Tom Fox and Politics in Basic Writing

Research & Teaching in Developmental Education, Fall 2003 by McAlexander, Patricia J

Most of us as teachers of basic/developmental composition get to know our students as individuals as well as writers while we help them improve their content, organization, and grammar. We see our job as helping underprepared students become better writers and thinkers, so that they can achieve success in college and in the world of work beyond.

Yet there co-exists for some basic writing teachers, including many well-known scholars in the field (Min-Zhan Lu and Ira Shor, for example), a complex web of political theory, often Marxist or postcolonial in origin, through which they view their students. These teachers seem to define basic writers mainly as various types of oppressed minorities-members of the working class, immigrants, people of color. According to this view, basic writing (BW) students are victims of society and of academe, for they are on the margins of both. Yet, as the BW classroom becomes a "contact zone," a place where different cultures meet (the phrase was originated by Mary Louise Pratt, 1991), these "borderlands" students can, the theory goes, provide wisdom and insight to their fellow students and their teachers. Such views, now extended to the multicultural and working class students in more advanced composition classes, are both upheld and questioned in academe. We find in the January 2003 issue of the widely-read journal College English a working-class culture group presenting a call for papers on "class in the writing class" (pp. 325-326), while Harriet Malinowitz, in "Business, Pleasure, and the Personal Essay," wryly comments, "Freirians, feminists, cultural studies mavens, just about everybody in the [composition] field and her sister, it sometimes seems, have touted the eye-opening joys of marginality that composition affords" (p. 313).

Tom Fox, in his articulate and often convincing book Defending Access (1999), supports the "borderlands" view. His arguments about ethnic, working class, and African American composition students relate both to his experiences as a teacher of basic writing and of multicultural first-year composition. Fox has served as coordinator of the basic writing program at California State University, Chico, and taught basic writing; he also teaches multicultural composition classes, designed to attract "students of color" (p. 93). he states that his book's focus is on African Americans (p. v), for whom, he states, the term "basic writer" is often a euphemism (p. 45).

Fox argues that the literacy standards set by academe and American culture are a way to exclude ethnic or African-American students from a higher education and from the American dream. he charges that "gatekeeping" is simply a tool to protect the present social hierarchy and that literacy standards, usually based on standardized tests, are unfair because social and political circumstances, rather than lack of ability, usually cause the low scores resulting in denial of access-or placement into non-credit basic writing classes.

Mina Shaughnessy was no doubt a shaper of the tradition whereby basic writers are defined by their ethnic or racial background. Basing her descriptions on her 1970s students at the City College of New York, she writes, "We can infer that [basic writers] have never written much in school or out, [and] that they have come from families or neighborhoods where people speak in other languages or variant. . . forms of English" ("Basic Writing," 1976, p. 139). In Errors and Expectations, she goes on to describe BWs as qualitatively different from traditional students, of "a different order. ... as if they had come . . . from a different country" (1977, p. 2). Shaughnessy also was an early defender of the intelligence of these students. She saw logic in their writing errors, logic that gave new insights into writing theory, and argued that these students were "capable both of steady growth and dramatic leaps into new levels of competence" ("The Miserable Truth," 1976; rpt. 1980, pp. 111-113).

Fox, then, is following Shaughnessy's lead when he links "basic writers" with African-Americans (as well as with ethnic minorities and members of the working class) and when he sees these students as separated from mainstream academic culture, but motivated and intellectually able. However, given his view of the unfairness of "standards," it is not surprising that Fox criticizes Shaughnessy for retaining a program of '"winnowing and indoctrinating' that served to contain challenges to the curriculum or challenges to prevailing notions of literacy." Indeed, he charges that writing programs based on any of her three metaphors-of basic writers as beginners and as foreigners and of basic writing as a frontier-actually continue the marginalization of African American students (p. 47).

When teachers see the teaching of composition as a political activity, they often strive to raise their students' awareness of cultural differences and to instill an awareness of the university's and society's margin-center hierarchy. Fox recommends that composition teachers assign readings about the oppressed and give students writing topics that "seek to reduce the violence of inequality-the social forces that prevent access" (92). he also encourages his students to read and write from their personal perspective-the perspective of the borderlands. For example, in a multicultural composition course, he asks his students to "write an essay about the significance of a 'game' in your own culture . . . and [give] an interpretation of its significance in the culture" (93).