Conflict and Power in the Reader-Responses of Adult Basic Writers

Though these writers of composition textbooks see the student as moving toward a place in society (free citizen; mover and shaker), they do not locate him in society now. They see him as newborn, unformed, without social origins and without needs would spring from his origins. He has no history. Hence the writing he does and the skills he acquires are detached from those parts of himself not encompassed by his . . . identity as a student. With all good will, the authors of the textbooks cannot generate much engagement out of so abstract a student and so ahistorical a situation. One more thing: the student is almost invariably conceived of as an individual. He acts not only outside of time and history, but aloneframing ideas, discovering and expressing himself, trying to persuade others, but never working with others to make a theme advances a common purpose. (Ohmann, English in America 148-49) Real students, Ohmann implies, have histories and bring their histories with them to class. These represent more than just the backgrounds from which students come; they are the active and ongoing histories make them the kinds of students they are, the sources of the motivations bring them to college and of the experience and knowledge they bring to the work they will do here. These histories, as Ohmann reminds us, are not only personal and individual but also are cultural, economic, and political, and as such they represent life-contexts many of our students have in common. The textbooks Ohmann critiqued are twenty years old now, but their tendency to make abstractions of students-to imagine them as somehow unformed before they come to us-is still with us in new versions. This tendency has been especially persistent in theoretical discussions of basic writing, in which students typically are defined by what they lack. We acknowledge, of course, the adult basic writers whose work we will be describing here have difficulties with academic discourse, but, like Myra Kogen, we are unwilling to conclude therefore that those who do not do ... what we seem able to do are deficient and