Institute/Session Summary:

I am a teacher of developmental writing at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, an urban campus serving over 11,000 students. We are the most ethnically diverse college in the state with over 80 languages and unique dialects spoken on our campus. Such language diversity poses a special challenge in our developmental writing courses; to meet that challenge, five years ago, after hiring Linda Adler-Kassner as a consultant to help us make this transition, our English department eliminated the long-standing timed exit exam and replaced it with a process-oriented writing portfolio. In our current developmental writing course, English 900, students write 4 essays (multiple drafts from prewriting, to discovery, to final), choose two of the essays for the final portfolio, and submit a reflective letter assessing their own growth as writers and defending the choice of the essays in the portfolio. All portfolios are read by a committee of instructors rather than by individual classroom
 instructors.

As a centerpiece of the portfolio writing process, the English department built in a requirement that was not included when the course culminated in the timed exit exam: students must write essays that bring in the voice of outside sources. At least one essay must respond to someone else’s ideas from texts (broadly defined). Over the last few years, a number of faculty in the department have been using and sharing texts that address language head on: our students read such essays as James Baldwin’s “If Black English Isn’t A Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?,” Gloria Naylor’s “Mommy, What Does ‘Nigger’ Mean?,” Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue,” May Lee’s “Hmongspeak,” and bell hooks’ “Language” (from Teaching to Transgress).

What we have discovered in the past few years of teaching developmental writing, with such challenging--both content and context-wise—-readings as a core component, is that our students are producing writing that not only reflects their own struggle in taking part in the academic discourse that is required of college level writers, but that these readings bring us closer to the kind of pedagogy that Ira Shor claims is where “critical literacy begins, for questioning power relations, discourses, and identities in a world not yet finished, just, or humane.”

We are one of the very few English departments across the country that has made the radical transformation from exit exam to portfolio writing in developmental English. As a result, our students, who once wrote critically unengaged compare/contrast essays on, say, shopping experiences at Wal-Mart versus Target for the exit exam, are now writing about their own English language acquisition and the intersections between their vernacular and its place in the language/class strata in America, or as one first generation Hmong college student, Yer Pha, writes, the difficulty of navigating “the burden of this thing we call ‘standard English.’”

What I offer participants in this session is a short rationale for challenging students in developmental writing courses with difficult, critically important readings and with rigorous, critically engaging writing. In the interactive portion of the session, I will distribute a brief reading excerpt, and have participants pair up and respond to a writing/discussion prompt in order to simulate the kinds of reading, writing and discussion that take place in our English 900 classrooms. I also offer copies of the course’s portfolio requirements, assignments descriptions, syllabi, a bibliography, sample student writing, and evaluation rubrics for participants to use in their own courses.

Presenter1 Name: Jane Leach
Presenter1 Institution: Minneapolis Community and Technical College
Presenter1 Bio: Jane Leach holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Minnesota, where she taught composition for three years before becoming an English faculty member at Minneapolis Community and Technical College (MCTC). She has taught developmental English at MCTC for 7 years, is a member of the Minnesota Association for Developmental Education, and is coordinator of the Developmental English Portfolio Committee at MCTC.