ABSTRACT

In her classic article, “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing,” Mina Shaughnessy (1976) described how teachers in the early 1970s responded to changes in the academy brought about by open admissions. They began by “guarding the tower,” holding out for the same results and using the same methods they used before open admissions “as if any pedagogical adjustment to the needs of students were a kind of cheating” (Shaughnessy, 1976, p. 235). Before long, as students and teachers spent time together in classrooms, faculty came to accept the educability of the new students and moved to the second stage, which Shaughnessy (1976) called “converting the natives”: Here the teacher “carr[ied] the technology of advanced literacy to the inhabitants of an underdeveloped country” but

did so without considering “competing logics and values and habits that may be influencing his students” (p. 235). In the third stage “sounding the depths,” faculty realized that ideas and knowledge that seemed self-evident to them must be reexamined in their full complexity and in light of the student’s own language or dialect. In the fourth stage, a faculty member dove into the task of self-remediation “to become a student of new disciplines and of his students themselves in order to perceive both their difficulties and their incipient excellence” (Shaughnessy, 1976, p. 238).