OPENINGS!!!

What Murray was not:

A researcher

What Murray was:

A writer

A teacher

A reformer

Educational reform--what Murray wanted most was to change schools and to change schooling around the teaching of writing. Why? His personal and professional experiences suggested that the way writing was being taught were ineffective and harmful. (11/16/11)

Situate Murray within Education reform...1960s/1970s?

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Others have already attempted to offer critical re-appraisals of Murray's work and significance to the field of composition. My purpose here is mostly descriptive--to try to map the various arguments Murray made about teaching writing and the roles he played within the field over the course of his career.

From Murray Himself, to help me frame this project:

In closing I would like to go back over this expedition and point out some things I see that may have implications for the classroom. I expect you will see others--and not agree with all of mine. Good. My theology is based on difference. ("A Writer's Geography" p. 193 in Newkirk/Miller collection)

We know far too little about the writing process. ("Write Before Writing" p. 38)

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From others:

We hope that this collection will allow a new generation of writing teachers and aspiring writers to appreciate both the utility and depth of Don's work. We also believe that a healthy rereading of his work will establish his significance at a time when he has been marginalized by the field of composition that he helped create, an exclusion that he felt keenly in the last decade of his life. (x)

Newkirk and Miller, The Essential Don Murray

I want to tease this out a bit...

The utility is simple: utility suggests usefulness, so the question becomes, what is useful, still? If we are to appreciate the utility of the work, what are we appreciating, exactly? And why? What do I appreciate? And that's a good place to begin. Make a list. Perhaps I can use Anne Beaufort's taxonomy of writing knowledge in order to frame Murray's utility--I think he might fall into her "writing processes" or "process knowledge" category. This is definitely worth thinking about some more...although others might really disagree with me on this.

As to the issue of depth, for me, the depth has to do with the fact that it's about more than writing. Can I force this other thing that I want to talk about into the category of "depth"? This other thing that I want to talk about has to do with Don's outsider status within education, Yagelski's notion of Don as critical educator. When we read, for example, just Don's manifesto "Teach Writing as a Process, Not Product", what do miss? And this is the question we are trying to answer when we talk about depth--what more is there to it than there appears at first glance? And the thing that I appear to be most interested in, when we talk about depth, is the education piece, the piece about learning, the piece about teaching kids like the kid Don was. And this is secondary in his writing, which is, always primarily about writing. But I can trace this other thread, which is captured in Tom's foreword to the program for Don Murray's memorial service:

Don had a special radar for students who had to struggle—women coming off tough divorces, bright working-class students with inadequate educations. He had a particular gift for reaching out to them, seeing potential that they themselves did not see.

As to Don's significance, this is a taller order--to establish his significance to the field of composition. Where does one begin tracing his significance? Why is he significant? How? That's a tall order and a bit daunting to consider.

What Tom has done for me, here, though, is provide me with, if I choose, a way to organize my own work--around the issues of utility, depth, and significance, and that might be a terrific way to think through an essay on Don--to answer these three questions: What is his lasting utility? What are the depths of his work that we perhaps fail to see? What is his ongoing significance to the field? Two tentative speculations:

1. He put students and student writing down on the map as being of primary concern to the discipline--composition studies is about helping PEOPLE write better--average people, normal people. We don't have a "content" to deliver--like dates, novels, etc.

2. he insisted that we must be able to use (practice) what we are trying to know or understand (theory). In almost all of his articles, he always asks how what he is talking about is of use to the profession. This is certainly not a requirement of all scholarship in composition studies, but much of what we write and read does, at hte end of the day, ask how we can USE what we are learning.

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Why do people teach composition as they do at any given moment? What determines their choices of textbooks, assignments, and daily classroom activities? Of all the possible approaches to the teaching of writing, why do teachers settle on particular ones? [...] Individual preferences and personal styles are certainly involved; so, of course, are institutional values and constraints. But even more certainly, the teaching of composition is shaped by the available means of pedagogical persuasion that are presented to us by intellectual and professional communities (broadly considered)--communities shaped, inevitably, by culture, circumstance, and history. (3)

1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition (Henze, Selzer, Sharer)

Ten years ago, genuine and extensive conflicts existed about what constituted good writing and thus about what sort of writing one ought to teach. We lacked shared axiological presumptions. But Composition Studies now shows the emergence of a significant consensus: the widely-held position today is a rhetorical axiology. Significant disparities, however, continue to exist about process, pedagogy, and epistemology. We are closer to agreeing on where we want to go, but not on how to get there. (411)

In 1979 expressivism, which Jim Berlin ("Contemporary Composition" 771) and Karen LeFevre (49-50) both describe as deriving from Platonic individualism, was an expansive domain, with such charismatic leaders as Ken Macrorie, Don Stewart (author of The Authentic Voice), and Lou Kelly (author of From Dialogue to Discourse). [...] We find nothing parallel in scholarly journals now, nor are new expressionist textbooks appearing. Works of the older writers like Macrorie are still in print, of course. And Don Murray's work sometimes seems expressionist, especially in the personal topics he stresses. (411-412)

Richard Fulkerson, "Composition Theory in the Eighties"