It began with “diagnostic.” The term sounded so clinical.
Besides, what, precisely, was I supposed to be diagnosing? What panel of
diseases was I looking to identify and cure? Or, worse, removing like a
malignant tumor? No… “diagnostic” didn’t fit my practice at all. That much I
knew. They were patient, but they weren’t my
patients.
But it didn’t stop there. Prescriptive program, sample
analysis, deficiency, crisis and outbreak. And institution. That one—institution.
I’d given them hugs and let them change my mind about video
games. This was making me feel like their papers were a biohazard, or
something. At the very least, I was fairly sure they had managed to infect
me—I’d gotten so close to the “population.”
That’s it! Illness. More specifically: Mental Illness.
I never really liked the way I was asked to test students to
see what was wrong with them (ok, their writing) on day one, and calling it a
“diagnostic” made it worse. This was in a class they were required to take:
where else were they supposed to go? Whomever and whatever they were as writers
is what I had to teach, so the diagnostic felt like a horrible social
mind-trick that was more about sending a very clear message—“You need to be
here because you need help. Let me show you what is wrong with you.” That’s when it hit me. We are treating student
writers who deviate from the norm (whatever that is) as if they represent a
prevalent, yet abnormal psychology. And on a sociocultural scale, we treat
un-assimilating groups and the very concept of “Basic Writing” like a chronic
mental illness. We only drop the insanity if/when they normalize. They move up
and out, and they stop having to take diagnostics. And in our frantic efforts
to remind ourselves that we are not like “them”—that we must be better, more
sanitary, than that, right?—we systematically institutionalize their treatment,
provide a remedy. We remediate.
Mary Soliday’s The
Politics of Remediation: Institutional and Student Needs in Higher Education
explores the concept of “remediation” as it has evolved as a function of
“institution” from its inception. She doesn’t draw the same parallels as I am
here (institution=institutionalization), but Soliday’s analysis thoroughly
explains how remediation—it’s definition and its institutional motives—is not a
simple help function in academia. It isn’t like students don’t need literacy assistance or writing improvement: they do. But
to what extent? That is a more difficult question. Because according to
Soliday, the motives behind “remedial education” have never been firmly rooted
in serving the student population. Rather, remedial education and it’s impetus
the “literacy crisis” has been wielded much like the Munchausen Syndrome of
academia. As Soliday writes: “One time-tested means of provoking debate about
standards and values in education … is to foment a literacy crisis. Before the
literacy crisis of the mid-1970’s, the most virulent outbreak occurred in the
last decade of the nineteenth century….” (p. 120-121). The hysteria is not new.
And neither is the victim-shaming. This cycle of crisis often results in
systemic beliefs that the remedial student is somehow to blame for both the
condition of their educational needs and the failure of the prescriptive
remedial writing program. To me, this seems like planning for failure from the
start: if “remedial education” knows it can always blame its students for any
failure, what incentive does the institution really have to succeed in helping
them? Furthermore, for many colleges and universities, it seems like they could
potentially make more money by designing a remedial model that students paid
for (perhaps multiple times through reenrollment), but which never cured
students’ writing ills enough to garner academic and economic payoff. At this
point, students who know they must pass compulsory composition courses and who
wish to have a chance at a middle class lifestyle can’t afford to have the
social stigma of being “un-remediated” or “in need of remediation” anywhere
near their transcripts. So how many times will they take a course of this ever
more expensive treatment? As many times as it takes to normalize….
According to Soliday, if remediation has been a “remedy” for
anything at all, it has been used only as a tool by which educational
institutions have socially managed their own appearances of exclusivity. To
belabor the previous metaphor, I would argue that it is the tool by which
America’s universities and colleges have made powerful statements about the
intellectual health of their institution, with open admissions often signifying
greater risk of contagion or “letting in the crazies.” If this seems like an
unsavory comparison (and I hope it does), consider Soliday’s analysis when
discussing how representations of remediation have been used to symptomatically
classify student groups and writing behaviors:
When intellectuals assume that working class is synonymous with underclass, [this] category for analysis
… tends to fuse the economic with the cultural and to highlight student need
rather than the institutional need to manage the conflicting aims of access and
excellence. […] This cultural analysis tends to portray social class as a set
of academically dysfunctional behaviors that cannot really coexist with those
habits of mind necessary to succeed in college. (p. 108-109)
As a teacher of designated “remedial” writing courses, what
concerns me most is not the idea that our curriculum isn’t
addressing a “basic writing” epidemic: I am afraid that once my students think
of themselves as “remedial writers” inside the academic system, they are given
little reason to believe they are valued as anything more. Despite often being
clear-headed, rational, emotive, experientially rich, culturally aware and
intellectually neurodiverse, we equate “basic writing” with “basic student,”
assuming that this person has little to offer the institution. We may pretend we are doling out a remedy by
offering remedial education, but at what cost? And I would press the question:
what might the institution be losing by failing to see the intellectual
potential lost when we assess basic writers as basic thinkers? It is crazy to
think that we could be turning away bright minds (in physics, computer
programming, psychology, linguistics, etc.) from the university because we are
imposing an identity of “remedial student” upon a person who might simply
structure grammar “abnormally.”
So often, I feel many of us reaching for answers, knowing
change is needed—but what? And how? The “I don’t knows” can be maddening. No
doubt, many of our students need our help, often in ways we do not anticipate
or imagine. We aren’t physicians: we are teachers. Our job is… different,
perhaps. But as we engage our students, personally and, yes, institutionally, I
would offer the first few lines of the Hippocratic Oath as we continue to try:
I swear to fulfill, to the
best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:
I will respect the hard-won
scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share
such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.
I will apply, for the benefit
of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of
overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.
I will remember that there is
art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and
understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.
I will not be ashamed to say
"I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the
skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.
We're all in this together,
Rachael
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