Summary and reaction to Critiquing the Need to Eliminate Remediation: Lessons from San Francisco State by Sugie Goen-Salter

Sugie Goen-Salter covers a lot of the same ground that she did in her earlier article with Gillotte-Tropp, but goes a step further.  She argues for universities such as hers to be the place for incoming freshmen to learn integrated reading and writing skills so they can successfully transition into basic college level writing courses.  Goen-Salter goes even a step further by showing how her and her collogue Gillotte-Trapp have created a year long program to help prepare community college teachers to teach integrated reading and writing. 

I find this article very inspiring because Goen-Salter and Gillotte-Tropp’s IRW program offers a solution to remediation.  Goen-Salter shows that the first year of college is the place where students should learn basic reading and writing together in order to transition into academia.  Goen-Salter and Gillotte-Tropp’s teacher education program should also put a dent in the remediation problem by giving future community college composition professors the tools they need to teach integrated reading and writing.  Goen-Salter states, ‘To help prepare new faculty to teach integrated reading/writing, my colleague Hellen Gillotte-Tropp and I created a year-long graduate seminar (“Seminar in Teaching Integrated Reading and Writing”) as part of the San Francisco States MA and graduate teaching certificate program in post secondary reading and composition”(100). This may sound like a dumb question, but is this our class that she is referring to?  I guess I am confused by her saying it is a year-long graduate seminar while our class is one semester.