Inside/out(sourced): the problematic nature of teaching basic writing at the community college /

Abstract

This work deals with the growing trend among many American universities to relegate basic writing instruction and other remedial courses to community colleges and the problems contingent with such a trend. While American community colleges were initially founded to give students a foundation of coursework that could then be transferred to a baccalaureate-awarding university, recent decades have seen community colleges grow away from this transfer function and toward vocational training and a stratification of the American population that further marginalizes basic writing and basic writers.^Additionally, the placement instruments currently used to gauge a student's ability to handle university-level coursework can, at times, give an unfair assessment of a student's true ability, thereby forcing that student into a recurring cycle of remedial classes from which he or she may never emerge to finish a baccalaureate (or even an associate's) degree.This work also looks at basic writing programs at Texas community colleges as a representative of the types of basic writing instruction currently being undertaken at the community college level across the country as well as at the problems that arise within these programs and the practices that contradict existing basic writing pedagogy and theory.^In contrast to this, the work details the beginning of a basic writing course at the University of Texas-Tyler, the theoretical foundations for that course (as opposed to the practices currently in place at the community college level), and a case study of five students in the inaugural offering of this course and how the methods employed in the course helped these students address issues such as their perceptions of themselves as students and scholars and their perceptions of the difficulties they faced in handling university-level writing assignments. Finally, this work looks at some recommendations for basic writing instruction in the present and implications for basic writing research in the future.