Professing Rhetoric and Composition: A Personal Odyssey (D'Angelo)

"Professing Rhetoric and Composition: A Personal Odyssey" (D'Angelo) History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition, 1963-1983. 269-281

I would like to discuss the role that individuals, interacting in small groups, played in bringing people together, identifying teaching needs and expanding knowledge. (269)

The 1970s was a period that gave direction and method to our teaching and scholarship. These small groups gave us a place to gather, to talk, and to share ideas. And we talked everywhere--at conferences, symposia, summer institutes, publisher's parties, in lobbies, restaurants, and bars. Out of these gatherings came newsletters, bibliographies, new courses, graduate programs, articles in books and journals, and support for our colleagues for tenure and promotion. (272)

There were many other small groups that helped to shape the discipline in the 1970s, but due to the limitations of space, I am including only those with which I had some personal contact. (278)

There arose in the 1970s a peculiar situation in which writing teachers learned more about what they were doing by meeting in small groups outside the academy than they did in pursuing their doctorates. They taught even the most elementary writing courses with a sophistication not always shared or understood by their literary colleagues. They recognized that the students they were teaching were eager and responsive and a joy to teach. (279)

In my narrative, I have persistently emphasized the role that small groups, meeting informally, played in the development of our discipline. These small groups gave us a placed to gather, to talk, to share ideas, and to develop professionally. They preserved the spirit of social interaction. They helped members of the group to get published. They fostered a greater interest in research. They began to establish journals to record and disseminate the results of their research. They argued that Departments of English needed to take composition more seriously. And most importantly, their collaboration gave direction and method to the teaching of writing. (280)

As members of these small groups in the 1970s, we did not seek to occupy a position of advocacy. Rather, our goal was to participate with others to achieve a common goal. And that goal was to make us better teachers of writing and to see the activity of composition from the student's point of view. (280)

...since those early years, there have been schisms between practitioners and researchers and between compositionists and rhetoricians, not to mention all kinds of ideological confrontations. Perhaps we were naive in the 1970s about the enemy within, but we could disagree, without being disagreeable, and contend, without being contentious... we need no grand narrative to tell us what we have known all along--that people can disagree and still cooperate and be intelligent and decent people. In the 1970s, we integrated our personalities into the groups without losing our identities. This integration provided a proper synthesis of intelligence, creativity and values. That is the lesson I learned from individuals in small groups in my personal odyssey in the 1970s. (280)

Stage 1: The Initiation Stage

Stage 2: The Quest Stage

Stage 3: The Triumph of the Ideal