Teaching in the Spaces Between: What Basic Writing Students Can Teach Us

Abstract

We began working on this issue with the awareness that 1998 is the 20th anniversary of Mina P. Shaughnessy' s death and that 1998 may also be the end of open admissions as we have known it at CUNY.At a time like this, we feel the need to be reflective but also to be look ing toward the future.So this issue is a special issue: an examination of the legacy of Mina Shaughnessy and an examination of our field at a crossroads.We are deeply aware of the rift in our field that puts on one side those who believe that basic writers are best served by identi fying them and providing classes and res::mrces for them at their en trance to college and, on the other side, those who feel that they are better served by unqualified admission and placement in mainstream classes, believing that special designations provide an easy target for those trying to outsource, downsize, eliminate, or "improve" our pro grams.We think of Mina Shaughnessy and recall that, in the first issue of JBW in 1975, she wrote about the "young men and women who want to be in college, who have enough intelligence to do college work, but who are not skilled enough when they arrive on campus to sur vive in a rigorously academic environment."She also wrote about how the teachers who "teach across such a range of skills and experi ences can expect to confront more questions than they will ever be able to answer and abandon more strategies than they will ever finally accept."It was her belief that JBW would offer a place for "the ex change of observations and theories among such teachers."And so this exchange continues.We begin with an essay aptly titled, "'The Dilemma that Still Counts': Basic Writing at a Political Crossroads."In it, Susanmarie Harrington and Linda Adler-Kassner look at basic writing in this "piv otal moment," recognizing that this is the time when we need to de fine, or re-define, basic writing by examining past research and by making suggestions for future research.Referring to Shaughnessy, they ask whether it is error that defines students as basic writers and, if it is, how we can better understand errors and the students that make them.Jeanne Gunner's "Iconic Discourse: The Troubling Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy" attempts to historicize Shaughnessy's contribution and to examine what it means that her name has come to be the "symbolic representation of the basic writing field, its students, teachers, and pedagogy."Using Foucault's concept of the author function, Gunner examines how Shaughnessy has become the primary coordinate for the discourse of our field and what that implies.