In the early days of August 2012, I spent a lot of time in the parking lot outside my apartment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, trying to figure out how I was going to fit everything I needed for four months on the Navajo Nation into my tiny Ford hatchback.I was a graduate student-a white woman just past my thirtieth birthday-and I would be spending the fall semester conducting ethnographic research with writing faculty at Diné College, the oldest and largest tribally controlled college in North America.I grew up in a military family, which should have made me better at packing and may have left me a little too comfortable skittering across the country without a clear sense of what

The early success of the revised ESL literacy development curriculum for inter- national undergraduates at a large Midwestern university suggests that a curriculum which integrates reading and writing activity around meaning-making tasks with texts and focuses on fluency before accuracy is preferable to a skill-based curriculum. Support for this approach is found both in first and second language literacy development research, yet it has not been widely adopted in ESL developmental writing programs. Although only in the second year of implementation, test scores, grades, and student and teacher interviews indicate the revised curriculum is well-serving the developmental academic literacy needs of these matriculated ESL international students. Students are demonstrating reading and writing with greater ease and speed. They understand and produce texts with greater rhetorical awareness and have developed strategies for talking about and working with a variety of academic text-types. The development of these literacy practices has been well-received by teachers and students, and has prepared the latter to participate successfully in the required first year composition course.

This article presents a case study of a university ESL program that was highly resistant to reform, despite substantial evidence that its curriculum and policies were ineffective. The author draws on surveys, interviews, and participant observation to show how remediation served not only as an instructional model, but as an institutional identity for the program. This remedial identity was reflected in a testing-heavy, basic skills curriculum focused primarily on lexico-grammatical issues, as well as in the program’s policies for placement, tuition, and course credit. Through data-gathering and cross-departmental collaboration, the program was able to construct an alternative identity for itself—one in which its role was to support diversity, rather than to eradicate deficiency. This study adds to the growing body of scholarship on the ideological and political conditions in which basic/ESL writing is situated, and offers insights on how programs can re-envision their role within institutions.

Over seven years after he started college, Antonio became the first college graduate in his family.Antonio's success is all too rare for the 40% of college students who are older than 24 ("Table 191") and the 73% of undergraduates identified as "nontraditional" by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) (Choy 1-3), where NCES defines nontraditional students as having one or more of the following seven characteristics: "financial independence, part-time attendance, delayed enrollment, full-time work,

This article recuperates the notion of value, but to new ends: rather than arguing whether or not writing should continue, this case study looks to one institution where it does, asking what value the category basic writer holds for teachers at this site. On the one hand, they confirm the existing scholarship's critiques of the category's strategic limitations. At the same time, they maintain its potential value when leveraged as a tactic to argue for resources for students, attempt to understand students, and articulate a view of teaching as in service of social justice. Given these tensions between problematic and productive uses of the term basic writer, debates about writing's existence would be better served if they shifted away from wholesale critique or defense and instead grappled with more rhetorical questions about value for particular institutions or programs at specific moments in time.

The question is not whether rhetorical pedagogy and psychoanalytic pedagogy can or should be in dialogue with each other.They should be and have been. 1 As a teacher of writing, I routinely wonder how well I heard what a student was really saying, what undercurrents of feeling I missed in our class-wide discussion of a draft, why in the margins of drafts and in class exchanges I made one move rather than another.Why I do what I do (to them) can also cause students to question my motives, such as why so much of the writing I have them read is not just wordy but sneaky-or why I cannot, in plain English, just say what I mean.If only to work ground my students and I have in common, then, I am receptive to Mark Bracher's recommendation, in The Writing Cure: Psychoanalysis, Composition, and the Aims of Education, that we "articulate more clearly the possible points of convergence between psychoanalysis and the teaching of writing" (11).The stakes are high, for unless the "fundamental aim of psychoanalysis as articulated by Lacan" is achieved-i.e.

A lesbian teacher, recently returned from four years in Japan and teaching an intermediate ESL class in a public community college in New York City, struggles with addressing the issue of her own sexual orientation while using a novel with a protagonist who is questioning his sexual identity. The evolution of gay/lesbian and/or queer theory mirrors the progress of the writer’s life as she confronts her own internalized homophobia and the heteronormativity of her culture.