Roberta; or, the Ambiguities: Tough Love and High-Stakes Assessment at a Two-Year College in North Georgia Spencer Salas 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. KEYWORDS: two-year college; teachers’ mental lives; basic writing; ESL students; Generation 1.5; postsecondary remediation In a navy blue Vietnamese ao-dai, Roberta,1 a temporary full- time ESL adjunct, leaned across the screen of her PC’s keyboard and into her e-mails. Not Vietnamese, as her traditional costume might have implied, Roberta was Thai, and from the northern reaches of that country. Adopted by Evangelical North American missionaries at three months old—hence her Christian name—Roberta com- mented that she was routinely complimented on the quality of her spoken English by her colleagues at Sweet Water, the two-year college in North Georgia where she taught Swiveling toward me as I knocked on the door of the yellow cinderblock cubicle in Academic III, Roberta initiated our Mon- day morning ritual—trash-talk starting with the story of how the weekend’s violent thunderstorms had knocked over a Bartlett pear Spencer Salas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle, Secondary, and K-12 Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. © Journal of Basic Writing, Vol. 27, No. 2, 2008 5 Spencer Salas tree in the front yard of her house in suburban Atlanta, a house that she and her husband were about to put on the market. Dave, her computer-geek husband, hoping it might grow back in the spring, pruned it down to a stump. Immediately, Roberta had him remove the “Charlie Brown tree” to the woods behind their house. “So what’s your secret for getting so many to pass the Compass?” I asked—shifting to my researcher role. To the delight of Sweet Water’s Learning Support administrators, 85% of Roberta’s students consistently entered the postsecondary mainstream—passing her course, the English Department’s exit essay, and the COMPASS exam in Writing. “‘Cause I’m a MoFo” [motherfucker]. This “tale of the field” (Van Maanen) is about Roberta’s “MoFo”—an ethnographic narrative of how, in the institutional specificity of a public two-year college in North Georgia, a full-time, temporary ESL basic writing adjunct was able to position herself in ways that allowed her to make sense of who she was professionally, what her work achieved, and, furthermore, to construct the gatekeeping in which she implicitly participated as a form of advocacy for the students she taught. Contemporary activist research for L2 postsecondary writers has worked, among other things, to deconstruct the complex and layered histo- ries of monolingual English writing instruction in U.S. institutions of higher learning (Horner and Trimbur; Horner), the representation of U.S. educated English learners in postsecondary classrooms (Harklau, “Representations”; Harklau, “Newcomers in”; Harklau, “From the ‘Good Kids’”), narrowly con- ceived notions of academic literacies (Zamel and Spack; Canagarajah, Critical Academic Writing), and the hegemony of “standard” written English (Lu, “An Essay”). Collectively, such discussions are characteristic of a twenty-year Freirean critical consciousness raising/”conscientizaçaõ” of postsecondary composition studies framing basic writing instructors as potentially trans- gressive or transformative intellectuals whose critical pedagogy represents a brand of cultural politics for liberating L2 writers from the asymmetrical power relations of the postsecondary writing classroom (for a comprehensive twenty-year review, see, Durst). Problematically, L2 writing teachers such as Roberta—and the emo- tional toll they may feel because of their complex and, at times, conflicted, subject positions—are somewhat under-represented in the literature advocat- ing on behalf of postsecondary English learners. When they do appear, they 66 Tough Love and High-Stakes Assessment are habitually portrayed as one-dimensional gatekeepers barring immigrant students from the two-year college mainstream (Valdés 145) or as self-styled provocateurs (Lu, “Professing Multiculturalism”; hooks; Shor). As the number of two-year institutions offering English as a Second Language continues to increase dramatically, especially in areas of the coun- try with large immigrant populations (Schuyler), ESL basic writing faculty are increasingly the first individuals such learners encounter in postsecondary education. How such professionals make sense of who they are and what their work accomplishes matters. More nuanced descriptions of basic writing teachers working for and with English learners are needed to understand how individuals navigate institutional environments where, potentially, they are, as Roberta was, compelled to assume multiple, if not conflicting, roles and constituencies as advocates for the English learners they teach, and gatekeepers for the postsecondary institutions that employ them. These multifaceted profes- sional constructions are potentially complicated by unyielding institutional definitions of what it means to be ready for college-level work, by the politics of immigration, and by the conundrums of the unfolding lives of those same professionals and the students they teach. More careful examinations of these teachers and students are needed to help make sense of the compet- ing national and local discourses surrounding issues of English learners and other non-traditional students at the postsecondary level. THE STUDY Data Generation Roberta’s story emerged as part of a five-semester qualitative inquiry distributed over two academic years that initially began as a project for qualitative research coursework and grew into a dissertation. My entry to Sweet Water College followed from the coincidence of my running into its ESL Learning Support program coordinator early in 2004 and asking if she knew of an ESL classroom that I might observe. By mid-January of that year, I had made my first visit to the college—a commute that continued through fall 2004, spring 2005, fall 2005, and spring 2006. Participatory data collec- tion shifted as the questions I asked during the semesters evolved, eventually constituting more than 250 hours of site visits as documented in 300-plus pages of fieldnotes, 500-plus pages of instructional artifacts, 10 hours of audiotaped classroom interactions, and more than 10 hours of structured 66 7 Spencer Salas audiotaped conversations with Roberta and the four other ESL composition instructors involved in the study. My roles ranged from being a silent observer taking notes on an Alpha-Smart (a portable, battery-powered keyboard) to becoming an active participant helping with small-group or individual work in the classroom. In a number of instances, I willingly substitute taught for the participating teachers; and, in spring 2006, I joined the ESL program at Sweet Water as a part-time adjunct faculty member. Theoretical Framework and Analytic Method Cultural anthropologists have long argued that how women and men come to be as individuals is largely dependent on their participation in the so- cieties or cultures to which they are born or recruited— what they commonly refer to as “cultural models” (Holland and Quinn). The anthropological construct of cultural models—processes that shape thinking and emotions through repertoires of presupposed and popularly shared knowledge—have since been affiliated to Vygotsky’s notion of mediating devices. Complex sorts of Vygotskian “helping means” (Holland and Valsiner; Holland and Cole), cultural models enable individuals to know how, what, and why to do, to think, and to feel in any variety of human situations. They allow, for example, a North American undergraduate to fall in love or a recovering alcoholic to narrate his conversion to a group of likeminded peers (cf., Hol- land and Quinn; Holland and Lave; Holland et al.). Bringing Vygotskian understandings of the liberatory and seem- ingly limitless possibilities of the semiotic mediation of children’s play and Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic self to the construct of cultural models, Dorothy Holland et al. theorize a human propensity “to figure worlds, play at them, act them out, and then make them socially, culturally, and thus materially consequential” (280). Accordingly, Holland et al. propose the construct of “figured worlds”—worlds that women and men collectively write and rewrite in “practice” (Bourdieu) through what Holland et al. name, “improvisation.” Introducing the concept of improvisation with an anecdote, Holland et al. tell the story of Maya, an “untouchable” woman in Nepal. Prohibited from entering Holland and Skinner’s home through the front door lest she “pollute” the cooking area, Maya climbed up the side of the house and into the office for the interview she and they were intent on having. Climbing up the side of the house was her improvisation—a spontaneous alternative to the subject positions afforded to her at that moment. 88 Tough Love and High-Stakes Assessment Thinking about Maya’s story, and in a Geertzian tradition of humanis- tic, interpretive, and hermeneutic anthropological scholarship, I crafted the narrative that follows. As is typical in ethnographic approaches to qualitative research, data analysis was an inductive, recursive, and ongoing process that accompanied data generation and continued afterwards in a transformative interplay (Wolcott) of description, analysis, and interpretation to arrive at a “thick description” (Geertz) of Roberta and her participation in the figured world of Sweet Water College ESL Learning Support. Specific procedures or methods for compressing, fashioning, and reading my data followed Robert Emerson, Rachel Fretz, and Linda Shaw’s practical considerations of the processes of ethnographic research. These procedures included initial line-by-line open coding of my data with the comment function in Microsoft Word or a pencil to name my understand- ings; focused coding whereby the assorted tags I had previously established were reduced into larger categories; in-process analytic writing; initial and integrative memo writing; and content analysis of archival data. ESL LEARNING SUPPORT Roberta worked for the University System of Georgia. In this system the Board of Regents first institutionalized postsecondary Developmental Studies programs in fall 1974 “as a means of bringing the reading, English, and mathematical skills of marginally prepared students up to standard” (Office of Strategic Research and Analysis, Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia). In 1993, Developmental Studies policy and procedures were reconfigured under an umbrella organizational structure of Learning Support whereby individual institutions were empowered to set higher regular admission standards and/or higher standards for exiting Learning Support than those set by the Regents themselves—but not lower. At Sweet Water College, Learning Support was not for the few, but for the majority. In fall 2005, the total number of first-year students at Sweet Water totaled 1,567. Of those, 803 (slightly more than 51%) were enrolled—for the most part, involuntarily—in one or more Learning Support courses. Sweet Water’s ESL Learning Support coursework was a complex cur- ricular menu designed to prepare students whose native language was “not American English” for success in credit-bearing college courses. The program of ESL study differed, sometimes substantially, from student to student—de- pending on one or more of the following factors: (1) their SAT/ACT scores, 88 9 Spencer Salas (2) their scores on the College’s or ESL program’s placement exams, and (3) their obligatory writing samples for the English department. THE RE-EDUCATION OF GEORGIA HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES Returning to the vignette with which I began this narrative, Roberta was young, young-looking, or, in her words, “what-ever.” Consequently, she worried that if she weren’t tough with her students, some might disrespect her diminutive five-foot Asian-American person. Accordingly, bravado was one of Roberta’s strategies for garnering the respect of the mostly young adults she taught. However, data analysis indicated that being unyielding was more than Roberta’s way of instilling discipline and respect. Rather, Roberta’s tough-love stance was an integral part of her conception of what it meant to be an advocate for English learners in the context of Sweet Water, where test scores meant everything as students contended with a daunting battery of assessments (see Appendix A) . Certainly, many of the students I had met in Roberta’s Level III class- rooms didn’t “sound” like English learners at all. In fact, some had apparently grown up in the mountains of North Georgia, graduated with admirable grade-point averages, and were able to effortlessly “Yes Ma’am/No Ma’am” Roberta as all well-mannered North Georgians are expected to do. However, as Roberta explained, their presence in the ESL class was not determined by how they spoke, but by how they wrote. Roberta explained that if Georgia high school graduates were in ESL it was because they had not been taught the basics in high school—or at least what was generally considered basic at Sweet Water, which was, after all, what mattered. Even if enrollment in Advanced ESL Grammar and Writing was a bitter pill for some of her U.S.-educated students, Roberta was con- vinced that it was for their own good. Thinking aloud about her course in an interview, Roberta said: It hurts now. Oh, it is so painful now you’re going to cry now at the end of the semester when you fail [laughing] it’s—it’s that sort of “it makes you stronger” cliché [laughing]. And I hate to even say that—but it really is. But it pays off though, it really2 does pay off. Again, when they go into 1101 and 1102 [Sweet Water’s two- semester Freshman English requirement] and they are making better grades than native born American students or native English 1100 Tough Love and High-Stakes Assessment speakers, they always come back and say, “I know more” than these students. I know what a relative clause is and I know why a comma goes there and why it doesn’t go here. And it makes them feel so much better. Thus, Roberta’s micro-preparation of her students for the high standards of grammar and mechanics that she believed the college’s English 1101 professors were deeply intent on safe guarding, and to which, she believed, her students would be subjected once they entered mainstream college coursework, was what she could do and did do. In the setting of the two- year college, such was Roberta’s advocacy as she had conceived it—that her students would pass their exams and be enabled, through her course, to succeed at Sweet Water. Although Roberta considered her students to lack the basic skills needed for postsecondary composition, she did not consider ESL Learning Support as remediation. The argument in its various forms over the five se- mesters went, “It’s not remedial if they’ve never had it in the first place.” Or, as Roberta ruminated, “Here’s what a noun is. Here’s a verb. Here’s subject- verb agreement. Here’s verb tense. They don’t get any of that in high school.” For the others, the international students, ESL coursework was, likewise, not remediation. Rather, it was language learning—like French, like Italian, like Russian. It was a process that took time. There was simply nothing remedial about ESL, she argued—not really. She was certain that there was nothing “wrong” with her students. That said, despite Roberta’s insistence that ESL Learning Support was not remediation, her students’ transcripts indicated something to the contrary. Namely, ESL Learning Support coursework—with one one-credit exception—counted for institutional credit only. Thus, Roberta and her col- leagues were unable to will ESL Learning Support into being, at the level of their students’ academic records, into something more than what it was. ROBERTA’S MOFO Rare was the day in ESOL 0099 that Roberta did not reference the English professors—what their expectations were; how they would come down hard on certain errors on the exit essay; and what students might expect of English 1101. Handing back their first attempts at a simulated exit essay, Roberta (Mrs. Ware) explained to the class her not completely accurate motivation for grading their papers so rigorously: 1100 11 Spencer Salas I don’t want you to think about this as Mrs. Ware is grading my pa- per because she hates me and she’s giving me poor grades because of this. Think of it this way, when I exit this class, my paper will be graded by at least two English professors, not Mrs. Ware. And Mrs. Ware is grading me according to how she believes the English pro- fessors will grade my paper. So here’s what I need to do to improve for my next paper. I want you to look at it that way. Actually, in some instances, Mrs. Ware did grade the essays. The first two readers were either (1) a combination of two English professors, or (2) an English professor and an ESL faculty member other than the one who had taught the student whose essay was being scored. The first two readers as- signed a score of Pass, Fail, or Borderline. With one Fail the student failed. In the event of a Pass and Borderline or two Borderlines a third reader’s score was taken into consideration. That third reader was always the ESL instructor whose student’s performance was under review. Thus, Roberta’s score did count, occasionally. Yet, she recognized that however much lip service her mainstream col- leagues paid to the importance of the writing process, a five-paragraph essay could not—above all—contain a comma-splice, a run-on, a fragment, and/or striking features of non-native language use. It had to contain a closed thesis statement at the end of the introductory paragraph, each paragraph had to contain a minimum of six sentences, and examples had to be concrete. “You Need to Write This Down” Hoping to instill a “healthy” dose of fear in her students, Roberta shared with all of her ESL Advanced Grammar and Writing students the rubric she used to score their mock exit essays. The instrument (see Appendix B), de- veloped by the former ESL program coordinator, was an inventory of what the English Department faculty considered the minimum requirements of academic literacy. By this rubric, a trio of Sweet Water faculty would “blindly” score the ESL students’ exit essays, and it was by this rubric that a score would be defended should a challenge arise. For whatever reasons, for now, her ESL students weren’t in English 1101. It was therefore, she ex- plained to her students in class one morning, essential that she and they stick to the rubric: 1122 Tough Love and High-Stakes Assessment I have seen nearly perfect papers—and when I say that, you know the content is pretty good the organization is pretty good there, with very few mistakes, grammar mistakes in the paper—fail that exit essay because of four or five comma splices. And I’m, I am upset when I see what I think is a paper that should be passing fail because of four or five comma splices or maybe four fragments or maybe missing commas after introductory adverbial clause. . . . it is—it is a heartbreaker when somebody deserves to pass and they don’t because of something that’s so significant but while you’re reading your essay maybe it’s insignificant to you—or you don’t catch on right away to those commas. That is a real disappointment to me, and it’s also a heartbreaker for the person who writes a wonderful essay. . . . I don’t want that to be you at the end of the semester. Despite Roberta's strong commitment to helping her students pass the final exit essay, she occasionally did express frustration with the college’s fixa- tion on the grammar and mechanics of writing, as explained in the next section. “Grammar, Grammar, and More Grammar” The “superficiality” of the five-paragraph essay and the time crunch to get her students prepared for the assessment cycle didn’t allow her students to “truly” write, as Roberta explained during an interview: I have to really focus on grammar, grammar, and more gram- mar—just so that they can write a superficial paper and then get through that standardized test. And I lose time then to focus on critical thinking—on logic—on the things that I really want to focus on—and, and what any English professor also would really expect from them at the higher level. “Don’t just spit back”—you know—“examples to me. Really think about what you’re writing.” And it doesn’t allow us enough time to delve into that. However, Roberta knew that even after English 1101, high-stakes standard- ized testing would not be over. There would still be the Georgia Regents’ Test—a system-wide assessment consisting of a multiple-choice reading comprehension test and the ubiquitous five-paragraph essay written on a choice of topics (See Appendix A). 1122 13 Spencer Salas By breaking writing down into discrete units and by teaching how those units worked together, Roberta hoped to sensitize her students to a litany of stigmatizing errors that would fail them on the exit essay and hurt their scores on the COMPASS, which measured various grammar, usage, and style points. Around the fifth week of the course, a shift would take place—one marked by Roberta’s first mention of the “closed thesis state- ment” and its distinction from an open thesis statement as exemplified in this fieldnote: Let’s stop right here. This is my million-dollar question—write this down. I don’t see a lot of you writing. You need to write this down. This is called a closed thesis statement. Now in their grading guide, they give this 30 points. Therefore, if you don’t have the closed thesis statement you’ve just failed the essay. For the remainder of the semester, Roberta asked her students to look at and try out the sorts of five-paragraph essays they might be asked to write for the exit essay—an argument, a description, a comparison/contrast, etc.—recy- cling questions from previous exit exams as practice prompts, for example, “Describe your perfect Thanksgiving.” Roberta did not explicitly “correct” her students’ papers. Rather, she identified errors using a system of symbols that she shared with students. She then asked students to make the appropri- ate corrections/revisions using the symbols to guide them. In addition to the weekly timed writings, Roberta and her colleagues presented models of other types of essays the test takers might encounter such as “Comparison Contrast Writing.” Specific grammar and writing issues that had come up in students’ mock exit essays also received focused prac- tice—for example, the punctuation of restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses in sentences such as: “Kuwait, which is a small country in the Middle East, is rich in oil”; “A medical computer is a machine that analyzes the results of laboratory tests”; etc. It was odd, Roberta commented, that although her students were computer-savvy, they were still being asked to hand write the exit essay: no spell check, no grammar check, no nothing. Students were changing. Perhaps, she speculated, Sweet Water would have to change one day too. When or if that would happen, she was not sure. For now, her hands were tied. Sixteen weeks went by quickly. She and her colleagues had to get their students ready for the tests. 1144