Basic writing and stigma

The number of college students who need remediation before they can function successfully in a college writing class is significant and likelier to increase than decrease because of economic factors that make a college degree a necessity. In addition, institutions and governmental entities are demanding accountability from remedial programs in the form of students who remediate quickly and persevere through subsequent courses to attain a degree. However, no consistent, effective pedagogy exists for helping remedial writers, largely because our understanding of these students is both fragmentary and reductive. Basic writers have been traditionally defined too restrictively, recognizable either through their flawed texts or by their faulty cognitive, affective or epistemological processes.

This dissertation argues that we lack an effective pedagogy because the paradigm we apply to define and understand basic writers is too static and narrow. Drawing on Mary Louise Pratt's notion of contact zone and Henry Giroux's border pedagogy, this study redefines basic writers relationally, arguing that the individual must be understood within a system of behaviors rather than in self-contained isolation. Erving Goffman's discussion of stigma supplies a workable description of this system of behaviors, providing a malleable explanatory model of the basic writing experience, rather than a definition of the basic writer. Goffman's ideas on stigma not only establish basic writers' unique position as stigmatized in the academic community, but also offer insight into the deeper patterns that guide their responses and interactions as they recognize and adjust to their stigmatized status and work through the ways they present themselves to others and the ways they come to terms with and transcend their position within the academy.