CSU English Council Position Statement: Mandatory Early Start (April 2010)

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Background

In April 2009, the English Council of the CSU issued a position statement opposing the adoption and implementation of mandatory “early start” programs. “Early start” would require incoming first-year students designated as “not proficient” to begin “remediation” in the summer before they begin college. (In some models of “early start” students must not only begin “remediation,” but complete it before enrolling in regular classes.) Similar resolutions opposed to mandatory “early start” have been passed by the Academic Senate of the CSU and the Academic Senate of CSULA. In October 2009, the English Council of the CSU was informed that a task force had been assembled to study and report on the implementation of “early start.” In response the Council presented the task force with a “counter-proposal,” which reiterated the pedagogic and philosophic objections to mandatory “early start,” highlighted current successful practices, and offered the measured judgments of experts. At their March 2010 meeting, the CSU Board of Trustees adopted an ‘early start’ policy. In response, the English Council of the CSU drafted and approved the accompanying position statement.

CSU English Council Position Statement: Mandatory Early Start (April 2010)

We understand that the Board of Trustees’ resolution to implement Early Start programs on all CSU campuses is an effort to help integrate first year students into mainstream academic life quickly, humanely, and with a high degree of probability that they will graduate. We share this concern. However, along with the Statewide Academic Senate, the CSU English Council opposes a mandatory Early Start as a precondition for enrollment at any CSU campus. We believe that a mandatory Early Start program will not serve our students well for these reasons:

• Mandatory Early start is discriminatory, forcing an identified group of students to participate in summer as a pre-condition of enrollment to the university, even though this same population of students is not only fully qualified for admission, but arrive at the CSU having earned high school GPA’s of B or better;
• While we do support voluntary summer programs, as a mandatory program, Early Start is punitive, placing high-stakes preconditions on admissions to fully qualified first year students. This raises the questionable legality of denying admission to these students;
• Mandatory Early Start places undo financial burden on students who can least absorb it. Whatever financial aid students may receive cannot compensate for summer income lost and summer costs incurred, which could lead to resentment, hardship, and disenrollment;
• No valid evidence has been presented to us that Early Start is effective, and we do not feel students should be forced to enroll in programs whose educational value is unproven;
• By contrast, in a two-year experiment at SFSU, Summer Bridge was designed as an early start, where students who were highly successful in this summer bridge course (earning a B+ or higher) were promoted to the next level composition course. The students did so poorly that Summer Bridge went back to its original model as an addition to, rather than a substitute for, the full sequence of composition courses;
• There is a great deal of evidence from a number of campuses indicating that innovative first-year programs (e.g. directed self-placement and stretch) are successful at retaining students, improving compliance with EO 665 (system-wide, roughly 85% of students are compliant within their first year), and improving graduation rates;
• In a CSULA study, students who placed into regular semester basic writing courses had higher persistence rates than students who placed directly into first-year composition, showing that students who go directly into our existing first-year courses do as well as, if not better than, their more “proficient” peers;
• From long-term consultation with Chancellor’s Office representatives, we understand that remedial courses that do not count toward graduation are a problematic option in today’s budget climate. We believe that directed self-placement and stretch courses solve this problem. Early Start, on the other hand, creates an additional remedial course;
• Early Start is an unfunded mandate that will require substantial resources to design, implement, and sustain and that will place differential burdens on individual campuses.

For these reasons, English Council recommends that writing programs throughout the system decline to participate in the design or implementation of mandatory Early Start Programs. We understand that conditions are different on different campuses and that some writing programs might for various reasons feel compelled to participate, and these programs have our full support. Nevertheless, the Council as a whole feels it is important to voice our strong opposition to this ill-conceived, however well-intentioned, program.

Research as a Process

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Texts such as They Say/I Say begin with the assumption that to enter a discourse community, to learn to write and speak as a participant, one must learn what David Bartholomae calls “the commonplaces, the texts, the gestures and jargon of the group.” That entry, though, is usually a slow and gradual process. Susan MacDonald suggests four points on a continuum to describe the path students must navigate to enter the academic discourse community:

1. nonacademic writing
2. generalized academic writing concerned with stating claims, offering evidence, respecting the opinion of others, and learning to write with authority
3. novice approximations of particular disciplinary ways of using and creating knowledge
4. expert, insider academic writing

First-year writing courses tend to focus on the first two points of the continuum. Students are often asked to write in a range of genres that include many instances of what MacDonald calls “generalized academic writing” and the argumentative “moves” made explicit by Graff and Birkenstein focus almost exclusively on this type of writing.

But as MacDonald’s continuum makes explicit, key to entering the academic discourse community is the need to learn the research conventions of scholars and to recognize how these conventions might be discipline-specific. To some, these differences across disciplines are so great as to call into question the ubiquitous general education research paper. Richard Larson went so far as to refer to the “so-called ‘research paper’” as a “non-form” with “no conceptual or substantive identity.” If the research assignment focuses too narrowly on finding and reporting information, on regurgitating data into templates, then Larson’s objection is valid.

Research assignments in first-year writing courses are certainly susceptible to the pressures of teaching the “format” of the generic research paper even when no such format exists, or rather even when a dizzying number and array of formats exist. The generic research assignment also confirms common misperceptions about research and writing; that they are simple tasks of gathering, organizing, and transferring to paper information that is already known. Instead, research is best taught as part of a course designed to introduce students to the discourse communities that form around specific topics. And research assignments need to emphasize the qualities that underlie research in all disciplines: intellectual curiosity and personal engagement.

Furthermore, research like writing is best seen as a process. Research abilities, like writing abilities, are neither separate nor linear. As the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) notes of its recommended information literacy standards, “many of the competencies are likely to be performed recursively, in that the reflective and evaluative aspects included within each standard will require the student to return to an earlier point in the process, revise the information-seeking approach, and repeat the same steps.” To teachers of writing this description will sound very familiar.

As with their ideas about writing, students often arrive in college with a very narrow sense of research. Their success at the university and as life-long learners will depend on their coming to see knowledge as both shared and created, and research and writing as epistemic and recursive, as ways not only of making sense of the world but of making the world.

Correlating Writing and Information Literacy Outcomes

(from the WPA Outcomes Statement and the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards)

Research Process
Writing

• focus on a purpose
• use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating

Information Literacy

• defines and articulates the need for information
• reevaluates nature and extent of information need

Search Strategies
Writing

• respond to the needs of different audiences
• understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate resources

Information Literacy

• identifies a variety of types and formats of potential sources of information
• selects the most appropriate investigative methods or information retrieval systems for accessing information
• constructs and implements effectively designed search strategies
• retrieves information online or in person using a variety of methods
• refines the search strategy if necessary

Documentation
Writing

• practice appropriate means of documenting work

Information Literacy

• extracts, records, and manages the information and its sources
• acknowledges the use of information sources in communicating the product or performance

Using They Say/I Say

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The most recent Composition Conversation focused on using They Say/I Say in writing classes. Now in its second edition, They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, is one of the texts recommended by the CSULA Composition Committee for ENGL 101 and ENGL 102.

Graff and Birkenstein use Kenneth Burke’s famous metaphor of the “unending conversation” to illustrate the importance of convention in academic discourse. According to the authors of They Say/I Say, students have difficulty joining the academic conversation because they lack the language to make the expected argumentative and rhetorical moves. These moves are so common that the language used to express them has become stock language in academic discourse and can literally and productively be represented as fill-in the blank templates. Their book provides over a hundred such templates covering everything from introducing a quote (“According to X, ‘__’ ”) to explaining the consequences of one’s ideas (“These conclusions will have significant applications in __ as well as in __”). Participants generally praised the utility of They Say/I Say and offered some suggestions for using the text in a composition class. Concerns, though, were also raised about the use of such “crutches.” After all, the five-paragraph essay began as a temporary expedient to help students get started.

Some instructors using They Say/I Say assign group presentations on each chapter. One instructor allows students to design their presentation in whatever form they prefer. “Teach the way you would like to be taught,” was the advice given to students preparing their presentations. Another instructor requires groups to summarize the chapter, give examples of the templates from their own writing (or from their reading), and if they are unable to find examples to work with the class to develop examples of the templates in action. One instructor noted that during election season students found many examples of the templates in the public discourse surrounding political campaigns. Finally, to follow-up on the chapter(s) presented, one instructor included questions on subsequent peer reviews that required reviewers to identify templates in the writing of classmates.

Two primary concerns, however, were raised about They Say/I Say. First, one participant liked the quasi-meta-rhetorical quality of the text. In making explicit common rhetorical moves, the authors had “succeeded” in reducing rhetoric to a series of formal gestures. The result, however, is a rhetoric text that rarely appeals to rhetoric. Curiously the authors don’t always refer to the rhetorical purpose of a rhetorical move, or do so only implicitly. The absence (or implicitness) of rhetoric in They Say/I Say could result in the second concern: that students would take these templates as not temporary aids to future development but as the endpoint of development. Instead of mastering rhetoric students might believe they only need to master the templates. And without the rhetorical training needed to understand how the templates work and to recognize the historic and cultural contingency of these particular templates, how could a student ever progress beyond the mere repetition of these mechanical forms? As is often the case, the answer is education. The templates in They Say/I Say might free us of the mechanical details of rhetorical moves but not of the need to teach why some moves are more effective and appropriate than others.

From the “Introduction” to They Say/I Say

Burke writes:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. --Kenneth Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form

What we like about this passage is its suggestion that stating on argument and “putting in your oar” can only be done in conversation with others; that we all enter the dynamic world of ideas not as isolated individuals, but as social beings deeply connected to others who have a stake in what we say.

Graff and Birkenstein, They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing

Low and High Stakes Writing

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In our professional lives all of us engage in a variety of writing tasks, each with its own purpose, intended audience, and associated conventions, and increasingly instructors are attempting to create a similar variety of writing tasks in their classrooms. Besides providing students with a variety of writing tasks, instructors also hope to encourage more writing by students without increasing the already heavy "paper-load" instructors face. Everybody agrees that students should do more writing, that more writing will lead to better writing, and that writing is essential to learning. But how do already overburdened instructors balance the legitimate pedagogic need for more writing by students with the equally legitimate claim of too much student work and not enough time to respond to it?

An important distinction that has emerged in response to this problem is that between "low-stakes" and "high-stakes" writing. Most instructors are already familiar with high-stakes writing, because they already require it of students. High-stakes writing is usually formal, structured writing that is assigned a grade. The writing might be take-home or timed, and the grade is usually a significant part of the course grade. In general, high-stakes writing is supposed to:\

• demonstrate what students have learned
• follow the conventions of formal academic prose (as well as discipline specific conventions)
• be relatively error free (when written outside of class)

High-stakes writing assignments are stressful for students and involve considerable work for the instructor.

Low-stakes writing falls under the general category of "writing to learn" pedagogy and is often used in writing classes as invention strategies. Low-stakes writing is also often used to assess quickly how well students understand course material. The writing is usually

• short and informal
• impromptu (in-class) or take-home
• intended to stimulate thought, and keep students engaged and thinking during class
• never corrected or graded

While the instructor might read low-stakes writing, the instructor should avoid lengthy comments, corrections, or even assigning a grade. Instead of a grade, most instructors use a simple acceptable or not-acceptable system (i.e. credit or no credit, check or minus) or simply "handed-in" or "not handed-in." If the instructor chooses to provide a comment, it will usually be directed to the content of the writing and not the form. For example, an instructor might need to signal in a comment a problem, such as a student not responding to a journal topic, inappropriately paraphrasing in a summary assignment, or otherwise misunderstanding the writing assignment. In general, comments, if used at all, should be brief.

Listed below are some examples of low-stakes writing assignments:

Journals
Freewriting or Quickwrites
Mini essays
Role-playing writing
E-writing

Low-stakes writing can also serve as pre-writing for high-stakes writing assignments. In-class brainstorming activities might lead to brief paper proposals which might lead to a formal paper. In short, low-stakes writing is not a substitute for high-stakes writing, but research seems to indicate that it improves student performance on high-stakes writing assignments.

Some Examples of
Low-Stakes Writing

Journals: Probably the most common low-stakes writing found in composition classes, journal entries might be guided, such as focused responses to particular questions, part of a dialogue journal, where the instructor and student carry on a conversation through the journal, or open-ended and closer to freewriting.

Freewriting or Quickwrites: These (usually) in-class activities help students work through what they know and understand and what they don’t know, which helps instructors gauge student comprehension. They also serve as effective invention strategies, especially for blocked or anxious writers.

Role-playing writing: Students might be asked to write a dialogue to explore another person’s role or perspective, or “record” an imagined interview with an author, expert, or someone holding a contrary opinion.

E-writing: Electronic discourse is becoming more commonly used for informal low-stakes writing. Students might be asked to participate in online chats, post to a bulletin board, or take part in an email discussion. Students might also be asked to create their own blog or respond to blog entries, though the public nature of blogs and blog postings complicates the idea of informality.