolio assessment, we also stressed publishing student work, using small group and
workshop approaches, and conferencing regularly with individual students. To participatein the project's evaluation, teachers reflected on their
work with the curriculum by compiling their own portfolios, keeping journals, and participating in workshops and interviews. My reading of one
student's portfolio-I will call him Derek-grew out of this specific context
of experimentation and self-assessment over the course of the project's
first year.4
As is true for most of the students who failed their placement exams
and then enrolled in the mainstreamed class, Derek's portfolio begins with
an impromptu that signals unreadiness for a college composition course.5
This exam and the essays Derek produced during his first four months at
City were characterizedby their brevity and their lack of control over generalizations, both key features of basic writing texts that scholars like Myra
Kogen have described. Derek agreed that brevity, a feature that Shaughnessy thought was typical of basic writing, was characteristicof his writing
("I have a tendency to write a little and not elaborate"). Along with and
perhaps related to brevity, Derek's writing in the first months of the course
was marked by what David Bartholomae describes as a struggle to "approximate" the forms and tones of academic discourse. For Derek, this
meant a tendency to resist taking either/or positions without knowing exactly how to formulate a conventional generalization that does more than
agree or disagree with a topic. I want to argue that the mainstreamed curriculum in its various dimensions enabled Derek to turn these weaknesses
as a writer into strengths because he learned to control the forms of academic discourse without having to reduce the complexity he perceived
within a particular topic. By the second semester, Derek was producing
longer texts and revising on the discourse level; at the same time, he began
sharing his drafts with other students who helped him to think about
ideologically complex topics and to evaluate his purposes as a writer.
In August, Derek had fifty minutes to read and then respond to the following prompt:
In Sweden, school authoritiesallow high school studentsto drop out of
schoolat age 15 if they wish to, arguingthatbored,disruptivestudentsdon't
belongin the schools.Theyallow studentswho changetheirmindsto come
back to school whenever they are ready.Some Americanteacherssuggest
thatwe shouldhave the samesystem.Do you agreeor disagree?
Here is Derek's response, which placed him into a remedial course:
Soliday/FromtheMargins
89
I disagree with the idea to allow high school student to drop out at the age of
15 for a number of reasons.
Students in high school at age 15 have not experienced all of what high
school can give them. The may take course that they find interesting and
want to learn more about or pursue that course as a career. There are many
high school students who cannot read or write at a certain level and if they
are allowed to drop out at such an early age they may never learn. Many
jobs today require a high school diploma or GED to be hired. Students who
are allowed to drop out of school will of course not receive their high school
diploma but may not have enough knowledge to get their GED.The world is
getting more competitive and we need more students who can compete with
the developing countries.
I believe that we should not try too hard to force someone to stay in school
because a person who clearly does not want to learn will not. They should be
encouraged to stay in school an see the value of an education. One small
thing that can be done is, simply tell them that many of the expensive
clothes and other things they have now they will not be able to have because
they will not be making enough money.
In conclusion, I am against the idea because the students have not learned
enough yet. There are many thing in the world that they may find interesting to do or learn about.
The two readers who judged this essay as less than adequate for collegelevel writing may have noticed that although Derek responded to the topic,
he did not consider the prompt fully, since the Swedish system allows students to return to school whenever they want. This failure to fully consider
the prompt contributes to the writer's difficulty in making a complete generalization about the topic. Although Derek disagrees with the decision of
the Swedish school authorities to allow students to drop out at fifteen, still
he says that "I believe that we should not try too hard to force someone to
stay in school because a person who clearly does not want to learn will not.
They should be encouraged to stay in school an see the value of an education." Derek goes on to supply only one example to support this distinction
(an economic argument for staying in school) before abruptly concluding
by repeating the position he has already taken ("In conclusion, I am against
the idea"). Temporarily, though, he has hinted at a distinction that leads
him into a seeming contradiction: Yes, students should be involuntarily
kept in school, but we should not try to keep them there involuntarily.
As Judith Fishman argues, the agree/disagree format of placement exams seems to demand that students "take a side," and this can prove disabling to those who don't want to take a reductive position on a topic but
90
CCC47/February 1996
who haven't practiced how to avoid this in an impromptu situation. This
appears to be the case with Derek's exam when he tries to distinguish between ideas in a conventional manner but fails to do so, and thus ends up
with an incoherent text. Notably, however, this dilemma of choosing sides
also appeared to mark Derek's texts written outside of an impromptu situation, and regardless of whether he could choose the topic. For example,
his required ethnographic essay, written in December, and an essay about
the Nation of Islam which Derek chose to write about in February,were
short, unrevised pieces lacking overall coherence or consistency in ideas,
although the latter piece was longer than any essay he had produced in
the course (four pages). Here is the opening paragraphto "Dialects,"an essay Derek wrote in November and that is typical of his struggle to distinguish between abstractideas:
Many of the texts we have readand seen, such as BarbaraMellix's"From
Outside,In"discussdialectsand the socialbarriersthatthey form.Peopleare
discriminated
againstor consideredto be inferiorsimplybecauseof they way
From
they speak.
my personalexperience,I have seen that althoughdialects
do formthese socialbarriers,they more often formcommunicationbarriers
and give peoplea sense of identity.
In conference, Derek and I discussed the difference that he was trying
to articulate between himself and Mellix on the issue of Black English:
Where she accords social weight to language use in general and to dialects
in particular, he believes that dialects don't create "social barriers"but a
milder form of linguistic misunderstanding he calls "communication barriers." At the same time, based upon "my personal experience," Derek has
to agree with Mellix's assertion that dialects "give people a sense of identity," which appears to conflict with his sense that language use doesn't create significant "social barriers."Derek's unrevised introduction suggests
that he agrees and disagrees with Mellix because he hasn't decided where
he stands on the issue, a conflict that touches him personally, since like
Mellix he is fluent in both standard and Black English. Thus while "Dialects" leans towards approximating an academic sentence structure
("Many... discuss"; "From... more often"), like the exam and other essays written during the first months of class, "Dialects"is very short-less
than three full typed pages-and it presents an incoherent argument. And
although we discussed his first draftsin conference, Derek confined his revision to word-level changes in the first and last paragraphs of the final
draft.
Apparently Derek was still thinking seriously about the topic of Black
English, though, since the next semester when I asked students to choose
their own topics for writing, he returned to the theme of everyday lan-
Soliday/FromtheMargins
91
guage use in an essay called "Slang?" Written just after an untitled essay
about the Nation of Islam, "Slang?" can be seen as a transitional text in his
final portfolio because, while it continues to reveal Derek's hallmark as a
writer who wants to agree and disagree on an issue at the same time, it is
also an essay whose ideological conflicts he settled for himself through a
process of revision that began when he read the paper aloud for the class.
Here is the opening paragraph to a paper that struggles to present an adequate generalization without presenting a reductive thesis, and in the process appears to avoid making a final commitment:
Of all the slang words that are used by black youth today the word "nigger"
is the one that raises the most questions in the black community. The main
question is whether it should be used in the everyday vocabulary because
[of] its past meaning. It is ironic that a word that was once used to only degrade blacks is now commonly used by blacks toward each other in everyday
language. Those people who use it defend themselves by saying that they do
not use it towards each other the way it was used towards blacks in the past.
Those who are against using it mainly believe so because of how it was used
in the past. Although I understand the argument of the people who agree
with using it, there is also merit to the arguments of the people who are
against using it.
Derek's opening paragraph culminates in a characteristically double statement: "Although I understand the argument of the people who agree...
there is also merit to the arguments of the people who are against using
it." But this time he tried to resolve his dilemma in the body of the paper
and in the concluding paragraphs, which he revised more than once. To
develop his thesis in the rest of the paper, Derek used two texts to illustrate
opposing views on the issue, one a rap song which celebrates the positive
use of the word among urban African-American youth, and the other a
magazine article which criticizes how young blacks use the word in everyday speech. In the penultimate paragraph of "Slang?", Derek explains how
the conflict between these two texts aroused his interest in the topic:
I decided to write about this topic because of the song and an article I read
called "The Nigger Syndrome." It did not totally change my opinion of the
use of the word but it made me look at it in a different way. Before this I never really paid close attention to people when I heard them argue [about this
issue].
Derek still isn't totally convinced that using the word is denigrating, but
he can't use the word as innocently as he used to do, and in making this
distinction, Derek establishes an interpretive perspective. That is, he
doesn't necessarily have to choose the best side but can instead document
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CCC47/February 1996
his deepening understanding of an issue which "before this" he had "never really paid close attention to"-even though that issue is widely discussed within his social groups outside of school. For the first time, Derek
uses a metalanguage ("I decided to write about this topic") to address the
reader and to explain his own conflict with the issue, an explanation that
takes him beyond the "there is merit to both sides" thesis and into a deeper
exploration of the topic. In the revised conclusion to "Slang?", Derek
achieved a stance on the issue without presenting a reductive response:
I feel that it is not a question of whether or not the word is being used as derogatory or not because it is clear that it is no longer used by blacks with its
past meaning. It is more a question of should it be used out of respect for the
people who had to hear it used towards them in a derogatoryway and that is
the only way that they will see it. People who use the word so frequently
must remember how it was used towards their grandmothers and grandfathers in the past and still is used by some whites to describe black people today. No matter how simple it sounds it is not easy to change the meaning of a
word that was used in that way in the minds of the people who are against it.
Earlier in this essay, Derek had identified his peers as the "people" who
have appropriated the word for everyday use, and now in the conclusion
he addresses this audience directly by reminding them that the issue isn't
simple because the word carries a historical burden ("People who use the
word... must remember how it was used... in the past"). By telling his
peers that they must rethink their everyday use of the word nigger, rather
than arguing that they should abandon the word or continue to use it
without thought, Derek strives to make a distinction rather than a simple
pro/con argument, a stance that also requires him as a writer to examine
an issue about which there is conflict among groups of people whom he
knows outside of college. Derek's increasing ability to find an interpretive
position on culturally complex experiences coincided with his growing
comfort and familiarity with the class itself and his willingness to revise a
text on the discourse level. "Slang?", the longest piece he had completed
thus far, was the first essay that Derek revised substantially on the paragraph level, and it was also the first essay he volunteered to read aloud to
the whole group. Derek was not unique in this, as by February both he
and his classmates had gained considerable practice in reading drafts aloud
in small groups, with the whole class, or with another class at a reading
hour held in the Writing Center. By the second semester several students
had used the Writing Center or worked with our classroom tutor, and they
were familiar with the idea of publishing their work since I had brought
examples of other teachers' class books to show them and the project's editorial assistant visited us to discuss how and why classes might publish
Soliday/FromtheMargins
93
their work. For his part, Derek visited the Writing Center twice in December, and in February he gave me permission to duplicate his draft about
the Nation of Islam for the whole class to read.
In Derek's case, the ways in which classroom social life enhanced students' notions of authorship became particularly visible with the last assignment, which required students to choose an aspect of popular culture
that they were familiarwith and analyze it using some of the themes established in class. We discussed excerpts from Susan Faludi's Backlashand
Michael Dyson's Reflecting
Black,and students worked in small groups, read
each others' drafts, or had individual conferences with me and the tutor.
Open-ended attempts to define popular culture proved to be especially
generative since, in the words of one outside evaluator who visited the
class in April, these large group discussions precipitated "a wide range of
ideas and thoughts" on everything from "jazzvs. opera" and the "possible
relationship between 'commerce and political dominance'" to the "'boundaries' of forms, and their tendency toward 'blending and borrowing,'" as illustrated in a "lively"debate about "the difference between traditional folk
cultural behaviors and the idea of 'popular.'"Given the opportunity to explore everyday issues within an intellectual framework, students moved
from their experience towards an interpretation of that experience, using
academic categories to distinguish, for example, between "commercial,"
"mass,"and "traditionalfolk" cultures. One student even drew applause
from the class when she made a passionate case for the cultural significance
of merengue music in the Dominican Republic and New York City. The
themes that students discussed-the idea of hybrid cultures, the differences
between folk and contemporary commercialized art-supplied the foundation for analysis as I asked students to move from describing the familiar
world of popular culture to an unfamiliar way of analyzing it.
During the second week of the popular culture study, several young
men who chose rap music as their theme formed a splinter group in the
class, and I would sometimes see them arguing heatedly during or after
class about the moral dimensions of this urban art form. In response to the
earlier assignment to write on a topic of your choice, one student wrote
"Don't Judge a Rapperby His Wrapper,"which I had already distributedin
its finished form to the class as an example of how to incorporate texts into
an argument. As the title suggests, this author wrote a defense of what he
believes is a misunderstood art form, and in response to "Don'tJudge," another student wrote "A Rapper Without a Wrapper,"which critiques rap
music's detrimental relationship to the black community. Not surprisingly,
Derek tried to negotiate between these arguments, and he visited my office
several times as he attempted to work out a dilemma which arose from his
conflicting beliefs about the values and uses of rap music: "One thing I did
94
CCC47/February 1996
not want people to get from this paper was that I believed that hip hop was
there are some things that are bad about
totally good...[Although]
it... people take those [problems] and apply [them] to all of the music"
(portfolio cover letter). Once again Derek found himself at the point of a
conflict of ideas, and once again he struggled to use the language of academic inquiry to settle an ideological dispute. Derek revised his essay four
times before he gave me a final draft for the class publication, a seven-page
argument about rap music's relationship to the urban African-American
community. Here is the opening paragraph of "Around the Way Music":
In the beginning hip hop music was believed to be only a novelty or a passing fad. It has lived far past that expectation becoming one of the most popular forms of music today. Hip hop is popular not only among black people
but it is also popular among many other races of people. Although it has
these listeners the music expresses a specific racial and urban identity. It is
associated with and represents black youth and reflects what is happening in
black communities in cities such as New York,Los Angeles and Oakland. Hip
hop expresses current attitudes and reactions to discrimination and poverty,
which leads many artists to call themselves 'reporters from the city.' Although some of the artists contradict themselves, there are those that address issues that are important to the community. We can see the close
relationship that the music has with the black community through the
changes in activities and attitudes which are reflected in the music.
More successfully than in his past essays, Derek uses a formal language
here which subordinates one idea to another to approximate his version of
college-level discourse. Speaking as a college writer who is also allied to
the everyday culture he's discussing, Derek uses academic language that is
consonant with his complex stance on the topic. As was true for a paper
like "Slang?", in "Around the Way Music," Derek not only writes within
and against two "codes," his own and academic discourse, he also writes
from and for those codes-he is both committed to and critical of his topic
(Bartholomae 283). By writing from and for his own "code," Derek takes
the strong position of the knowledgeable insider while at the same time
adopting the perspective and the linguistic form of the outsider, in this
particular case that of the cultural critic who orients himself interpretively
towards the topic in a way which enables him to satisfy an ideologically
complicated issue. Throughout the rest of the essay, he uses various excerpts from texts to develop his thesis, metalanguage to explain both his
choice of a title and the purposes he has in writing an essay about rap music, and a thoughtful conclusion which questions the consequences of the
assimilation of black music into mainstream cultures.
Soliday/FromtheMargins
95
Derek's appropriation of academic discourse occurred within a specific
context provided by the social life of the classroom which evolved over the
course of a year. He noted the influence of peers in his portfolio cover letter: "When I began to write the popular culture paper I thought that we
were supposed to simply choose a form of popular culture and write about
it";but "afterreading the [other students' drafts] in class I realized that we
had to choose a thesis that allowed us to look at [popular culture] in a different way." As Derek's ideas about the topic changed, so did his text, and
these changes occurred in the context of the classroom where students
practiced the give and take of ideas that characterizes interpretive reading
and writing at its best. He explained in an interview that "Ilike to hear the
comments [on my draft] because it helps me to think about [the topic],"
and he recalled a particular discussion when a student argued that suburban whites have popularized rap: "Likewhat [the student] said in class. I
never thought about that before. I know it's true but I never really thought
about it until she said it, so, I like for people to talk about [our topics] in
class." As this student's remark found its way into the third sentence of
Derek's opening paragraphto "Aroundthe Way Music," Derek's text resonated with the voices of other readers and their perspectives in a way that
his earlier writing did not. In contrast to an earlier essay like "Dialects,"
"Aroundthe Way Music" represents a self-reflective process of composing
through which Derek makes meaning in response to readers, and a final
product which reflects the richness of that dialogue.
Mainstreaming: The Politics of Institutional Change
My analysis of Derek's portfolio constitutes just the beginning of our longterm evaluation and as such it is meant more to foster debate about mainstreaming than to settle definitively the question of whether to eliminate
remedial writing courses. But my interpretation of Derek's development as
a writer-from his impromptu to "Dialects,"from "Slang?"to "Aroundthe
Way Music"-shows how a curriculum that is responsive to the experiences and histories of nontraditional students can support remedial writers
who are mainstreamed into a college course. The curriculum-which emphasizes linguistic self-consciousness, the study of language and culture,
and social interactions with readers-supports students who bring diverse
backgrounds and levels of preparation into the classroom. The two-course
sequence, which doesn't require students to achieve full proficiency within a semester yet consistently exposes them to the intellectual conversation and inquiry that we associate with a liberal arts education, supports
an alternative tempo for learning which is not torn "between the need to
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CCC47/February 1996
make haste and the need to teach the ABC's of writing in adult ways." As
important, the sequence enables students to acquire the college credits
which play a major role in whether minority students will decide to stay in
college after the first semester (Otheguy).
Put within the context of what we know about language learning, as
well as from the critiques of remediation that extend from Shaughnessy to
Rose, Derek's portfolio reveals the promise of responsible mainstreaming
and calls for further classroom research in different settings. But an interpretation of one student's response to a mainstreamed course is limited in
making a broader case for institutionalizing mainstreaming because its focus does not include what happens outside the classroom. As Susan Miller
points out, institutions of higher learning have always made conflicting
demands upon writing courses and have attached equally conflicting symbolic meanings to writing programs. My reading of Derek's writing doesn't
capture the ways in which a composition program is embedded within this
dense network of institutional practices and expectations. Institutional
politics contextualize a mainstreamed course, and once the new course is
no longer protected by the prestige and funding of a special grant, politics
can redefine the course's original goals. I want to end, then, by briefly discussing the relationship between mainstreaming and the politics of remediation which affect the integrity of new projects.
As several scholars point out, institutions have long considered remedial
education to be a temporary solution to a fleeting educational dilemma.
What Mike Rose aptly calls the "myth of transience" has shaped popular
belief and institutional practice as people continue to assume that each literacy crisis is new in American history and that remediation at the college
level addresses a problem specific to one group of students ("Exclusion").
In reality, of course, over the past 25 years remedial education has sunk
deep roots within institutions of higher learning, and consequently a remedial writing program often constitutes just one facet of an entire remedial
enterprise on a college campus or within a university system. Eliminating
remedial writing courses in one part of the enterprise affects the whole and
threatens the identity of programs which have their own methods for assessment, particularhistories, and beliefs about how basic writing students
acquire academic discourse. Equal opportunity programs, tutorial services,
financial aid, and advisement may all have a stake in the remedial enterprise in general and in the writing programmore particularly.What will be
the relationship between a new mainstreamed course and programswhich
serve remedial students? A mainstreaming project can disruptthis relationship by categorizing students differently; and thus we have to be acutely
aware of our role in a potential struggle over redefining the considerable
territorywhich constitutes remedial education within an institution.
Soliday/FromtheMargins
97
Equally difficult is redefining the relationship between a mainstreamed
course and the academic disciplines, all of which have their own timetables for required courses and electives, and all of which have a stake in the
writing program. In arguing for more extensive college-level instruction in
writing, a mainstreaming project like ours has to challenge the myth of
transience by persuading the academic disciplines to agree that students
with complex language backgrounds need more than the traditional semester's worth of instruction on the college, not the remedial, level. Another consequence of the myth is that the pervasiveness of remedial
writing instruction outside of the actual remedial courses themselves isn't
always visible. At many public colleges and universities, remediation persists beyond one or two basic courses in the form of inter-session workshops, upper-level courses associated with proficiency testing, and longterm tutoring at the Writing Center. Mainstreaming of the type we are advancing calls for more required college-level instruction, and as such asks
the institution to invest substantially in a credit-bearing curriculum rather
than in a fragmented, non-college curriculum which deals with students'
lack of fluency on an ad hoc or individual basis. From this perspective, reconceiving remediation involves rethinking the role of writing instruction
within the college's liberal arts curriculum.
But perhaps the most daunting political task is to persuade administrators to view mainstreaming as a method of enhancing instruction for open
admissions students, not for cutting costs by eliminating remedial courses
and the students these courses traditionally have served. One way to make
this case is to present an evaluation of an entire project which includes a
range of quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Thus at this point continuing the Enrichment project depends partly upon the persuasiveness of
our final evaluation-which will continue for several years as with outside
consultants we assess student writing on a programmaticlevel, collect longitudinal case study information, and analyze data on grades and retention. At the same time, even the most positive evaluation of the program
won't by itself justify mainstreaming since the remedial writing program
serves the college and, like the regular composition program, it must remain in dialogue with literature faculty in the English department and
other departments within the university. The result of this kind of dialogue will determine a project's ultimate future, which of course is true of
all writing programs that play a gatekeeping role within the university.
This is a long way of saying that the future of our course depends not
only upon the quality of instruction that individual teachers deliver and the
intelligence and maturity of students like Derek, but also upon our ability
to navigate a credit-bearingcurriculum through rough institutional waters.
In the process of navigation, there is certainly a danger that in bypassing
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CCC47/February 1996
test scores a new program could bypass the students that the tests were
originally constructed to identify in order to enhance their chances of doing
well in a college curriculum. Indeed, from my experience with mainstreaming I find that one of its most ambiguous features is this disruptive
tendency to break with a long tradition. This tradition includes the teaching
and scholarship of many dedicated people who developed holistic assessment as an alternative to machine-scored tests that penalized minority students far more harshly than the impromptu essays we currently use to
place students. I believe, however, that the ambiguity is reduced if we think
about mainstreaming as a way to continue the progressive practices begun
by scholars who over twenty years ago saw that their writing programs
were not adequately responsive either to their students or to current scholarship in language and literacy learning. If we define mainstreaming as
more than bypassing test scores and attend to the broad dimensions of an
alternative program-the theoretical framework of the curriculum, supports for classroom teaching such as tutoring, course sequencing, methods
of evaluation-along with the political dynamics involved in writing program administration,then mainstreaming will support the goal of open admissions by challenging conservative beliefs about who will succeed in a
college writing course. In this way mainstreaming does not become an educational short-cut but instead promises to provide a genuinely progressive
alternative to traditionalremediation.
I'd like to thank the CCCreviewers for their insightful comments on an earliAcknowledgments:
er draft of this essay. Special thanks also go to Sharon Gamble and the wonderful students of
English 110.11, especially Mustapha, Ysolina, Fuzuki, Natacha, Eva, Omar,Jean-Philippe, and
"Derek."
Notes
1. Provocativeessays in the 1993 special issue of the Journalof BasicWritingand a dialogue in CCCbetween Elbow and Hull et al.
reflect a range of responses to the question of
whether we should eliminate remedial writing courses (and the term basic writing itself).
In "WritingAssessment,"Elbow describesseveral programsacross the country which offer
alternatives to remedial writing courses. For
further discussion of specificpilot projectsand
programs,see Duffey;Harleyand Cannon;Lalicker;and the essay by Grego and Thompson
in this issue. Kidda, Turner, and Parker describe their university'ssuccessful elimination
of all remedial courses across the disciplines.
2. For example, in USNews & WorldReport,
John Leo argued that CUNYis squandering
the taxpayers'money by attempting to remediate illiterate college students who should
have mastered basic skills in high school.
Similar arguments are made by those who
believe that the California State University
System should be downsized (see Lively).
Leo drew support for his attack upon CUNY's
remedial students from Heather Mac Donald,
whose policy paper for the Manhattan Institute condemned open admissions and
sparked a heated debate about remedial education in the editorial pages of the New York
Times. (Mac Donald also visited my class.)
Soliday/FromtheMargins
James Traub'srecent book (along with an excerpt of it published in TheNew Yorker)suggested more subtly that remedial education
at City College is a failure and that CUNY
should rethink its position on open admissions. Mainstreaming, however, evokes
mixed reactions from right-wing journalists
because it can also be seen as a way for universities to downsize in name but not in spirit. Not only could mainstreaming mean that
"success in CUNY's remedial courses is no
longer requiredbefore students can enter the
mainstream college classes" (McConnell 23),
but our FIPSEproject in particular so blurs
distinctions between students that the public
might get a mistaken impression as to the
true numbers of underpreparedstudents enrolled in a given semester (see Traub'sletter
to The New YorkTimes Book Review).
3. Professor Barry Wallenstein of the
CCNY English Department has successfully
taught a mainstreamed two-semester course
for several years.
4. I drew upon several sources in evaluating my student's portfolio. Sharon Gamble,
the classroom ethnographer, shared with me
her field notebook, transcribed interviews,
audiotapes of class discussions, and question-
99
naire; three observers wrote evaluative reports of the class; and Heather Mac Donald,
cited above, described one class. I photocopied each student's portfolio and kept a detailed teaching portfolio which documented
the year's work, as was required of all teachers. As did all his classmates, Derek generously granted me permission to quote from
his written work provided I did not use his
real name.
5. 13 out of 23 students failed their placement exams in my particular section (out of
twelve sections, 175 out of 314 failed their
exams). Of these, I judged only one to be an
evident misplacement-since the student
had written two sentences on her placement
exam but on the first day wrote a fluent, sophisticated essay in class. Otherwise, when I
read students' exams after the course ended,
I didn't detect any great discrepancies between the initial exam scores and students'
early writing. The discrepancy came when I
assigned final course grades in May, suggesting that in my class, the exam worked well as
a diagnostic but not so well as a predictorof
students' ultimate success in a writing course
of the type we were offering.
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