1. There have been questions and discussion about engaging faculty from other departments & disciplines. One issue that’s come up is what happens when students are kept out of the regular curriculum & faculty outside of basic writing do not engage with those students. How do we make those “introductions” and engage them in the conversation?
One strategy is to marshal the arguments for moving basic writing into a credit-bearing position in the university (rather than making basic writing a gate keeping course).
2. What happens when basic writers move into other classes and find themselves still in conflict with the academy? It’s not that this history goes away as students move into other courses.
“Subversive complicity”: how you move through the system and engage the rhetoric of power/dominant discourse while also maintaining your identity.
“Compliantly revolutionary”: alternate term suggested by the group.
3. Engaging students in a question of “how to get something out of the professor”–a question of agency & students engaging in a practice of figuring out what is helpful from the course.
4. See Victor Villanueva’s syllabi in a new book this week edited by Deborah Teague & Ronald Lunsford (Utah State UP, 2013)
These syllabi show his cycle of writing in working with basic writers & the classroom. For example, the syllabi demonstrate that he doesn’t require revisions: those are a practice of seeing if students can obey.
5. Why do we have students write about themes other than language & consciousness of language? Villanueva suggests that we want students to focus on language, not social topics. What we know and know well is language: why not engage students in that?
6. Hannah Ashley shared a teaching practice of “ghost writing,” having her students ghost write other student narratives in the class to think about the issue of learning language & discourse.
She suggested that perhaps we should “ghost” or “ghost write” with colleagues from other disciplines. We need to take ourselves seriously as we make connections & work in our colleges. Work to get them to see your point-of-view.
7. There are many conversations to be had: psychologists are focusing on cognition (how do we build on that and learn from them?).
8. What is the relationship between “second chance” and the language of “non-assimilation assimilation”?
In part, that language is about a social structure: “second chance” means students failed. It also means that they are an exploitable class. So, Villanueva suggests that we reject that language.
And, education is more than a chance.
Council on Basic Writing 
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