Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2011
Department
English
Abstract
I frame the continuing value of basic writing as part of a long tradition in composition studies challenging dominant beliefs about literacy and language abilities, and I link basic writing to emerging--e.g."translingual"--approaches to language. I identify basic writing as vital to the field of composition in its rejection of simplistic notions of English, language, and literacy; its insistence on searching out the different in what might appear to be the same and the familiar; and its commitment to work with students consigned by dominant ideologies to the social periphery as in fact central, leading edge. These positions enable basic writing teacher-scholars to learn, and re-think, along with their students, what it can, does, and might mean to write. They thus help to maintain the intellectual, pedagogical, and ethical integrity of composition as a field committed to working and reworking language and literacy. (Contains 7 notes and 2 figures.)
Original Publication Information
This article was originally published in Journal of Basic Writing, volume 30, issue 2, in Fall 2011.
ThinkIR Citation
Horner, Bruce, "Relocating basic writing." (2011). Faculty Scholarship. 78.
https://ir.library.louisville.edu/faculty/78
ORCID
0000-0002-8412-5454
