"Reconsiderations: Donald Murray and the Pedagogy of Surprise." CE, 70.3 (Jan. 2008): 296-303. -- Bruce Ballenger

Ballenger, Bruce. "RECONSIDERATIONS: Donald Murray and the Pedagogy of Surprise." CE, 70.3 (Jan. 2008): 296-303.

"a discipline that doesn’t quite know what to do with people like Murray, compositionists who are more likely to call themselves writers than scholars" (296).

"...his belief that composition studies should focus on the “act of writing.” In an afterward to a 1977 essay, “Our Students Will Write—If We Let Them,” which was republished by the North Carolina English Teacher in 1993, Don wrote that he hoped that “research into how writers—student and professional—wrote would illuminate our understanding of this vital human act and that our teaching methods and curricula would be based on this new knowledge” (296)

This is not what has happened. Our discipline in the years since 1977 has increased its research into significant but peripheral issues, decreased its efforts to understand through research how writing is made and how writing is taught. We are a profession with a black hole in the center. We do not yet know how effective writing is made, and all theory and practice should grow from that understanding. (88)

...Don’s familiar, writerly moves—the strong personal voice; the autobiographical digression; the mixing of genres with fragments of poetry, fiction and essay; and the practical lists. (297)

While it may not be “quaint,” this idea is hardly revolutionary, but, when Don and a few others urged writing teachers to reimagine their classrooms as places where authority is dispersed, they were doing it against the orthodoxy of current-traditional pedagogies, which emphasize the more formal qualities of composition that the teachers know and the students must learn. For Murray, writers always learn from each other.This idea was most powerfully expressed in Don’s 1972 essay, “Teach Writing as a Process, Not Product,” first presented as a talk to the New England Association of Teachers of English. (299)

Here, i am struck by the invocation of current-traditionalism. We stand it up to make room for Don and his work. Another passage:

Murray’s insistence that composition students should enjoy the pleasures of writing that seem reserved for published authors was extraordinary at a time when most first-year writing classes were concerned with teaching the modes of discourse—narration, description, exposition, and argument—and focusing attention on correctness.

I am struck by how easily the straw-man of current-traditionalism is constructed so it can be broken down (by Murray).

This brief essay ["Teach Writing as a Process, Not Product"] provided the writing process movement its manifesto. (emphasis added, 299)

Manifesto is a good term to think through a good deal of Don's writing. He writes manifestos--that is his mode. Imperative, insistent, demanding writing. Do this, do that, don't do this. It might be interesting to look into the genre of the manifesto (I'm thinking here of a recent piece in CE...

The manifesto, Janet Lyon reminded us in her seminal work on the form, is the ur-genre to critique modernity. It enacts this critique through sheer force of exhortation, by embodying, rhetorically, "nascent fury" and "fervid, even violent rage" (14). Deriving from the Latin composite of manus and fectus for "hostile hand," the manifesto is "a fist striking through the scrims of order." It is at once "word and deed, both threat and incipient action" (14). The manifesto leaves no room for debate or conciliation in its tight rhetorical structure. It strikes a combative tone and keeps striking. "It conveys resolute oppositionality and indulges no tolerance for the fainthearted" (9). [...] The rhetorical feat that the manifesto accomplishes is in making its threat continual, without resolution. The manifesto spoils for a fight and never ceases. [...] As Lyon pointed out, the manifesto establishes its timelessness by locating its authority in an unspecified "we," thereby both invoking a broader community and inviting participation in it. The power of the manifesto thus comes from the "potentially infinite constituency" it creates (26). [Prendergast, 24-25]

The citation for this passage:

Prendergast, Catherine. "The Fighting Style: Reading the Unabomber's Strunk and White." CE, 72.1 (Sept. 2009): 10-28.

Lyon, Janet. Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.

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With its focus on students rather than instructors as the agents of their own learning, writing as a “process of discovery” was also a direct challenge to the dominant current-traditional approaches. (emphasis added, 299)

For Donald Murray, “expecting the unexpected” was always the point of writing, and the first question he often asked his students about a draft was a simple one: “What surprised you?”

The problem with this is that all too often, it seems the answer is or was nothing. And so we sat around waiting for the student to get surprised. I've written of this before as the Waiting-for-Godot problem.

Murray believed that “cultivating surprise” was the purpose of the writing process and the motive that kept all writers—students or professionals—returning to the work with eagerness and anticipation. “The writer sits down intending to say one thing, and hears the writing say something more, or less, or completely different,” Don wrote in A Writer Teaches Writing. “The writing surprises, instructs, receives, questions, tells its own story, and the writer becomes the reader wondering what will happen next” (7).

For me, this was a welcome revelation... (300).

Would there still be a role for writers such as Murray whose method of inquiry is to witness themselves and their students in the act of writing and report what they see? Should there be? (301)

In The Making of Knowledge in Composition (1987), Stephen North observed that “practice as inquiry” was an increasingly marginalized form of scholarship in the discipline, and Don seemed to think, particularly after the rejection of his essay “Pushing the Edge,” that his influence was waning. Creative writers in academia always have an alternative to publishing scholarship, and, in the final fifteen years of his life, Murray focused on personal essays, publishing a weekly column in The Boston Globe. He continued to publish new editions of his textbooks, including Write to Learn, The Craft of Revision, and A Writer Teaches Writing, but he rarely attended conferences, and few new essays graced the pages of leading journals in the field. (301)