My apologies for not getting back to you sooner in response to your rich and thoughtful email. September has been a crazy month and I'm just getting a moment to breathe. But now, spurred on also by the news about Don Graves, I did want to respond.
Mostly, I think you and I are very much walking the same path and engaging the same questions when it comes to Murray. Like you, I think his ethos, his valuing of student writing, and his respect for students as writers who, when treated as such can learn to be better writers, is what I get centrally from Don. Some of his pedagogy I use directly, but not huge amounts and much of that is modified (though I think the section on student conferences in A Writer Teaches Writing is still the best primer around on the subject for new teachers.) And, I do think Don is important for his insistence that we are teaching writing to writers, not composition to students. The nomenclature and its connotations are important and have an important impact on teachers and students.
But, that said, Don is just one theorist/scholar I draw from. I can also see in my teaching David Barton's ideas on situated literacies, and Donna Alvermann's ideas about student motivation and pedagogy, and Nancy Sommer's recent work on response, and Andrea Lunsford on audience, and Rick Altman on genre, and Tom Newkirk on student expectations, not to mention Stuart Hall, Althusser, Bhabha and a slew of other literacy and critical theorists. I think we all draw from a variety of influences and sources to create out pedagogies and our identities as scholars and teachers. But my exploration in the essay I sent you was to argue, primarily, that Don Murray deserves not to be dismissed out of hand when we think about important theorists and scholars in the field. More to the point, we shouldn't dismiss him without reading him and reading him carefully. And, like I said, I think you and I are in a lot of agreement here. I really do appreciate your careful and thoughtful reading and response to the essay. Given that I have huge doubts as to whether Enculturation will ever get around to publishing it, I'm glad to know if found one reader.
How is the autumn going for you? By the way, I am going to be at the Writing Research Across Borders in February. Unfortunately, I already have lodging arrangements. But it will be good to see you there and maybe we can catch up over a meal or a drink.
Hope all is well.
Best,
Bronwyn
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Thanks for sharing the article. I read through it this morning and really enjoyed it. It sounds like you might be kind of "far away" from it, in the sense that you wrote it a while ago and perhaps haven't thought about it too much recently, but I thought I would take a moment to respond (which might be as much about my need to think through my own project as to make sense of yours).
It seems that the fundamental impetus for your writing the piece is very similar to mine. I was really struck by this passage:
I had long been influenced by Freire and the idea that education should be connected to social justice. That and a growing realization that I enjoyed being a theory wonk began to draw me toward cultural studies and critical pedagogy and away from thinking about what Don Murray had to say about writing. I began to wonder if Don’s ideas and cultural studies were not particularly compatible. (My discomfort with some of the excesses of critical pedagogy and cultural studies disciples is grist for another time and another essay.) In fact I began to find Don’s work a bit embarrassing. Maybe it was too sentimental and solipsistic. Maybe it didn’t deal enough with culture and postmodern ideas of identity. Maybe Don was beginning to sound a bit like an Old Testament prophet, thundering away on his ideas about teaching writing, but sounding rather antique and out of touch with the postmodern, ironic world. As a graduate student returning for my Ph.D. with gray already in my beard, the last thing I wanted to be was out of touch as well.
I think that here I see similarities between our experiences and differences. I think you "came of age" in the field at a slightly different moment than I. When I started at UNH in 2003, cultural studies and critical pedagogy were very much a part of my thinking and learning. I remember trying out Diana George's book for the first time in a comp course and that was definitely something new for me. By my sense is that by the time I left the grad program in 2007, to some extent, the field was beginning to move on to different questions (don't mean to suggest, at all, that cultural studies and critical pedagogy are no longer relevant--I just see us as asking different questions today).
When I began to feel about Don's work what you felt came in two stages. First, of course, there was Berlin. Up until my second year or so in the doctoral program at UNH, my BIBLE for teaching writing had been Don's _The Craft of Revision_. It guided everything I did. I was introduced to this book and what Berlin calls the "expressivist" view of writing pedagogy under the tutelage of Bonnie Sunstein at Iowa, where I got my MAT...then I worked as an adjunct at UNH for Tom and at BC for Lad. Additionally, I was an undergraduate English major at UNH from 1992-1996 and took many writing courses (Pam Barksdale, Sue Wheeler, Margaret Love Denman, etc.) I was thoroughly steeped in so-called expressivist teaching in the sense that I had experienced it as a student and seen and felt the way this pedagogy could transform one's life (seriously, not exaggerating). And then, in graduate school, it was like someone pulled back the curtain and gave me access to the theory behind the practice I had experienced.
But then came Berlin and now there was a name for what I thought was THE ONLY (and the best) way to teach writing. And then I began to see that this name or label or whatever had become sort of a dirty word among many of the elders in the community (although not those at UNH). I felt, at first, defensive and then, I think, began to see the things that Don seemed to miss (or which you perhaps had to read harder to see). Like you, I began to find his work a bit embarrassing and my earlier self a bit embarrassing. My teaching began to get more politicized and I began to think more about the role of the social in writing. Frankly, I didn't know quite what to do with Don and all my years with him in the classroom. I think my teaching was, for a time, a lovely hybrid--or, less generous, schizophrenic. I was bringing in the new but not entirely leaving the old. I remember teaching Ways of Reading and feeling really challenged by that book adn realizing that the way I was spending time with my students was TOTALLY different when teaching that book. Murray was nowhere to be found and I began to see that I had given up some things that I really didn't want to give up. So, I was a man divided!
Wave #2 came late in my doctoral program when I began reading more in new literacy studies, activity theory (just a bit) and genre theory. The work of Anne Beaufort is front and center for me here. And here, again, initially, there was the embarrassment. What to do with Don? How does he fit into all of this? He was like an outfit that still fit and which I didn't want to toss out, but which had, apparently, gone out of style. In some important ways, Don seemed to come up so short. His views of genre (the writing leads you to the genre) are so at odds with genre theory it was hard not to see his work as outdated and somewhat irrelevant.
So, two waves of disillusionment. The first at the hands of Berlin and the second at the hands of these other David Russell/Amy Devitt/Anis Bawarshi type folks. The final straw came in spring 2009 when I tried to bring back Craft of Revision for an Expo writing course I was teaching. It was the first time I had taught the book in a while and rereading it really forced me into some cognitive dissonance. I decided, after that term, that I would not be using the book again (and perhaps not Murray, explicitly, either).
So, all of this is to say that I appreciated this move you are making in the piece and I identified with it.
And then I noted the other move you are making and it is the move I find myself wanting to make as well. You write:
Yet as I reflect on my experiences and ideas about writing pedagogy—a Murray-like move in itself—I have come to realize that I have never been as far from his influence as I have imagined.
Yes! As I've been reading his work, and also blogging about the article I am working on, this is the SAME feeling I have been having and it is the sort of resolution for the turmoil described above. While I may not make the explicit assignments Don would have advocated (or, perhaps there were NO assignments! :), while, for example, I may subscribe to a different notion of genre than he did (obvious point: genre studies developed in the years after Don had retired from the scene), Don's "big picture" teaching undergirds almost EVERYTHING I do. Most of this can be summed up, I think, in the word student-centered. He gave me (and us?) student-centered and it informs and undergirds everything I do today and so, like you, I have realized that while the house I live in in the classroom may change from year to year (new room, new paint, new furniture), the foundation holding the thing up is still in place and that Don helped me build that foundation (sorry for these metaphors--but they seem to make sense to me as I am writing! :).
In sum, I really identified with your moving-away-but-coming-back frame. It made total sense to me.
Now, here's where I sort of move away from you a bit--maybe. I don't know. I'm making this up as I go.
In some ways, I see your piece as in conversation with the debate/argument between expressivism and/or social/critical rhetorics/pedagogies. One move you seem to make that I find really cool is the move to say that there is nothing more "critical" than Don's pedagogy. You write (and I find this persuasive):
Teaching as listening, as the valuing of individual experience, is the real critical pedagogy. If you look at the writing and work of Freire, of people engaged in Participatory Action Research around the world that is enacting real social change in people’s lives4 it begins with the fundamental principal that people’s knowledge of and reflection on their lives and experiences is both valuable and necessary to enact democratic and sustainable social change (Brydon-Miller 78-79).
I think you are totally right to point this out--it seems that you want to point out that to call Don expressivist is to miss the larger thrust of what he was doing or trying to do in his teaching. And by the way, you're not the first to make this point. I've attached a book review by Robert Yagelski, who also makes this point. Yagelski seems Murray, Elbow and Freire as compatible and I think this is a really useful re-framing--to take apart the categories we have come to accept and are fed by, frankly, Cross-Talk, and to think in new categories. Murray-as-critical-pedagogue. Yes, there is truth in that and to make that claim, I think, is to begin to understand the big picture of what Murray was shooting for. I think you make a further compelling point here:
To argue instead that knowledge can be generated by students exploring and reflecting on the meaning of their experiences and ideas in writing runs counter to the epistemological mainstream of the academy.
Of course, Don was an outsider in the academy and that's what allowed him to critique it. I didn't understand that at first and I think that here, we get to your point about the danger of disciples. Because Don has all the accoutrements of the academy (books, articles, emeritus professor) it's easy for disciples to associate him with the institution. But, to read his work is to see a consistent thread of anti-authority and anti-academy (specifically literature professors). Those who worked and taught with him obviously new this, but those who came after perhaps did not (like me). To read Don is to see that he is one of those wonderful people who had terrible childhood experiences with school but then went on to become teachers and help us understand things about education that many or most of us miss (and this is something I am exploring in my article--the foundations of Don's pedagogy, which I see as rooted in his own experiences growing up).
Okay, I have sort of come to a cross roads where I was on a tear there for a while, but skidded out. I've written a lot and who knows if you're even still with me! I'll close with the way that I have been resolving my own embarassment, disillusion, whatever you want to call it. Two things: first, the realization that Don's ethos informs virtually everything I do, even when I am asking students to conduct a genre analysis (an assignment he never would have dreamed of--but, of course, I help them find genres of writing that are of interest to them with the hope that if they're interested, it will produce better work). Second, and this is tentative and I am toying around with it and hesitant to say too much about it...but, Beaufort has a really interesting framework that she proposes in Writing in the Real World and perhaps further develops in College Writing and Beyond where she identifies five knowledge domains that writers draw on when making "expert" writing performances (I'm doing this from memory, so bear with me if I don't get it quite right). HEre are some passages from her:
In addition to discourse community knowledge, subject matter knowledge, and genre knowledge, writers must address the specific immediate rhetorical situation of individual communicative acts" (20).
And finally, writers must have writing process knowledge, i.e. knowledge of the ways in which one proceeds through the writing task in its various phases. This procedural knowledge associated with writing process is also affected by the material, socially specific particulars of a given writing situation or "community of practice" (Flower, 1994, Rogoff 1994). (20).
In my reframing of Murray's work in my own head, as I move away from the framework of cognitivist, social epistemic, expressivist that I learned in grad school, I move both towards the one you propose--Murray-as-critical-pedagogue--but also towards incorporating Murray into Beaufort's framework. I think that Murray has something to tell us about all of Beaufort's knowledge domains (discourse community knowledge, subject matter knowledge, genre knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, writing process knowledge), but I think he has A LOT to tell us about that final domain--writing process knowledge. And, sadly, I think that what he has to say about the procedural aspects of writing, the process itself, is still largely unknown or perhaps unheard by many students (and teachers).
As I teach writing this term and simultaneously read through Tom and Lisa's new book, I find myself highlighting entire passages from the articles there that I firmly believe my students need to read and hear (so much of my project has been a serendipitous process--last year in order to come to terms with my own feelings about Don's work, I had begun rereading every article he had written, going all the way back to the 1960s; then their book came out and so I'm now reading that as well). This semester, as I try to think about how to raise awareness of Beaufort's five knowledge domains in my writing classes, I am selecting articles from Tom and Lisa's book that I am going to ask students to read as they work on their major writing project for the class. I want them reading Murray on writing as they are researching and writing and I want to learn from them what that's like to read Murray after reading other perhaps more complex texts from the field of comp/rhet (this fits nicely into the larger picture of the pedagogy I am currently deploying--the writing-about-writing approach developed or articulated by Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle).
Okay, I've written a lot. As I said, this email was likely to be as much for me as for you. If I got you "wrong" somehow here or misread you, I'm sure you'll set me straight. But I really enjoyed your piece...and now, I return to my own piece. :)
Best-
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Hi Mike,
I agree, Murray has not gotten much attention, not even as much as Elbow with whom he his usually linked. I think part of that is that Don, once he retired in 1986, stopped writing in rhet/comp journals and such while Elbow has continued to be active. But I also think it has to do with both the "social turn" and the misperception that Don's work is a-theoretical. When I was teaching the GTA teaching writing seminar I always started with A Writer Teaches Writing and the students found it both practical and useful as well as comforting. I wish someone had done an oral history with him before he died.
I also think that Don's legacy and name is in better repair in K-12 literacy studies than in rhet/comp. And he continued to present at NCTE long after he stopped going to 4Cs. Maybe it's time for you to write about him.
Anyway, for what it's worth, he is the piece that has been accepted at Enculturation and, who knows, may even be published some day.
Best,
Bronwyn
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