Book Description

Focusing on culturally diverse students and the adequacy of efforts to help them succeed in college, this book presents an ethnographic study of the basic writing course, a central element of the adjustment between academe and nontraditional students. The research site, pseudonymously called Dover Park University for purposes of this account of the study, was a typical, predominantly white, middle-class institution newly committed to the goal of increasing services to, and enrollment of, minorities, but with uneven and unremarkable resources and with a faculty and administrators who were well intentioned but sometimes weighed down by entrenched attitudes and precedents. The first part of the book discusses the background and design of the study. The second part discusses the nature of the larger social contexts in which the basic writing adjunct program was situated, and the nature of the more immediate social contexts (at the level of the English department) as perceived from the points of view of the writing program directors, adjunct component coordinators, and instructors. The third section examines four focal students' backgrounds, their attempts to adjust to college life, their struggles with writing, and perceptions of the small-group component of their basic writing course. The concluding section of the book reflects upon the complexities of designing effective programs to serve the needs of linguistically and culturally diverse basic writers, and discusses the more general ramifications of one campus's often troubled attempts to provide equitable opportunities for all. Interview questions are attached. (Contains 135 references.) (RS).