This study examines the association between educational loans and college graduation rates, with a focus on differences by race and ethnicity. Data come from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Results from the event history analyses indicate that educational loans are positively related to college graduation rates, but only up to a…

Intended for teachers of basic writing, this book contains a collection of new and updated essays addressing issues surrounding underprepared writers. It maps errors and expectations for basic writing and develops teaching approaches that will be effective in a social and political world. The book considers concepts such as the possibility of…

Relates the author's reflections on her early experiences as a student in China and her recent experiences as a composition teacher in the United States. Reveals how the frustration and confusion the author experienced growing up caught between two conflicting worlds ultimately helped her to grow as a reader and writer. (JD)

Describes the problem of importing multiculturalism into the writing classroom and specifically the possibility of a multicultural approach to writing style. Considers the ghettoization of student writing that appears to be riddled with "errors." (HB)

Describes how struggle and conflict are constructive for writers. Examines why this view of conflict had rhetorical power historically for theorists. Explores how and why this view persists among basic writing teachers in the 1990s. (HB)

Argues that Mina Shaughnessy's view of language as a politically innocent vehicle of meaning overlooks basic writers' need to confront the dissonance they experience between academic and other discourses. Suggests educators need to abandon the limitations of the essentialist view of language informing their pedagogy. (KEH)

Examines two debates within the basic writing community (the reaction against Min Zhan Lu's early theoretical work and the recent acrimonious debate regarding Ira Shor's defense of mainstreaming) showing how they reflect conflicting models of the basic writing field, with "critical" discourse challenging the conventions and authority of…

Argues that Basic Writing students, teachers, and scholarship are crucial to enabling colleges and universities to realize their ideals of diversity, interdisciplinarity, and student-centered learning. Calls for more research exploring the potential of basic writing students to develop (and help others develop) "borderland" perspectives which may…

Explores the convergence between projects in ethnographic research and composition pedagogy that emphasize the critical power of experience. Argues that critical ethnography and pedagogy need to redefine "experience" and its function for research and teaching and that composition can help this redefinition by looking for ways to build…

The 21 essays in this book interrogate one another as they explore the relationships among politics, curriculum, and pedagogy in contemporary classrooms and cultures. Critical theory, the book suggests, is generated in and through classroom practice, rather than imported from without. After an introduction by James F. Slevin and Art Young, essays…

Presents a discussion of symposium participants' excitement as well as frustrations over the ways in which current work in composition and literacy studies has explored the politics of the personal. Offers an example of how personal writing can promote the material as well as the subversive authority of professional discourse. (SG)

This revised and updated resource contains a total of 43 essays that serve to initiate graduate students and more experienced teachers into the theories that inform composition studies. Under Section One--The Givens in Our Conversations: The Writing Process--are these essays: "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product" (Donald M. Murray);…