INTRODUCTION

THE DOCUMENTS included in “What We Are Part of”: Teaching at CUNY 1968-1974, emerge from poet and educator Adrienne Rich’s first-hand experience in a defining moment in the history of both the City University of New York (CUNY) and the landscape of activism and educational change, in which an individual classroom was often the place where rapid institutional reform was both located and expected to happen. The editors of this project have all taught in the CUNY system and are the inheritors of this under-examined legacy. I write this as a teacher of English and composition who has been in the classroom for over fifteen years, seven of which were spent working in the CUNY system. Walking the same halls that Rich, Mina Shaughnessy (the innovator most associated with the concept of “basic writing”), and so many other pioneering educators walked makes this ongoing work sustainable. While we have been “naturalized” into a system that often takes student-centered writing for granted, the actual materials comprising the history of this change have largely been invisible. By presenting Rich’s teaching notes, syllabi, classroom exercises, and memos, we can begin to reconstruct a defining moment in the relationship between the work of poets and writers and the teaching of writing.

Rich was hired by Shaughnessy at a flashpoint of radical institutional transformation, as the Civil Rights movement had made access to higher education a central issue. The SEEK Program (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge), founded at City College in 1965, certainly had roots in that struggle. The main CUNY website defines the motivation behind SEEK’s creation as “a result of the efforts of social activists and progressive politicians whose vision was to provide access to CUNY for poor students, then largely African-American and Puerto Rican, who graduated from high schools that had not prepared them for the rigors of college.”¹ This streamlined version of a complex and fraught history, along with the relationship of SEEK to the 1969 student strike and the implementation of the Open Admissions policy in 1970, is recounted in greater detail in co-editor Conor Tomás Reed’s accompanying essay.

Originally created as a Pre-Baccalaureate Program to provide the kind of atmosphere and attention for New York City high school graduates that one might have found at an elite institution, the program expanded to other campuses in 1967, the year Shaughnessy was hired to become its Director, joining Toni Cade Bambara, Barbara Christian, June Jordan, and others who had already been teaching there. The assembled team, including many academically unaffiliated writers and poets, created space for a new kind of pedagogy, marking a dramatic shift from blaming students for producing “bad writing” to acknowledging the external circumstances surrounding student “error,” and mandating that the instructor pay close attention to the specific talents of the individual learners in any given class. In “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing,” Shaughnessy describes the unique dynamic of a SEEK class in what, from this perspective, seems self evident:

the writing course requires students to write things down regularly, usually once a week, and requires teachers to read what is written and then write things back and every so often even talk directly with individual students about the way they write.²

Shaughnessy further proposes that there needs to be a “developmental scale” for teachers, one that points to the teacher as student instead of as the voice of authority. This clearly indicated— particularly when working closely on writing with small groups of students— the very real exchange of language and time that was a regular part of this new classroom, an exchange significantly different from the traditional relationships between students and teachers that many faculty were accustomed to before the SEEK Program began. The SEEK classroom became a place where multiple and nonstandard literacies were investigated and respected, and where writing became a tool used to inspire change instead of a skill added to the roster of things students were too often told they “lacked.”

In many ways, the early success of the SEEK Program proved to be its demise. For the first few years, classes were small and students got the kind of individual attention and peer support that a student at a small liberal arts college would expect. Shaughnessy and her team’s firm belief that this “new population of student writers” facing multiple barriers to higher education, could thrive in such an environment was borne out. As Rich recalls:

It never occurred to Mina that the teaching of basic writing could be a mere task… She seemed far more concerned that the poets and writers then being hired to teach basic writing were imaginative enough, responsible enough, lucid enough, to benefit the students.³

Rich continually emphasized Shaughnessy’s insistence on creativity and student-centered teaching, underscoring that the SEEK Program was not looking for faculty who could teach grammar, but those able to offer students the space to discover their own right to become authors. As importantly, it was Rich’s deep commitment to teach basic writing that made her acutely aware of how institutional decisions would impact the students she most wanted to serve. In her SEEK notes, Rich details the time and care involved in providing what is necessary to succeed in the classroom and foresees the problems that would come about when class size and teaching loads expanded: “It will eventually guarantee a kind of tokenism which will admit large numbers of students only to betray and cheat them.”

I have found the materials collected here of crucial importance to my own work as a teacher, as they demonstrate how many of the same problems still need to be addressed with the same dedication and vigor shown by Rich. In the accompanying essay, Conor Tomás Reed describes how “Rich demands an active political use for literature that exceeds its value as a finished product.” I would add to this that Rich brings her own indelible relationship to language and writing as a poet into the classroom by sharing with students the importance and imperatives the act of writing has as its own activist form of self-expression. In “Teaching Language in Open Admissions,” Rich wrote:

I think of myself as a teacher of language: that is, as someone for whom language has implied freedom, who is trying to aid others to free themselves through the written word, and above all through learning to write it themselves.⁴

Rich’s repetition of the words “free” and “freedom” indicate the intensity of importance writing has for her, both in terms of her own writing and that of her students. This is also evident in the fact that, again, Rich chose to apply to teach in the SEEK Program—she had previously only taught at elite institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and Swarthmore. And she thought of this decision as both “a political decision to use my energies in work with ‘disadvantaged’ students” and “a need to involve myself with the real life of the city,”⁵ a sentiment echoed in “Poetics and Pedagogy,” co-editor Talia Shalev’s brief introduction to the teaching materials contained in this collection. Certainly, Rich could have secured work teaching creative writing or literature seminars, but she chose SEEK because she wanted to work with and learn from “these” students.

The documents presented here are a testament to the level of Rich’s commitment to this work and the students at City College. It is clear that Rich extends herself to her students in ways that are striking. In a note to students sent during the Open Admissions Strike, Rich reaches out, offers her home phone number, and important advice—“This is part of what it means to be a college student in our time and is even probably one of the most valuable parts of your education even though you don’t get academic credits for it.” In the documents directly addressing the SEEK Program—before, after, and during Open Admissions—Rich unfalteringly places emphasis on student-centered/writing-based teaching. Instead of focusing on the students’ level of “error,” she points to a “mistrust of the written word as a genuine article” that she importantly attributes to “the miseducation that has been perpetrated where language is concerned.”

Addressing her colleagues, Rich is equally clear; in a “Statement to CCNY Faculty Meeting,” she writes, “Let’s not sell our ghetto students short by imagining that they have everything to gain from the College, and little to give.” Conversations around Open Admissions, specifically the “lowering of standards” and increase in enrollments that its implementation sparked, created an atmosphere where many faculty were resistant to working in the very environments that Rich saw as critically productive. In many ways, Rich absorbed the qualities that were implicit and explicit in the SEEK program prior to her arrival, through the work of teachers and writers of color such as the previously mentioned Toni Cade Bambara, Barbara Christian, and June Jordan, as well as Addison Gayle, David Henderson, and others. In this, she served as a crucial bridge between those sometime outsider pioneers and other faculty members who could more easily embrace Rich as a peer.

In Rich’s work we also see the articulation of a new pedagogical approach to “basic writing” courses, a term Shaughnessy coined to describe the writing done in the SEEK Program, and a term still used in the field of composition studies. In Shaughnessy’s still essential Errors and Expectations, we get a clear sense of what this kind of instruction looked like. As Shaughnessy writes:

no one saw the intelligence of their mistakes or thought to harness that intelligence in the service of learning…grammar still symbolizes for some students one last chance to understand what is going on with written language so they can control it rather than be controlled by it.⁶

What is particularly revelatory about this approach when working with students too often labeled as “uneducable,” is the emphasis on the experience of the student and the acknowledgement of the fact that even if their writing is not “correct,” it is still valuable.

Published in 1977, Errors and Expectations was blurbed by Rich, stating that the book “reveals the patterns underlying the apparently chaotic damages of substandard education, and the proven strategies by which intelligence imprisoned by lack of skill can be released into articulation.” Errors and Expectations provides a lens into the work Shaughnessy did at City College, particularly from 1970 and the advent of Open Admissions onwards, while Rich’s blurb points to her own first-hand experience “in the trenches” at City College. While Shaughnessy’s work focuses primarily on “error” and specific studies of the texts students produced, Rich’s documents take us inside lesson plans and faculty meetings. And, while Shaughnessy’s work is specifically foundational basic writing pedagogy (at the risk of being reductive), Rich’s documents echo Shaughnessy’s programmatic priorities while also presenting us with a writing-based teaching model that predates many of the texts that later become central to composition studies.

In a memo to Shaughnessy from 1971, Rich writes, “no piece of writing is going to be better than the quality of thinking and feeling that had led to its writing. This is as true for prison letters as for literary criticism.” And, in 1969, Rich mentions assigning in-class essays at least once a week— with the aim to help students “discover for themselves the release and liberation of writing as an activity. The problem of teaching a minimal necessary ‘correctness’ without impeding this self-initiated process is a serious one.” In both examples, we see Rich clearly employing the same language that later comes to completely dominate educational pedagogy.

In Rich’s writing exercises and class materials, her language clearly indicates a pedagogy that encourages collaborative learning and “power-sharing,” to use composition theorist and scholar Ira Shor’s phrase. For example, by asking students to “write a description of a course you would like to take some day,” Rich is inviting students to take ownership over their own education, to imagine the learning experience they want for themselves. This exercise could have been, “write a description of a course you take” or “write a course description,” but instead Rich includes “you would like to take.” In another assignment from the same class, Rich asks students to “write your opinion as to the value of decentralization, arguing for or against it from your own school experience.” The language at play in this exercise again centers on the student as knowledge maker. Rich asks her class to share their “opinion” and “own school experience,” phrases that validate the reality that we are all experts in our own education. And Rich doesn’t speak down to her students, she doesn’t explain “decentralization”— many had first-hand experience of it or Rich knew her students to be curious thinkers who would find out what she was referring to.

Of course, over forty years later, these ideas seem all too familiar. We all recognize ideas like “student centered” teaching, “writing across the curriculum,” “writing to learn,” and many of the other terms that have become the present orthodoxies. But how often do we actually make time for students to write in class? How often do we invite students to contribute to the assignments we ask them to write? How often do we complain about student papers or students themselves? Are we still trapped by “teaching to the test” and submerged in worries about standardized “correctness”? How often do we take into account how and why students think they are being graded and evaluated? How often do we see ourselves (whether we like it or not), as the bearers of knowledge and skills our students don’t yet have? And are we still, to borrow from Rich, “confusing spoonfed ‘preparedness’ with basic intellectual ability?” These texts are documents of a classroom in action and continue to provide a vital sampling of a pedagogy that was alive with a practice that integrated and changed lives. And there is still a lot we have to learn from Rich and the documents she so lovingly created for and in her classrooms.