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The BWP works with open-admissions African-American students from HBCUs, who are traditionally required to take up to a full year of pre-college-level writing courses. The BWP uses an interactive inquiry model, coordinating and interweaving small-group action research at student, staff, and faculty levels.
In the project's second year, as in the first, entering students who scored low on a writing placement test were placed into regular first-year writing courses, but also met weekly with a small-group of four to six students and a BWP group leader outside their regular class meetings. These student meetings--providing instruction using whatever writing tasks, drafts, attitudes or behaviors students brought to the table each week --were paralleled by BWP staff meetings wherein group leaders (English faculty and Learning Lab Specialists) shared and critically questioned specific weekly observations about student writers and writing processes.
As in Year One, percentages of BWP students earning a "C" or higher match those of non-BWP students, suggesting that the BWP enrichment inquiry program can replace separate remedial coursework. Furthermore, indicators show that when historically disadvantaged college students attend BWP groups, the program helps to retain them. Unfortunately, Spring 1999 saw a convergence of various campus-wide circumstances that fostered attendance problems, but BWP worked to develop both short- and long-term plans to counter any recurrence of these problems in Fall 1999. Comparing the grades of BWP students who did not attend their weekly small group with those who did made even clearer the positive benefits of the program.
Project staff hypothesize that programs like BWP--working outside but alongside typical institutional structures--create a "third space" within which students and teachers can step outside traditionally scripted roles and more freely examine the social systems that make up academic life on both everyday and abstracted levels. To the extent that students can be helped to see how these underlying social systems guide the learning and language processes of people in their respective disciplines, they can succeed with less time spent in remedial coursework. To the extent that faculty and staff can be helped to explore how courses and assignments have been presented in ways unresponsive to the social circumstances (and the accompanying affective ecologies and language practices) of historically disadvantaged students, they can help such students to succeed in higher education. Dissemination: An ACLS-produced video, conference presentations, an on-site writing program conference planned for May 2000, and a cross-institutional book proposal provide ongoing dissemination forums at local, state, national and international levels.
Wanted: other programs operating in similar "third spaces" with which to share additional strategies for working outside but alongside traditional institutional and disciplinary attitudes and structures.
ONLINE REFERENCE:
http://www.benedict.edu
http://www.benedict.edu
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Rhonda C. Grego
Project Director
Benedict College
Department of English,
Foreign Languages, Media
Arts
1600 Harden Street
Columbia, SC 29204
Tel: 803-255-1779
Fax: 803-540-2325
Christopher I. Chalokwu
Benedict College
School of Arts and Sciences
1600 Harden Street
Columbia, SC 29204
Tel: 803-540-2326
Fax: 803-540-2325
John M. Grego
Benedict College
Department of Statistics,
Statistical Laboratory
, SC
Tel: 803-777-5110
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