This thoughtful piece by Mike Rose (UCLA) discusses why it is so important to continue providing access to education for all and suggests we need to break out of disciplinary and methodological silos to do it effectively. As you may or may not have noticed, I frequently include posts about reading and writing in this ostensibly education oriented blog, precisely because I see being able to read and write as so essential to success in higher (or K-12 or continuing) education. My friend and writing instructor extraordinaire, Sara Jameson, wrote her thesis on Mike Rose so I always pay particular attention to what he has to say. Here are a couple of excerpts from this piece:
"...some of the problems with college remediation as it is typically executed. It is built on a set of assumptions about language and cognition that have long ago been proven inadequate, like the belief that focusing on isolated grammar exercises will help students write better prose. The work students are doing isn’t connected to the writing they are required to do in their other courses, academic or vocational.... Most of us are trained and live our professional lives in disciplinary silos. Let me give you one example of how mind-boggling, and I think harmful, this intellectual isolation can become. In all the articles I’ve read on remediation in higher education journals, not one cites the 40 years’ worth of work on basic writing produced by teachers and researchers of writing. There is even a Journal of Basic Writing that emerged out of the experiments with open admission at CUNY in the 1970s. Not a mention of any of it. Zip."
"...some of the problems with college remediation as it is typically executed. It is built on a set of assumptions about language and cognition that have long ago been proven inadequate, like the belief that focusing on isolated grammar exercises will help students write better prose. The work students are doing isn’t connected to the writing they are required to do in their other courses, academic or vocational.... Most of us are trained and live our professional lives in disciplinary silos. Let me give you one example of how mind-boggling, and I think harmful, this intellectual isolation can become. In all the articles I’ve read on remediation in higher education journals, not one cites the 40 years’ worth of work on basic writing produced by teachers and researchers of writing. There is even a Journal of Basic Writing that emerged out of the experiments with open admission at CUNY in the 1970s. Not a mention of any of it. Zip."
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