Instructional Re-Design

Preto-Bay, Ana Maria, and Kristine Hansen. “Preparing for the Tipping Point: Designing Writing Programs to Meet the Needs of the Changing Population.” WPA 30.1-2 (2006): 37-57. Print.

In this article from a special edition of WPA dedicated to L2 matters, Preto-Bay and Hansen argue that the demographics of colleges and universities have changed enough to warrant if not systemic change at least a careful reconsideration of composition curriculum and pedagogical practices. To illustrate the change in student populations, they discuss the inadequacy of terminology for students of diverse backgrounds. They examine “international” and “multicultural” labels that fail to accurately describe students of various socioeconomic backgrounds, immigrants whose families have been in the country for various amounts of time, and refugees whose educational backgrounds may be significantly different than those of the students typically labeled “international.” And, as they note, these increasingly diverse populations are not isolated to particular parts of the country, making addressing the changing demographics a concern for faculty in English departments across the country.

More concerning than the inadequacies of some labels for them are pedagogical inadequacies. For Preto-Bay and Hansen, “[o]ne or two ESL specialists on any given college campus can no longer answer all the questions that puzzle mainstream composition teachers, not only about those we have traditionally labeled L2 students […] but also about the increasing numbers of other culturally and linguistically diverse students” (40). Instead, the entire curriculum must change to meet the needs of these students. They use systems theory to explain that if a key element of a system (the student population of an educational system, for example) changes, the system must change to address that change. To address these changes, they argue for education of new teachers to include significant attention to linguistic and cultural diversity, new textbooks and resources that highlight effective pedagogical practices for such diversity, for a more rhetorically and communication oriented pedagogy (as opposed to cultural studies or expressivist approaches for example), and for local considerations about the best place to locate the writing program—whether the writing program is best suited as a part of the English department or in its own department, depending on its ability to control its own interests.

In many ways, Preto-Bay and Hansen’s article is quite sweeping in its scope, covering a number of complex pedagogical and political issues relatively quickly. However, given their call for significant systemic change in composition curriculum, such broad strokes are necessary to lay the foundation for those changes, to illustrate the breadth and depth of such changes. Of course, the feasibility of such changes is the main limitation here. Such changes would require significant investments of time and money that some departments may not be able to afford. But, we must also consider this in terms of our students: if these changes will truly benefit them, shouldn’t we make those investments?