Roberta; or, the Ambiguities: Tough Love and High-Stakes Assessment at a Two-Year College in North Georgia

Abstract

This ethnographic narrative employs a neo-Vygotskian perspective (Holland et al.) to examine how, in the setting of a remedial ESL program at a public two-year college in North Georgia, the subject position of an ESL basic writing instructor was mediated by her understandings of and engagement with the multiple and interactive contexts of her profes- sional activity. Despite a wide variety of tensions that complicated the instructor's understand- ings of who she was professionally, Roberta was able to position herself in ways that allowed her to make sense of her professional choices. However, her construction of gatekeeping as advocacy brought with it an emotional toll at the end of each semester when some students passed and some students failed—shaking the sense of her tough-love pedagogical stance. Representations of basic writing professionals are critiqued to argue the need for more nu- anced research for and with basic writing faculty in the activist college composition literature.