3/10/ (3)--Linda Adler Kassner's essay

Linda Adler-Kassner, "The Shape of the Form: Working Class Students and the Academic Essay" (in Teaching Working Class, 85-105)

At the beginning of the term, I ask the students in my basic writing classes to write about their previous experiences with reading and writing. (85)

The argument advanced by these basic writing researchers [Perl, Rose, Bartholomae/Petrosky, and Shaughnessy] that some of these students' issues with academic writing come from their inexperience with the genre has been an important one for compositionists because it has helped us look closely at the relationship between  basic writers' prior experiences and their performances in our classes. But I'd argue that issues connected with these students' success or failure with academic writing go beyond lack of exposure to the acts of reading and writing. They extend to a disjuncture between students' own values, reflected in their literacies, and the values and literacy reflected in the shape of the essay itself, as a genre. (emphasis added, 86)

I've bolded this final section because it is germane to my Tony project. A disjuncture between students own values, reflected in their literacies...yes, workplace/professional values. This is Tony. 

ACADEMIC WRITING: 

• The contemporary academic essay is something most readers of this essay know well. It begins with a thesis that introduces and summarizes the writer's argument, moves on to evidence supporting the thesis, and ends with a conclusion that might summarize the essay, demonstrate the relevance of the paper or suggest avenues for additional investigation. The writer is expected to draw the reader through the argument, demonstrating how the evidence in teh essay is related to the thesis. (89)
  
• She later refers to this kind of writing as "thesis, evidence, conclusion form of the essay, integrating quotations from other sources" (92).
  
• And yet again: "The model we expect in the essay--thesis, evidence, conclusion, with topic sentences and other points of reference that help the reader follow the writer's argument..." (98-99).

For those of us immersed in this kind of academic writing--because we write it ourselves, grade stacks of it on a regular basis, or read it in academic texts--it is familiar territory. As successful survivors of multiple components of the educational system (elementary school, high school, college, graduate school), it feels fairly natural because we've done it for so long and becuase, for many of us, the essay reflects the values that we've (willingly or unwittingly) adopted in our own lives. (new paragraph) Too often, however, we forget that the values reflected in that form don't represent everyone's culture. (89)

This is a passage that sort of blew my mind (because...who says that you have to be able to master academic writing to achieve economic success? Surely it's true that they need to master certain genres of academic writing to do well in school...but the connection between academic writing and economic success? Other than that you must pass college to get a diploma and that earning a diploma will lead to greater economic success--what connection can there be made between mastering academic genres and economic success?):

While academic writing doesn't enter in Jones's argument directly, many have made the same argument with regard to this medium as well--students need to master it to do well in school, and that success is one step toward economic success. (88)

David Bartholomae has argued that students' success with academic writing depends, in part, on their abilities to strike a balance between their own modes of expression and the discourses they're expected to produce. According to Bartholomae:

The student has to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and he has to do this as though he were easily and comfortably one with his audience...; has to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language while finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, on the one hand, and the requirements of convention, the history of a discipline, on the other. He must learn to speak our language. Or he must dare to speak it or to carry off the bluff, since speaking and writing will most certainly be required long before the skill is "learned." And this, understandably, causes problems. (qtd. in Adler-Kassner, p. 93)

Excerpts from Ned's and Frank's papers demonstrate common points of difficulty that working-class students seem to have with academic writing. The model we expect in the essay--thesis, evidence, conclusion, with topic sentences and other points of reference that help the reader follow the writer's argument--seem less accessible to these students than they do to others who might have more academic experience with writing and reading. But by examining examples like these side-by-side with the historical context in which ideas about what an essay should look like evolved, it becomes clear that some of the reasons for this inaccessibility go beyond lack of experience with academic writing, perhaps to differences in ideologies and values reflected in the forms of expression most commonly used by students. As the excerpts from early-twentieth-century compositionists demonstrate, mastery of the essay's form has long been integrally linked to assimilation of cultural values that they consider to be reflected in and perpetuated by the form of the essay. If studnets come to that form with different values, it might seem far less "natural" to them than it is to students who already participate in those values. (98-99)