Postcolonialism and the Idea of a Writing Center

Abstract

The terms “remediation” and “Basic Writing” emerged at critical moments in the history of American higher education. Used originally to describe students who suffered from neurological problems, “remediation” became a popular designation in education journals in the 1920s in response to an ever-increasing number of under-prepared lower class and immigrant students who began to enter the educational system at the turn of the century (Rose 343, 349). These students’ reading and writing “disabilities” needed “remediation” before the students were prepared to enter the academic community. Similarly, “Basic Writing” instruction matured as a field in the 1970s, the era of the G.I. Bill and the open admissions policy at CUNY. Open admissions prepared the way for thousands of non-traditional students “whose difficulties with the written language [Mina Shaughnessy tells us] seemed of a different order . . . as if they had come, you might say, from a different country” (2). These students, Shaughnessy explains, were indeed “strangers in academia, unacquainted with the rules and rituals of college life” (3). These racial and rural “strangers” whose “other” languages and dialects posed problems so great as to appear, in the words of their teachers, “irremediable” Hunzer, Kathleen M. “Misperceptions of Gender in the Writing Center: Stereotyping and the Facilitative Tutor.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 22.2 (1997): 6-10.