Reflecting on #4C23 Remediation and the Student-Ready University

On Sunday, I returned home from Chicago where I was attending the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC [but we say "See's"]). 

It was a trip back in time on a few levels, and more than once, it had me thinking about an exchange from way back in 2003 about working with students who still have a long way to go in their development as writers.

I shouldn't be surprised that the conference sent me into my past. The last time I attended an in-person conference was 2019. And on another detour down memory lane, the conference was a block away from Columbia College Chicago, where I spent my first year of college as a theater and fiction writing student. Then after the conference, I hopped on a train to visit family in Milwaukee, the place I grew up. 

So, my head was in a space where I was often looking backward to look forward. All of which very likely contributed to this specific 20-year-old memory being brought to mind a few times. 

Jack Hicks was trying to get us creative writing MA students to understand a certain frame of mind that is essential for anyone planning to teach writing. He asked what an instructor should do with students who 'can't write worth a damn' (paraphrasing here, but trying to get Jack's tone right). We students all tried to give thoughtful answers, but after some struggle, Jack interrupted us and said, "There's nothing you can do. Your job is to take them where they are." 

It was one of those moments when the correctness of the answer was only obvious after it had been spoken, but then it was so obvious that it was greeted with an embarrassed silence. 

That lesson has shaped the way I think about placement and pedagogy to this day. Our job in FYC is to open the door of higher education for the students the institution has admitted. And if I'm abiding by my values, I am pushing the institution to open that door as wide as possible. And yeah, that means the skill level of students entering is not where it was 20 or 40 years ago - or even 5 years ago. I don't see that as a failure. 

But I do acknowledge it as a challenge. 

Because the goals we pursue in FYC remain. I think of it this way: We work to foster the writing development of students so they can, in time, compose texts that will give them a voice in the academic, scholarly, professional, social, and civic communities they join.   

Or, as we put it in the Sac State Writing Program mission: In the Sacramento State University Writing Program, we engage students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds to develop reflective, analytical, and collaborative literacy practices, empowering them to communicate effectively.

It's a bold set of goals that requires a network of support capable of reaching across multiple classrooms and learning resources. 

At and since CCCC, I've heard from a number of people describing how those goals might be too bold for the network of support we have to work with in FYC. 

The most public expression of that concern came during the Opening General Session at CCCC. Joanne Baird Giordano was delivering the greeting from the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA). It was a brilliant address that called on the conference to recognize the impact and importance of the labor and expertise present in two-year schools and open-admission four-year institutions. It's a call I will work to heed. There was, however, one part of the call that complicates my understanding of "Take them where they are." 

Giordano called on us all to "recognize that some writing and developmental education reforms imposed on community colleges by legislators and state systems are austerity measures masquerading as equity." 

This was a clear reference to, among other things, the end of remediation in the Cal State system and the California Community College system. And I'm not sure how I feel about Giordano's critique. 

On one hand, I agree that many students need additional support for their writing development when they start college. And often that support should take the shape of additional instruction. We move in the wrong direction if (and when) instructional resources are lost or defunded in the name of reforms to higher education. I agree with that and I think that's what Joanne Baird Giordano was getting at.

The end of remediation, however, doesn't have to result in the loss or defunding of instructional resources. It should mean the reshaping and reconfiguration of such resources. 

I get nervous when I hear people argue that ending remediation is a failure to support our students. The argument is a messy one.

With the right amount of nuance, I do support the argument. For example, I'm all in on this version: Ending remediation without providing new forms of support to replace what's being removed is a cynical way administrators tell composition faculty to 'Do more with less' while quietly accepting lower standards for our students.

When policy is getting made, however, arguments like this one are rarely allowed that level of nuance. They typically become a version of this: Ending remediation is administrators telling composition faculty to 'Do more with less' while quietly accepting lower standards for our students.

That's the argument used to support mandated remedial courses for students who perform poorly on a test (or a different set of measures) as determined by administrators like me.

And I don't agree with that argument. I support the end of mandated remediation as it has been implemented for decades: As a gate-keeping tool that excluded people from a college education based on a set of criteria developed by patriarchal institutions that center a limited kind of whiteness, a hate-based take on sexuality, and a profoundly exclusive understanding of socioeconomic status.  

That deeply problematic use of mandated remediation needs to be rejected along with the chorus of arguments about good intentions that support it: "We're just thinking of the future challenges these students will face," "Some kids just aren't made for college," "Students can't be held responsible for past teachers' failures," "Admitting students who aren't ready is cruel because they will just fail later after being told they could succeed."

The research and practices compositionists engage in should not treat certain students as people who require a remedy. A remedy is something provided to set right an undesirable situation. The students we work with in FYC are not in an undesirable situation. They are first-year students at a university that will serve as the setting for a years-long endeavor to grow and learn. That shit is dope and deserves to be celebrated.  

The criteria used to argue for mandating remedial courses must be removed from the deeply problematic history they inhabit. 

But we also need to acknowledge the circumstances that generated those criteria: A diverse population of learners needs a diverse set of resources to support their development as writers. And yeah, those resources require investment in our institutions. We need space, experts, and buy-in from everyone who serves our students. 

The required courses are not enough for some of our students. It is therefore our obligation to provide additional resources that students can utilize to support their own writing development. And we are also obligated to make sure students have access to and understanding of those resources. 

• Writing Centers with specialists
• Credit-bearing and non-credit-bearing access to peer tutors
• Accessible and inclusive writing prompts and syllabi
• Representation of diverse student identities reflected in the faculty
• Representation of diverse student identities reflected in the readings
• Stretch sections of composition
• Multilingual sections of composition
• Low-stakes assessment moments that serve as advising tools
• Antiracist and inclusive assessment practices
• And this list is not exhaustive!

And then there's an additional challenge once these resources get put in place. Faculty, staff, administrators, advisors, and peers need to understand this network of support so they can navigate it or guide others. 

It's a lot, but it is also the work required to enact the values of our discipline. 

Changes and Shapes

In August of last year, I took on the role of Writing Program Coordinator here at Sac State. One of the initial challenges I face in this role is deciding what success on the job looks like.

During the prior six years, I had a measurable vision of what I wanted to achieve. As the large-scale writing assessment coordinator, I told everyone my plan: I was going to replace the timed-writing assessment with an ePortfolio. It was a big project; we assess more than 7000 students a year. So, I figured, if I put a functioning program in place within five or so years, I could say I'd succeeded. 

In my new role as Writing Program Coordinator, the goals have not taken on such a clear shape (yet). 

I aim to remedy that between now and the end of the semester because I learned something about myself while working on the ePortfolio project. I need to know the shape of the project I am working on in order to forge ahead and simultaneously negotiate the day-to-day tasks of administering a program.

The initial outlines of a project are coming into focus at this point. Here's what I'm thinking:

In the past 8-9 years, our writing program has undergone two significant transformations, both of which speak to a programmatic philosophy. 

First, under the initial direction of Dr. Amy Heckathorn and the subsequent direction of Dr. Angela Clark-Oates, the placement procedures for freshmen were changed. We had been using a statewide timed-writing test to determine if students required extra instruction. We shifted to a directed self-placement model for which students perform a self-assessment and determine their own path through the first-year writing requirements. 

Second, the writing assessment we perform when students transition from lower-division coursework to upper-division coursework was changed. We had been using a timed-writing test to determine if students require extra instruction before taking a Writing Intensive course. We have since switched to an ePortfolio used to advise students and then allow them to choose the kind of support they need to complete the final Writing Intensive course requirement.   

Both of these changes put more decision-making power into the hands of our students. The changes also (attempt to) remove the stigma of remediation from the writing development support we offer in our program. 

And that's where I think I need to put my efforts: I aim to more fully integrate the courses our Writing Program delivers and the student support we offer throughout a student's career here at Sac State. 

My research has focused on how writing skills transfer and transform over the course of a student's time in college. This is an exciting opportunity for me to apply that research and build a learning environment that fosters writing development alongside/with the academic development students do in their disciplines.  

My initial sketches of a writing resources map are here. I intend to make it look nicer and also show where these resources link up with other learning resources on campus. 

I'm excited to see how this turns into a more concrete goal this year.  

The False Narrative of Good and Evil with ChatGPT

The New York Times published another article on ChatGPT today. This one is a well-research piece by Kalley Huang who interviewed professors, students, and administrators to learn about higher education's response to ChatGPT. 

Huang's reporting confirms a lot of what I've been hearing in the discussions I'm being pulled into as a Writing Program Administrator. 

But there is an issue with how the larger story is developing, and Huang's piece demonstrates that issue.

I posted the following comment: 

Higher education is being framed as a form of policing in this article, and that is deeply frustrating. 

The question not asked in this reporting is important for context. How has the lumbering behemoth of higher education marshaled a response to this disruptive Silicon Valley technology within two months of ChatGPT's launch? 

The answer is simple. The responses to this disruption are all well-established practices developed by scholars of Composition & Rhetoric (a discipline that, among other things, studies the development of writing ability in college settings).

Here are the "innovations" described in this article: Mr. Aumann will support his student's writing by including low-stakes in-class writing exercises that build towards the more significant assignment. Professors are going to develop more collaborative writing assignments. Assignments include reflection and revision memos. "Gone are prompts like 'write five pages about this or that.'” Professors will look beyond the canon for assignment prompts. Writing instructors will teach students about the benefits and pitfalls of new writing technologies. Institutions are going to revisit their academic integrity policies. 

That list describes the basics required to teach writing. It is not a response to attempts to cheat. We Compositionists are not plagiarism police. Our job is to teach students why writing their own paper is more valuable than submitting an "A paper."

I get pointed questions about student cheating all the time, especially when I work with people to make changes in higher education writing settings. People love to imagine ways students will cheat. 

And yeah, I can name a number of times I have identified papers or passages that were lifted from other sources. I'm not here to say it's a non-issue.

But I am here to say that the public likes to think of things using established narratives, and the following narratives are very popular:

• Cheating students outwit professors
• Professors catch cheating students

From School Library

These are stories we like to tell. And because these stories do happen from time to time, they become the stories we tell most often. News articles, department meetings, conference presentations, blog posts, op-eds in the Chronicle of Higher Education (so often), Tiktoks, Tweet threads, family gatherings, professional small talk sessions, everywhere we look!

And if you have a good plagiarism story, people lean in to listen. You get rewarded with engagement. 

The most common one I used to hear was about students who figured out ways to outwit Turnitin.com. People love those tales.

And I am very much aware of this happening again with ChatGPT. 

I would like to remind everyone of this 9-year-old gem from Neil deGrasse Tyson:

When Students cheat on exams it's because our School System values grades more than Students value learning.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) April 14, 2013

We must re-examine our practices if our students don't understand why we are teaching the very challenging processes of writing to learn and writing to contribute to a community.

If we don't teach students the value of doing their own writing, our course is nothing more than a hoop to jump through... Or worse, a gate intended to withhold opportunity from some in favor of others. 

Personal Narratives in the News

The personal narrative is one of the more popular opening assignments in the first-year writing courses at Sac State. Many are framed as literacy narratives, but that is a subgenre of the personal narrative.

The assignment is popular because it moves students toward several learning objectives at once. We have outcomes associated with how identity shapes writing development, how writing contexts impact the way we write, and how community impact what we write. So, it makes sense to start students off by asking them to reflect on the knowledge they brought to the composition classroom - and personal narratives are an excellent way to do that. 

From the AASL

I know I also enjoy giving students permission to use "I, me, my" and to situate themselves beside the model texts by Sherman Alexie or Gloria Anzaldua. 

It's a rewarding assignment when it's well-supported. 

And thanks to some absurd news out of Long Island, we now have new ways to support literacy narratives. If you haven't been paying attention to political news (and I can't blame you if that's the case), it has been revealed that a politician from Long Island, New York lied extensively about his personal history during his campaign. 

By itself, that's not really relevant to a composition classroom. But thanks to David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, we have a way to examine this news through the lens of 'what it means to compose a personal narrative.' Brooks wrote a column on December 28th about what it means to compose a false personal narrative. It's a fascinating look at why and how people create narratives for themselves. It examines the limitations of the genre as well as the way personal narratives reshape both author and the audience. 

I can see this as a potential addition to reading lists. The column can help students consider what it means to be honest in a personal narrative and what it means to bend the truth. I have certainly suspected a bit of fiction writing in literacy narratives I've received in the past. This reading helps students understand what that approach means. 

If you (or your students) personally don't have online access to the New York Times, please remember that the Sac State Library has access.   

 

A.I. Chatbots and Composition

 

I'm working on a series of responses to the ways new technologies are going to impact the composition classroom. This is the first video, an attempt to put ChatGPT into the context of Rhetoric and Composition's history. 

I'm working on one that addresses the issue of academic integrity.