Week 3: Summary and Response to Goen-Salter's articles

After you read: Briefly summarize Goen's two articles and respond with any questions or reactions that you have.

First Article Summary: Sugie Goen and Helen Gillotte-Tropp’s “Integrating Reading and Writing: A Response to the Basic Writing ‘Crisis’” describes San Francisco State’s Integrated Reading and Writing program within the context of ongoing administrative attempts to eliminate or severely restrict remediation at the CSU’s. In order to support the need for remedial efforts at the college level, Goen and Gillotte-Tropp claim that the historical tendency to separate reading and writing as distinct processes is a primary contributor to the “basic writing crisis.” In searching for new ways to address administrative attempts to dismantle “remedial” courses, Goen and Gillotte-Tropp developed the innovative IRW program at San Francisco State, “in which instruction in reading and writing is fully integrated, and students’ movement from the margins of the university to its academic center can be appreciably hastened” (91).

The authors cite empirical research showing the links between reading and writing in order to make a strong case for the IRW approach. They note that the administration implemented a mandate to severely reduce the number of incoming remedial students, with the goal of eliminating remediation altogether in the future, and this led to the creation of the IRW program. They point out that before the implementation of the IRW program, many basic writing students would remain at the basic writing level well into their second year of enrollment at San Francisco State University. In response, the authors developed an accelerated program where students could join the mainstream academic community and take college-level English courses within one year.

The IRW system was piloted, found to be successful across the board, and eventually replaced the old (two-tier) system. In the old system, students who scored in the lowest quartile of the English Placement Test were required to complete a full year of developmental-level course work in reading and writing by taking separate courses with different instructors; the authors note that this model is cumbersome and redundant, and that it fails to alleviate the risk of dis-enrollment from the university that would result if the remediation requirement was not completed in one year.

The authors describe the IRW Program in detail, explaining that the program places at-risk students into a single course which explicitly connects reading and writing and moves these students swiftly from the developmental to college level within one year. Successful completion of the course meets both the CSU remediation requirement and SFSU’s first-year written composition requirement, enabling students to complete in one year what previously took three semesters.

The authors go on to explain that from an IRW standpoint, reading is no longer secondary to writing, and students instead “see how the structures, practices, and language of each process can enhance understanding of the other” (94). The authors describe six fundamental principles that guided their thinking about integrated reading and writing: integration, wherein writing contributes to the development of reading, and vice-versa; time, which takes into account that reading and writing skills develop gradually and within supportive communities; development, which sets a slower pace for the learning process that is more conducive to learning; academic membership, so that at-risk students are incorporated into the mainstream academic community more quickly, thereby ending the cycle of remedial failure and removing the punitive aspect of remedial education; sophistication, which recognizes that basic-level writing classes can be as sophisticated as college-level classes by asking students to work on the same projects, such as reading book-length works and conducting original research; and purposeful communication, which places the teaching of grammar and essay-writing into broader contexts, imbuing the learning process with meaning.

The authors explain their objectives for the program, which include: having students read a range of materials and write from a variety of viewpoints, and helping students apply these skills both within and beyond their work at the university; developing a metacognitive perspective of reading and writing, involving developing conscious strategies for self-awareness (KWL+ is an important process for developing metacognitive awareness, and the authors advocate applying it as both a reading and writing strategy); understanding the rhetorical elements of reading and writing, including purpose, audience, and stance; using reading and writing to engage with the world; developing enjoyment and confidence in reading and writing through self-assessment.

The authors then discuss how student outcomes in the pilot IRW courses were compared with that of a control group, beginning in Fall 2001. They conclude that “[a]cross all categories of data, students in the integrated reading/writing program outperformed their counterparts in SFSU’s conventional sequence of basic reading and writing courses” (103). The article ends by calling for more graduate teaching programs to extensively prepare instructors to teach integrated reading and writing and for administrative policy decisions to take into account curriculum, pedagogy, and composition theory in the future.

Responses/Questions:

• ·      When the authors conclude that “any postsecondary instruction in reading and writing is de-facto remedial and, as such, vulnerable to political and educational forces aimed at its removal” (91), are they also referring to college-level composition (what is called “transfer-level composition” at a community college)?

• ·      The fact that the IRW program accelerates student completion of both remedial and college-level composition is incredibly impressive, especially as this occurs at the same time that students participate in collaborative cohorts, work on metacognitive strategies, and learn to view reading and writing as integrated.

• ·      Is SF State’s IRW model the same type of model that is called for in the article we read from The Chronicle of Higher Education?

• ·      What is the PPC model that is mentioned on page 99? 

• ·      I like the point that “we ‘draft’ a first reading and revise or elaborate on it in subsequent readings, just as we do in writing” (99).

• ·    I like the idea of having students cultivate an “internalized reader” to guide their writing process.

Second Article Summary: Sugie Goen-Salter’s “Critiquing the Need to Eliminate Remediation: Lessons from San Francisco State” argues that more resources need to be allocated to develop innovative teaching approaches to basic writing instruction, including more graduate programs to prepare teachers to take an integrated reading and writing approach. The article also attempts to raise historical consciousness about the CSU’s approach to eliminating remediation at the university level. Goen-Salter outlines the history of CSU’s attempts to eliminate remediation by reducing the number of incoming first-year students. The CSU focused on strengthening high school English requirements along with cooperate partnerships between the CSUs and high schools, in order to clarify expectations for college-level reading and writing and get high school teachers to adopt university standards in their curriculum.

Even as these plans were implemented, the number of remedial students entering the university continued to increase. Goen-Salter traces the CSU’s continual attempts to limit remedial students from entering the university by placing a one-year limit on remedial education and threatening dis-enrollment from the university if the remedial courses were not passed. She also identifies the “institutional amnesia” behind such attempts, since the pattern continues with no effort to learn from the failures of past attempts. This blindness to history makes basic writing vulnerable to attempts to eliminate it, Goen-Salter points out. She notes that concerns about curriculum, pedagogy, and basic writing theory should be considered in administrative policy decisions. To remedy these blind spots, the article situates the IRW project within the context of this history of remediation in order to question attempts to eliminate remediation.

Goen-Salter describes the theory and pedagogy behind the IRW program, noting that it addressed concerns that reducing incoming remedial students would threaten CSU’s access and equity, and that attempts to dismantle remediation are linked to a view of reading and writing as separate processes. Goen-Salter cites empirical research demonstrating the interconnectedness of reading and writing and the ways in which each informs the other: “better writers tend to be better readers, better writers tend to read more than poorer writers, and better readers tend to produce more mature prose than poorer readers” (84). Because of these links, students will benefit greatly from a curriculum that connects reading and writing. The IRW approach at SF State was an attempt to see if these benefits could also “eliminate the ‘need for remediation’” (85) by accelerating students’ progress through their reading and writing courses, both at the developmental and college levels.

As in her earlier article, Goen-Salter describes the main components of the IRW approach here, noting that the goal is “to break down the barrier between text reception and text production, by inviting students to look at a text they read for clues to its production, and a text they produce for clues to how it might be received” (86), which occurs alongside the development of metacognitive awareness. Assignments like the “difficulty paper” and KWL+ are designed to promote this kind of self-consciousness about reading and writing processes, and to demonstrate their reciprocal relationship.

Goen-Salter outlines the results of the IRW project, noting its high retention rates and the fact that retention has improved over the years. For the three years of the pilot project, IRW students passed the integrated course at a higher rate than students enrolled in the traditional sequence. Goen-Salter provides detailed tables to demonstrate how these outcomes were measured between the IRW and control groups.

Goen-Salter describes various other strategies for eliminating remediation, including the CAPI partnership and EAP program, which focus on strengthening high school reading and writing curriculum. While she commends these projects, Goen-Salter notes that they cannot constitute the entire effort to eliminate remediation because they embody the flawed reasoning that setting higher standards in high school will get rid of remediation, reasoning which has proven to be false in the past. She also critiques CSU’s attempts to outsource remedial instruction to adult continuing education courses or community colleges. She notes that the IRW approach provides a more viable solution than these options.

In conclusion, Goen-Salter questions the “institutional need” to claim that remediation must be eliminated, arguing instead that we rethink our conventional perceptions of remediation, to avoid seeing it merely as a problem in need of a solution. If we continue to think of remediation in this way, we remain in a double bind, caught between offering remedial programs in the name of equal opportunity, and attempting to eliminate them in the name of maintaining high standards. By adopting the IRW approach, this problem will disappear, and the CSUs can begin to see “its campuses as the appropriate location for basic writing instruction” (98). Goen-Salter calls for more graduate programs to focus on training basic writing teachers and incorporating an IRW approach.

Responses/Questions:

• ·      When Goen-Salter discusses the IRW approach at SF State as part of an effort to “eliminate the ‘need for remediation’” (85), I wonder if this can actually occur across the board and in all situations, given the various needs and diverse abilities of students; can the admittedly successful and effective IRW approach completely eliminate the need for remedial-level courses? It sounds a bit like a kind of “magic cure” in theory, and I wonder if it would be less successful when put into practice.

• ·      I like the idea of assigning a “difficulty paper” to promote self-reflection, and would like to try this out in my future classes. What would a prompt for this kind of paper look like?

• ·      When Goen-Salter mentions that “we have seen more than twenty community college instructors … come to our campus to take the course [in Teaching Integrated Reading and Writing] so they could begin to develop integrated reading/writing courses at their home institutions” (100), she is talking about me! I’m glad that other community college instructors have also done this, and hope that more will do so in the future.