“The first stage of Open Admissions involves openly admitting that education has failed for too many students” Mina Shaughnessey

“I cannot know for them what it is they need to free, or what words they need to write; I can only try with them to get an approximation of the story they want to tell” Adrienne Rich

One of my major objections to Basic Writing is that our students receive no credit for the class, though it remains on their transcript forever. Before teaching Basic Writing, I never thought about this concept. However, once I began to work closely with the Basic Writing students, I soon realized that this system seemed unfair; many of the students I taught were not lazy, but had not been given a proper education in writing. Essentially, the system had failed to give the students the education they deserved and the students were having to pay for the failure of the system. These students had been failed at the basic level of writing–transferring thought to text.

I was struck by the impediments Mina Shaugnessey provides and realized at the same time that these were common problems among my students. Spelling, punctuation,sentence construction and order, voice, grammar, are all reasons that my students have given for their “bad writing.” Perhaps this is the reason that so many Basic Writing courses emphasize grammar and mechanics instead of helping students develop their own writing style and voice. Basic Writing needs to help students become more confident in these areas, but to juggle all of these impediments alongside teaching students to construct an essay within a rhetorical situation seems a bit much for an instructor to cover in a 3 credit course. Nor is it what I would consider ideal to ask the students to undertake in a class for which they don’t receive credit. It seems that we need to consider a new model.

I had been reading a bit about the studio model over the past few weeks and this seems to fit into my ideal Basic Writing class. The studio model places students into the regular composition class and requires them to attend a 1 hour credit studio where they discuss issues that aid in the construction of their composition essays. I wasn’t sure that I liked this method until I read Adrienne Rich’s “Teaching Language in Open Admissions.” Rich writes:

“In order to write I have to believe that there is someone willing to collaborate subjectively, as opposed to a grading machine out to get me for mistakes in spelling and grammar” (Rich 202)

This passage enlightened me to the benefits of the studio model. Students are writing for their 1013 class, which provides them with a collaborative person to write for (the instructor, the peer group, etc.). At the same time, they receive the grammatical and rhetorical aid they need from the writing studio. Even if this studio is taught by the same instructor, the students receive their information and help on pertinent obstacles in a different setting. They are not dreading the instructor marking the comma splices in the final essay, but rather are getting help with their writing problems in their essays (which is advocated by both Clark and Hartwell). The studio model, therefore, would allow the students to create the “mess” that will become their essay in class while receiving the education they are expected to enter college with during the studio hour.

The studio model seems to create a Basic Writing utopia (which worries me; I wonder if I’m missing some aspect of this model that is terribly anti-pedagogical). Students receive credit for their composition class and get to stay with on track for their degrees. These two important changes would aid in removing the stigma from the Basic Writer. They also get the coaching in their weak areas that keeps me from arguing for mainstreaming the students.  Simultaneously, they learn to make a “mess” of their writing and worry about the polish of grammar and mechanics after they have transformed the mess into an essay. Even more, the students are no longer paying for the failures of their previous educational career.