Discoursing Basic Writing T he teaching of basic writing occupies a peculiar position in composition studies. It is the specialty of some of the leading figures in composition studies and, simultaneously, the province of teachers and students placed at the bottom of the academic institutional hierarchy. The emergence of basic writing as an academic field in the early 1970s has been cited as crucial historically in the development of composition. John Trimbur, noting that "many of the teaching and research projects we now take for granted began in the wake of open admissions and educational opportunity programs in the late sixties and early seventies," attributes "a number of remarkable innovations in the study and teaching of writing" to basic writing (14). James Slevin identifies the period as the time of composition's "rise," a "writing movement" addressing "broad questions about the aims of education and the shape of various educational institutions" and having as its focus "the revitalizing of the teaching of writing" (12). Ira Shor likewise describes this time as one when teachers faced "a creative and exciting frontier of cultural democracy" (Critical Teaching 269). Thimbur, Slevin, and Shor all identify the lessons and insights of teaching from this period in political terms: a "movement" for "cultural democracy" that explicitly called into question the social and political role of educational institutions and the politics of representing students, or prospective students, and their writing in particular ways-as "literate" or "illiterate," "college material" or "remedial," "skilled" or "unskilled." It is significant, however, that all three writers identify such lessons and insights as at risk of being lost or forgotten. We need, Trimbur notes, to "relearn" the insights of open admissions (14-15). Slevin worries that the Bruce Homer is an associate professor of English at Drake University, where he teaches courses in writing, literacy studies, and song criticism. Some of his essays have appeared in English Education, Rhetoric Review, and the Journal of Advanced Composition. This essay is part of a booklength project with Min-Zhan Lu on Basic Writing.
