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Critical Terms for Critical Work
Arranged alphabetically, what follows is a list of some key terms that come up in Critical Work.
"Basic" Writing
Basic Writing is an area within the field of composition and rhetoric and designates both certain first-year composition courses and pre-college writing courses. Often, students are tracked into these courses based on multiple choice grammar test scores and, less frequently, by timed essay exams.
Students in many basic writing courses do not receive college credit for these classes, which they are required to take. The courses are seen as preparatory, the students not “college ready” in aptitude, ability or preparation through previous education.
Traditionally serving a “gatekeeping function,” basic writing courses tend to stigmatize students and discourage them from continuing the pursuit of higher education. Sometimes called “weed-out courses,” their deleterious effects have historically overshadowed their original intent and many basic writing teachers’ purposes and goals.
Basic writing courses were offered in US colleges and universities as a direct result of pressure from social groups not typically granted access to higher education. Collectively, in what’s referred to as the Open Admissions Movement, members of these social groups changed the nation’s student body; the forebears of their work being the class-based movements of the late-eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Equal Rights Movement and, most directly, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. Open Admissions was aided as well by the push for college access by veterans returning from WWII.
Despite concerted efforts on the part of some compositionists (those teachers and academics in the field of rhetoric and composition) from the 1970s on to change curricula and the overall effect of basic writing, it remains marked by its history and the continuing perceptions of it in the academy, as well as attitudes of both some who teach and many who take such courses.
Basic writing often becomes about viewing its students as somehow “basic,” its purposes merely to “remediate” and “correct” both student writing and its writers.
This is a result of wider prevailing attitudes toward writing and learning in general, which rely upon mistaken notions of how writing and writers work, and which do not account for the economic, class and other social factors that typically make some students more "prepared" for college than others.
Against these notions and the continued function of basic writing, on this site “basic” will appear in quotation marks to designate the problematic idea of referring to any person or any writing as such and to remain clear about what is being referred to: “Basic” Writing is a set of human relationships within institutional contexts which designate a recent and still contested history in US higher education and a location that still holds out the idea and promise of access to continued education for all, if this history is accounted for in course design, teacher attitude and through the repeated questioning of the purposes of such classes.
Cariño
“Cariño” further clarifies what radical pedagogues might mean when developing the condition of caring when translated as “affection, love, fondness and liking” (Bartolomé, p. 15).
Bartolomé, Lilia. “Authentic Cariño and Respect in Minority Education: The Politics and Ideological Dimensions of Love.” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy (2008): http://freire.education.mcgill.ca/ojs/public/journals/Galleys/IJCP003.pdf
Critical Literacy
“Critical literacy” as a concept has been employed in numerous ways to designate abilities to read and write that are somehow in the service of a project greater than individual communication and comprehension. Ira Shor describes “critical literacy” as “questioning received knowledge and immediate experience with the goal of challenging inequality and developing an activist citizenry” and goes on to say that critical literacy is a social practice used “as a tool for the study of other social practices,” by which he means it is necessary for fully understanding the social practices being examined, and, I would argue, for changing these social practices, which Shor partly suggests with the phrase “developing an activist citizenry.” Shor follows this with a meta-explanation: “[C]ritical literacy is reflective and reflexive: Language use and education are social practices used to critically study all social practices including the social practices of language use and education. Globally, this literate practice seeks the larger cultural context of any specific situation.”
Shor, Ira. “What is Critical Literacy?” Journal for Pedagogy, Pluralism and Practice 4 (1997).
Students in many basic writing courses do not receive college credit for these classes, which they are required to take. The courses are seen as preparatory, the students not “college ready” in aptitude, ability or preparation through previous education.
Traditionally serving a “gatekeeping function,” basic writing courses tend to stigmatize students and discourage them from continuing the pursuit of higher education. Sometimes called “weed-out courses,” their deleterious effects have historically overshadowed their original intent and many basic writing teachers’ purposes and goals.
Basic writing courses were offered in US colleges and universities as a direct result of pressure from social groups not typically granted access to higher education. Collectively, in what’s referred to as the Open Admissions Movement, members of these social groups changed the nation’s student body; the forebears of their work being the class-based movements of the late-eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Equal Rights Movement and, most directly, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. Open Admissions was aided as well by the push for college access by veterans returning from WWII.
Despite concerted efforts on the part of some compositionists (those teachers and academics in the field of rhetoric and composition) from the 1970s on to change curricula and the overall effect of basic writing, it remains marked by its history and the continuing perceptions of it in the academy, as well as attitudes of both some who teach and many who take such courses.
Basic writing often becomes about viewing its students as somehow “basic,” its purposes merely to “remediate” and “correct” both student writing and its writers.
This is a result of wider prevailing attitudes toward writing and learning in general, which rely upon mistaken notions of how writing and writers work, and which do not account for the economic, class and other social factors that typically make some students more "prepared" for college than others.
Against these notions and the continued function of basic writing, on this site “basic” will appear in quotation marks to designate the problematic idea of referring to any person or any writing as such and to remain clear about what is being referred to: “Basic” Writing is a set of human relationships within institutional contexts which designate a recent and still contested history in US higher education and a location that still holds out the idea and promise of access to continued education for all, if this history is accounted for in course design, teacher attitude and through the repeated questioning of the purposes of such classes.
Cariño
“Cariño” further clarifies what radical pedagogues might mean when developing the condition of caring when translated as “affection, love, fondness and liking” (Bartolomé, p. 15).
Bartolomé, Lilia. “Authentic Cariño and Respect in Minority Education: The Politics and Ideological Dimensions of Love.” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy (2008): http://freire.education.mcgill.ca/ojs/public/journals/Galleys/IJCP003.pdf
Critical Literacy
“Critical literacy” as a concept has been employed in numerous ways to designate abilities to read and write that are somehow in the service of a project greater than individual communication and comprehension. Ira Shor describes “critical literacy” as “questioning received knowledge and immediate experience with the goal of challenging inequality and developing an activist citizenry” and goes on to say that critical literacy is a social practice used “as a tool for the study of other social practices,” by which he means it is necessary for fully understanding the social practices being examined, and, I would argue, for changing these social practices, which Shor partly suggests with the phrase “developing an activist citizenry.” Shor follows this with a meta-explanation: “[C]ritical literacy is reflective and reflexive: Language use and education are social practices used to critically study all social practices including the social practices of language use and education. Globally, this literate practice seeks the larger cultural context of any specific situation.”
Shor, Ira. “What is Critical Literacy?” Journal for Pedagogy, Pluralism and Practice 4 (1997).