User:BeatriceKnits/sandbox

Note: a small part of this comes from the subsection "Shaughnessy's Legacy" under "Major Theorists." I propose to delete that subsection and insert this section either between "Major Theorists" and "Reform Efforts" or after "Reform Efforts."

Critiques of basic writing
Critiques of basic writing and some of its major theorists have been plentiful and ongoing for decades. Min Zhan Lu, for example, problematized Shaugnessy's essentialist view of language, expectation that basic writers adjust to mainstream linguistic standards, and failed to acknowledge political, economic, and institutional contexts that shape the designation of basic writers and basic writing. Other notable scholars of basic writing, however, like Laura Gray-Rosendale have claimed that such critiques of Shaughnessy do not hold much critical weight. "Shaughnessy's works," themselves, she claims, "render ambiguous if not outright defy many such negative characterizations."

In 1992, the Fourth National Basic Writing Conference saw vigorous debate on the definition and very existence of basic writing. In 1993 the Journal of Basic Writing published some key talks from the conference. David Bartholomae argued basic writing as a program was a form of maintaining the status quo and that the purpose and definition of basic writing should be a continually contested term. Peter Adams released preliminary data showing students placed into basic writing courses at the Community College of Baltimore County had extremely low success rates. Adams later led the testing and implementation of the Accelerated Learning Program.

Ira Shor called basic writing "Our Apartheid" in 1997, noting its effects on both students (adding more layers to "gateway" courses, segregating students, and slowing progress to degree and thus economic improvements) and faculty (basic writing often taught by part-time adjunct faculty). Shor positions basic writing and declining labor conditions for those teaching it as a kind of conservative backlash to the open-access, but is careful to to critique the system rather than colleagues.

More recent critiques of basic writing have framed its inception and founders (including Shaughnessy) as a "pedagogical white backlash to integration" and claimed that part of the reason reform efforts have been slow is due to "white innocence." Carmen Kynard, like Lu, critiqued Shaughnessy's essentialist view of language, and re-framed the traditional story of basic writing by considering it in context of HBCUs and Black teaching practices. Vershawn Ashanti Young cast the insistence on a single standard "academic" English in written and oral communication as requiring Black students to code switch, which Young links to W.E.B. Du Bois' concept of double consciousness and the "separate but equal" logic of Jim Crow laws. Molloy and Bennett call for the field to end basic writing and the paradigm of deeming some entering college students "basic" writers.