Policy Regimes: College Writing and Public Education Policy in the United States: Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy
Autor Tyler S. Bransonen Limba Engleză Paperback – 20 apr 2022
Engaging education policy from kindergarten to college
Author Tyler S. Branson argues that education reform initiatives in the twentieth century can be understood in terms of historical shifts in the ideas, interests, and governing arrangements that inform the teaching of writing. Today, policy regimes of “accountability” shape education reform programs such as Common Core in K-12 and Dual Enrollment in postsecondary institutions. This book reopens the conversation between policy makers and writing teachers, empirically describing the field’s institutional/historical relationship to policy and the ways teachers work on a daily basis to carry out policy. Federal and state accountability policy significantly shapes classrooms before teachers even enter them, but Branson argues the classroom is where teachers leverage disciplinary knowledge about writing to bridge, partner with, support, and sometimes resist education policies.
Branson deftly blends policy critique, archival analysis, and participant observation to offer the first scholarly treatment of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Washington Task Force as well as a rare empirical study of a dual enrollment course offered in a high school. This book’s macro-and-micro-level analysis of education policy reveals how writing teachers, researchers, and administrators can strengthen their commitments to successfully teaching their students across all levels of education, while deepening their understanding of the ways education policy helps—and hinders—those commitments.
Author Tyler S. Branson argues that education reform initiatives in the twentieth century can be understood in terms of historical shifts in the ideas, interests, and governing arrangements that inform the teaching of writing. Today, policy regimes of “accountability” shape education reform programs such as Common Core in K-12 and Dual Enrollment in postsecondary institutions. This book reopens the conversation between policy makers and writing teachers, empirically describing the field’s institutional/historical relationship to policy and the ways teachers work on a daily basis to carry out policy. Federal and state accountability policy significantly shapes classrooms before teachers even enter them, but Branson argues the classroom is where teachers leverage disciplinary knowledge about writing to bridge, partner with, support, and sometimes resist education policies.
Branson deftly blends policy critique, archival analysis, and participant observation to offer the first scholarly treatment of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Washington Task Force as well as a rare empirical study of a dual enrollment course offered in a high school. This book’s macro-and-micro-level analysis of education policy reveals how writing teachers, researchers, and administrators can strengthen their commitments to successfully teaching their students across all levels of education, while deepening their understanding of the ways education policy helps—and hinders—those commitments.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780809338467
ISBN-10: 0809338467
Pagini: 226
Dimensiuni: 152 x 235 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.31 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Seria Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy
ISBN-10: 0809338467
Pagini: 226
Dimensiuni: 152 x 235 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.31 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Seria Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy
Notă biografică
Tyler S. Branson, an assistant professor of English at the University of Toledo, has published essays in the journals College Composition and Communication and WPA: Writing Program Administration and in the edited collection The Cambridge Handbook of Service Learning and Community Engagement.
Extras
Introduction: Writing Studies, Policy Regimes, and Public Education Policies
At its heart, this book concerns educational policy for writing instruction as it is promulgated, enforced, engaged, and lived. In the case studies to follow, my goal is to provide frameworks for the field of writing studies to think through how and whether the educational policy work that governs writing and writing instruction is effective (and to consider why it sometimes is not, even when done well by thoughtful and engaged educators).
Throughout the field of writing studies, there is robust work centered around policy. Scholars have taken up specific language policies and their cultural and ideological underpinnings (see Flowers; Gilman; Parks; Wible; Young et al.). Other scholars have approached policy from the broader ideological underpinnings of education reform as they intersect with writing and rhetoric (Webber; Gallagher, Reclaiming Assessment; Kynard). Some scholars have researched the institutional policies of academic disciplines (Parks; Scott et al.). Moreover, some of the most important scholarship on policy in the field has to do with the impact of literacy policies on the experience of marginalized communities. For example, Candace Epps-Robertson investigates a county in Virginia that chose to abolish all public schooling in defiance of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that ended school segregation. David Kirkland’s A Search Past Silence: The Literacy of Young Black Men is an ethnographic account of the literate lives of four Black male students in Michigan and the ways that their social, cultural, and historical contexts for literacy intersect with their educational experiences.
Empirical work on writing policy, however, is less abundant. Policy Regimes, then, takes up writing from a policy studies approach. My hope is that given the thoughtful work that came before me, this book can extend these discussions and theorize a bit more about what policy actually means to our field and about how we—our discipline, our institutions, and the individuals who compose them—can and should work on policy in the future.
The central questions of this book are, How does education policy shape our experiences with writing and literacy? How do individuals within specific institutional contexts leverage disciplinary knowledge about writing (or what Adler-Kassner and Wardle might call what we know about writing) to bridge, partner with, advocate, or resist educational policies? Ultimately, I argue that the slippery and complex topic of policy is a fundamental component of writing studies, and our field would do well to consider both how policies shape the intellectual work of the field and how our own institutions and individual teachers can actively put stress on policies we wish to change. As each case study unfolds, I advocate for doing kairotic policy work: a pragmatic, multiscopic rhetorical practice that leverages disciplinary knowledge about writing to put stress on an existing policy regime by taking into account what policy theorists call the governing arrangements of education policy and how these arrangements structure—for better or worse—the way writing is taught, researched, and administered in secondary and postsecondary writing classrooms.
I answer these questions through an analysis of case studies of writing and educational policy. First, I analyze the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and its policy work as an organization; next, I explore the role of NCTE in the development of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. I follow these cases with two chapters on dual enrollment: first comes a case study of dual enrollment as an extension of accountability in the state of Ohio; then comes a qualitative case study of a dual enrollment composition course taught in a high school classroom. Together, these chapters provide large-scale views of policy impact combined with a look into a classroom that helps to ground the policy analyses in the lived experiences of students and their teacher. Through its range of analytic scales and methods, this book will provide readers with a deeper sense of how writing teachers, researchers, and administrators can work together to put stress on accountability-based education policies that do not align with what we know and value about writing across all levels of academic writing instruction.
Above, I described the methodology as multiscopic. A multiscopic approach, which I take in part from Bruce McComiskey’s work on microhistories, is a strategic process of zooming in and out on the mechanisms through which policies shape the complex interplay between the field’s institutional and historical relationship to policy, on the one hand, and the ways that teachers work on a daily basis to carry out those policies on the other. By studying policy from these perspectives, we can see how institutions and individual actors take advantage of kairotic policy engagement. As I will show in the following chapters, the ways that institutions and individual actors within those institutions create rhetorical moments for action or take advantage of these opening and closing rhetorical windows can tell us much about how our field can better understand, and ultimately participate in more effectively, the policymaking discussions having to do with writing.
Carolyn Miller once wrote that the revival in rhetoric and composition of the term kairos, which is a concept dating back to the Sophistic tradition, is useful for making us “look for the particular opportunity in a given moment, to find—or construct—an opening in the here and now, in order to achieve something there and then” (“Opportunity” 83). According to Miller, kairos can be either continuous, which means one can create opportunities for rhetorical intervention at any time, or discontinuous, which means the time for one’s rhetorical intervention is a rare window in “unprecedented times of radical change” (83). Whether through the institutional efforts of the main professional organization of English Studies, NCTE (which, historically, often took advantage of, yet sometimes fell short of responding to, changes in the education policy regimes of the federal government), or through the efforts of individual teachers who create opportunities for rhetorical intervention within prevailing policy regimes—the kairotic element of policy regimes is a persistent theme that emerges from my multiscopic analysis. A window is a fitting metaphor for characterizing how policy and writing studies are interconnected. Echoing Lloyd Bitzer, Eric Charles White, in his book about kairos, describes the term as a “right moment” or a “critical time,” in which a temporal rhetorical “window” opens up, for one to engage in policy discussions (13).
In writing studies, scholars like Elizabeth Wardle have drawn on this body of work to theorize how policy stakeholders rely on varying levels of kairos to create change in their institutional contexts. For Wardle, theorizing kairos in this way allowed her to consider how the “macro-level disciplinary knowledge” of writing studies can “inform micro-level classroom practices” in the first-year composition curriculum at her university. Thinking kairotically, or rather utilizing both advocates and stakeholders of varying backgrounds and levels of seniority, can help institutions survive precarious changes and “construct, discover, and respond to kairotic openings.” Patricia Freitag Ericsson, in her 2003 dissertation, “Beyond the Laments, Beyond the Boundaries: Communicating about Composition,” uses the term polikairos to describe “an analytical and generative concept, influenced by close attention to problems, policies, and politics, and used for both assessing the opportune time for a political move and guiding the force of that move” (25). A well-developed sense of polikairos, Ericsson writes, can help us “carry on effective policy-oriented learning—to know when to step into ‘debate’ with other advocacy coalitions, to know what kinds of arguments to make, and to know with what force those arguments must be made to be successful” (111). Throughout the case studies of this book, I explicate how kairotic policy engagement, or polikairos, is a useful temporal-spatial rhetorical practice for writing studies scholars and teachers in a variety of political and material situations to figure out the right responses and the right moments required to put stress on policy regimes of accountability. Polikairotic engagement, in other words, allows us to take stock of the ways that writing policy impacts our institutions as well as our classrooms, and it helps us make critical judgments about the best ways to imagine new policy paradigms, to forge new policymaking arrangements in whatever contexts we inhabit, and to define in kairotic terms what that work can look like.
As Elizabeth Wardle and Linda Adler-Kassner know, writing is an activity and a field of study. But writing is also a policy problem. As such, it is important for our field to untangle the ways writing is bound up in what I call the policy regimes of education reform. These regimes, which I explain further below, comprise a range of competing interests, ideas, political arrangements, and laws that inform the teaching and research of college composition. If we, as writing teachers, researchers, and administrators, pay close attention to writing policy, we can deepen our understanding of how public education policy helps—and hinders—our commitment to student success at all levels of education.
Whether we like it or not, federal and state education policies are fundamentally entangled with the work of writing studies. In chapters 3 and 4, I focus on the growing number of dual-enrolled students. At my institution, the University of Toledo, the State of Ohio mandates that we partner with local middle and high schools so that they can offer college composition for free to their students. The state pays for dual enrollment by transferring money from the school’s budget to ours, and state policy lets students transfer their course credit from our institution to any other public institution in the state. These policies are now components of administering our writing program, for which I serve as the associate director. Moreover, Ohio state law stipulates that all of our dual-enrolled students (those in middle or high school who take our courses) be treated no differently from traditionally enrolled college students. This means that dual enrollment students are to be held to the same standards and assessment criteria as everyone else. At Research 1 land-grant research institutions in the state, this policy probably makes sense because it allows the institutions to maintain their rigorous standards for dual-enrolled students prior to their admission. But for my institution, a regional Research 2 university with an acceptance rate of 93 percent, the mandate has a different impact: essentially anyone from seventh to twelfth grade can enroll in our first-year composition course for free. So we enroll both high-achieving and unprepared students in our dual enrollment courses, which creates new, and often straining, pedagogical dynamics for our writing instructors. These dynamics change the way instructors design course content and position themselves to the students in their classes. While all students are welcome in our classes, and our mission as a program is to meet all students where they are regardless of their ability, the state mandates often leave us perplexed over how to best serve unprepared and at-risk dual enrollment students.
[end of excerpt]
At its heart, this book concerns educational policy for writing instruction as it is promulgated, enforced, engaged, and lived. In the case studies to follow, my goal is to provide frameworks for the field of writing studies to think through how and whether the educational policy work that governs writing and writing instruction is effective (and to consider why it sometimes is not, even when done well by thoughtful and engaged educators).
Throughout the field of writing studies, there is robust work centered around policy. Scholars have taken up specific language policies and their cultural and ideological underpinnings (see Flowers; Gilman; Parks; Wible; Young et al.). Other scholars have approached policy from the broader ideological underpinnings of education reform as they intersect with writing and rhetoric (Webber; Gallagher, Reclaiming Assessment; Kynard). Some scholars have researched the institutional policies of academic disciplines (Parks; Scott et al.). Moreover, some of the most important scholarship on policy in the field has to do with the impact of literacy policies on the experience of marginalized communities. For example, Candace Epps-Robertson investigates a county in Virginia that chose to abolish all public schooling in defiance of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that ended school segregation. David Kirkland’s A Search Past Silence: The Literacy of Young Black Men is an ethnographic account of the literate lives of four Black male students in Michigan and the ways that their social, cultural, and historical contexts for literacy intersect with their educational experiences.
Empirical work on writing policy, however, is less abundant. Policy Regimes, then, takes up writing from a policy studies approach. My hope is that given the thoughtful work that came before me, this book can extend these discussions and theorize a bit more about what policy actually means to our field and about how we—our discipline, our institutions, and the individuals who compose them—can and should work on policy in the future.
The central questions of this book are, How does education policy shape our experiences with writing and literacy? How do individuals within specific institutional contexts leverage disciplinary knowledge about writing (or what Adler-Kassner and Wardle might call what we know about writing) to bridge, partner with, advocate, or resist educational policies? Ultimately, I argue that the slippery and complex topic of policy is a fundamental component of writing studies, and our field would do well to consider both how policies shape the intellectual work of the field and how our own institutions and individual teachers can actively put stress on policies we wish to change. As each case study unfolds, I advocate for doing kairotic policy work: a pragmatic, multiscopic rhetorical practice that leverages disciplinary knowledge about writing to put stress on an existing policy regime by taking into account what policy theorists call the governing arrangements of education policy and how these arrangements structure—for better or worse—the way writing is taught, researched, and administered in secondary and postsecondary writing classrooms.
I answer these questions through an analysis of case studies of writing and educational policy. First, I analyze the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and its policy work as an organization; next, I explore the role of NCTE in the development of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. I follow these cases with two chapters on dual enrollment: first comes a case study of dual enrollment as an extension of accountability in the state of Ohio; then comes a qualitative case study of a dual enrollment composition course taught in a high school classroom. Together, these chapters provide large-scale views of policy impact combined with a look into a classroom that helps to ground the policy analyses in the lived experiences of students and their teacher. Through its range of analytic scales and methods, this book will provide readers with a deeper sense of how writing teachers, researchers, and administrators can work together to put stress on accountability-based education policies that do not align with what we know and value about writing across all levels of academic writing instruction.
Above, I described the methodology as multiscopic. A multiscopic approach, which I take in part from Bruce McComiskey’s work on microhistories, is a strategic process of zooming in and out on the mechanisms through which policies shape the complex interplay between the field’s institutional and historical relationship to policy, on the one hand, and the ways that teachers work on a daily basis to carry out those policies on the other. By studying policy from these perspectives, we can see how institutions and individual actors take advantage of kairotic policy engagement. As I will show in the following chapters, the ways that institutions and individual actors within those institutions create rhetorical moments for action or take advantage of these opening and closing rhetorical windows can tell us much about how our field can better understand, and ultimately participate in more effectively, the policymaking discussions having to do with writing.
Carolyn Miller once wrote that the revival in rhetoric and composition of the term kairos, which is a concept dating back to the Sophistic tradition, is useful for making us “look for the particular opportunity in a given moment, to find—or construct—an opening in the here and now, in order to achieve something there and then” (“Opportunity” 83). According to Miller, kairos can be either continuous, which means one can create opportunities for rhetorical intervention at any time, or discontinuous, which means the time for one’s rhetorical intervention is a rare window in “unprecedented times of radical change” (83). Whether through the institutional efforts of the main professional organization of English Studies, NCTE (which, historically, often took advantage of, yet sometimes fell short of responding to, changes in the education policy regimes of the federal government), or through the efforts of individual teachers who create opportunities for rhetorical intervention within prevailing policy regimes—the kairotic element of policy regimes is a persistent theme that emerges from my multiscopic analysis. A window is a fitting metaphor for characterizing how policy and writing studies are interconnected. Echoing Lloyd Bitzer, Eric Charles White, in his book about kairos, describes the term as a “right moment” or a “critical time,” in which a temporal rhetorical “window” opens up, for one to engage in policy discussions (13).
In writing studies, scholars like Elizabeth Wardle have drawn on this body of work to theorize how policy stakeholders rely on varying levels of kairos to create change in their institutional contexts. For Wardle, theorizing kairos in this way allowed her to consider how the “macro-level disciplinary knowledge” of writing studies can “inform micro-level classroom practices” in the first-year composition curriculum at her university. Thinking kairotically, or rather utilizing both advocates and stakeholders of varying backgrounds and levels of seniority, can help institutions survive precarious changes and “construct, discover, and respond to kairotic openings.” Patricia Freitag Ericsson, in her 2003 dissertation, “Beyond the Laments, Beyond the Boundaries: Communicating about Composition,” uses the term polikairos to describe “an analytical and generative concept, influenced by close attention to problems, policies, and politics, and used for both assessing the opportune time for a political move and guiding the force of that move” (25). A well-developed sense of polikairos, Ericsson writes, can help us “carry on effective policy-oriented learning—to know when to step into ‘debate’ with other advocacy coalitions, to know what kinds of arguments to make, and to know with what force those arguments must be made to be successful” (111). Throughout the case studies of this book, I explicate how kairotic policy engagement, or polikairos, is a useful temporal-spatial rhetorical practice for writing studies scholars and teachers in a variety of political and material situations to figure out the right responses and the right moments required to put stress on policy regimes of accountability. Polikairotic engagement, in other words, allows us to take stock of the ways that writing policy impacts our institutions as well as our classrooms, and it helps us make critical judgments about the best ways to imagine new policy paradigms, to forge new policymaking arrangements in whatever contexts we inhabit, and to define in kairotic terms what that work can look like.
As Elizabeth Wardle and Linda Adler-Kassner know, writing is an activity and a field of study. But writing is also a policy problem. As such, it is important for our field to untangle the ways writing is bound up in what I call the policy regimes of education reform. These regimes, which I explain further below, comprise a range of competing interests, ideas, political arrangements, and laws that inform the teaching and research of college composition. If we, as writing teachers, researchers, and administrators, pay close attention to writing policy, we can deepen our understanding of how public education policy helps—and hinders—our commitment to student success at all levels of education.
Whether we like it or not, federal and state education policies are fundamentally entangled with the work of writing studies. In chapters 3 and 4, I focus on the growing number of dual-enrolled students. At my institution, the University of Toledo, the State of Ohio mandates that we partner with local middle and high schools so that they can offer college composition for free to their students. The state pays for dual enrollment by transferring money from the school’s budget to ours, and state policy lets students transfer their course credit from our institution to any other public institution in the state. These policies are now components of administering our writing program, for which I serve as the associate director. Moreover, Ohio state law stipulates that all of our dual-enrolled students (those in middle or high school who take our courses) be treated no differently from traditionally enrolled college students. This means that dual enrollment students are to be held to the same standards and assessment criteria as everyone else. At Research 1 land-grant research institutions in the state, this policy probably makes sense because it allows the institutions to maintain their rigorous standards for dual-enrolled students prior to their admission. But for my institution, a regional Research 2 university with an acceptance rate of 93 percent, the mandate has a different impact: essentially anyone from seventh to twelfth grade can enroll in our first-year composition course for free. So we enroll both high-achieving and unprepared students in our dual enrollment courses, which creates new, and often straining, pedagogical dynamics for our writing instructors. These dynamics change the way instructors design course content and position themselves to the students in their classes. While all students are welcome in our classes, and our mission as a program is to meet all students where they are regardless of their ability, the state mandates often leave us perplexed over how to best serve unprepared and at-risk dual enrollment students.
[end of excerpt]
Cuprins
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Writing Studies, Policy Regimes, and Public Education Policies
1. Regime Change: An Overview of NCTE’s Policy Advocacy from ESEA to A Nation at Risk
2. NCTE’s Critique of the Draft of the Common Core English Language Arts Standards
3. An Analysis of Dual Enrollment Policy from a Regime Perspective
4. Experiencing Policy on the Ground: A Case Study of Midwest High
5. Politically Kairotic Approaches to Effecting Accountability-Based Literacy Policies
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Writing Studies, Policy Regimes, and Public Education Policies
1. Regime Change: An Overview of NCTE’s Policy Advocacy from ESEA to A Nation at Risk
2. NCTE’s Critique of the Draft of the Common Core English Language Arts Standards
3. An Analysis of Dual Enrollment Policy from a Regime Perspective
4. Experiencing Policy on the Ground: A Case Study of Midwest High
5. Politically Kairotic Approaches to Effecting Accountability-Based Literacy Policies
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Recenzii
“Policy Regimes is a powerful argument for focusing on the ways that policy and writing studies do—and can—shape one another. It is invaluable for anyone who wants to understand how policy shapes our teaching lives and how to make thoughtful, meaningful change in writing education.”—Ryan Skinnell, author of Conceding Composition: A Crooked History of Composition’s Institutional Fortunes
“Through his astute analyses of archival material, contemporary public documents, and classroom encounters, Tyler S. Branson shows us, in a way we’ve never seen before, how writing policy is promulgated, enforced, challenged, engaged, and lived. Without giving easy answers, Branson deepens our understanding of how writing policy works and how we might, in turn, work policy. This important book will be widely read by scholars and teachers in writing studies, education, and policy studies.”—Chris W. Gallagher, author of College Made Whole: Integrative Learning for a Divided World
“In dialogue not only with historical documents but also with the scholars who have interpreted those events and documents, Branson makes clear what his contribution adds at each step. This book provides a profoundly useful new frame for thinking about the successes and challenges of education reform in writing, and helps us to deepen our understanding of past successes and failures as we strategize for the future.”—Amy J. Lueck, author of A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856-1886
“Through his astute analyses of archival material, contemporary public documents, and classroom encounters, Tyler S. Branson shows us, in a way we’ve never seen before, how writing policy is promulgated, enforced, challenged, engaged, and lived. Without giving easy answers, Branson deepens our understanding of how writing policy works and how we might, in turn, work policy. This important book will be widely read by scholars and teachers in writing studies, education, and policy studies.”—Chris W. Gallagher, author of College Made Whole: Integrative Learning for a Divided World
“In dialogue not only with historical documents but also with the scholars who have interpreted those events and documents, Branson makes clear what his contribution adds at each step. This book provides a profoundly useful new frame for thinking about the successes and challenges of education reform in writing, and helps us to deepen our understanding of past successes and failures as we strategize for the future.”—Amy J. Lueck, author of A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856-1886
Descriere
Author Tyler S. Branson argues that education reform initiatives in the twentieth century can be understood in terms of historical shifts in the ideas, interests, and governing arrangements that inform the teaching of writing.