From Form To Meaning (Fleming)

From Form to Meaning: Freshmen Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957-1974 (David Fleming)

Another book in a series which attempt to investigate specific sites of composition during the 1960s/1970s.

Preface

They represent for me the best of composition-rhetoric: its unusual humility in a world not always known for such, its abiding commitment to social justice in an environment where such devotion ebbs and flows, its deep humanity in a profession that can be cold and aloof. (x)

Introduction: Freshmen Composition in the United States, 1885-Present

One hotbed for tension at UW was the huge English Department, and many of its deepest conflicts swirled around the two-semester Freshman English course, English 101 and 102. The course was required of every undergraduate on campus, a group clamoring (if inchoately) for relevance and freedom in their studies; it was taught by a cadre of politically active, newly unionized graduate teaching assistants (TAs), anxious about their future in a society they now saw as morally bankrupt and an academy whose decade-long spending (and hiring) spree was clearly coming to an send; and it was directed by an English faculty who affiliated not with first-year writing but with the advanced study of British and American literature and who, given the disaffection of the two groups mentioned above, felt themselves under siege by the late 1960s. (15)

It was also clearly now about more than just that one course. Having read widely in the story of my own field, I knew that what had happened at UW was not entirely out of sync with the broader story of freshmen composition in this country. Add to that my own complicated relationship with composition, my sensitivity to its role in contemporary English departments and university general education programs, and my scholarly background in the history and theory of rhetoric, and I was printed to see in the story of this specific course broader lessons about freshmen composition and higher education in general. (21)

I thus follow here a long tradition in historical research of trying to tell a general story by focusing on a particular one. This is, in other words, a case study, which involves gathering and analyzing data about an individual example as a way of studying a broader phenomenon. It is done on the assumption that the example (the "case") is in some way typical of the broader phenomenon. The case may be an individual, a city, an event, a society, or any other possible object of analysis. The advantage of the case study method is that it allows more intensive analysis of specific empirical details. The disadvantage is that it is sometimes hard to use the results to generalize to other cases. (21)

Why does your study matter?

1. First, I believe this study tells us new things about the history of freshmen composition. In particular, it helps compositionists across the country make better sense of a period that, oddly, has not been well accounted for in our disciplinary histories, narratives that have tended, in my opinion, to privilege the decades from 1946 to 1966, when "comp-rhet" emerged as an academic discipline, and 1971 to 1991, when the process paradigm established itself as the dominant approach to teaching writing in this country, but have largely skipped over the handful of tumultuous years in between, from 1967-1970. (22)
2. The second main contribution of this project, I hope, is the illumination it provides on the 1960s in general, especially the momentous changes in higher education that took place during that decade. In fact, as I argue here, the most important influence on writing instruction at UW during this time was not any new theory or pedagogy of composition, but the massive cultural, demographic, political, economic, and institutional changes that were taking place in the country at large, changes felt especially acutely on college and university campuses and affecting general education courses, like first-year composition, more than any others. The story of English 101 and 102 at UW in the late 1960s, in other words, needs to be told in the context of the changing material conditions of U.S. higher education and North American society during those years, when a rapidly expanding and increasingly diverse student population, mounting federal support for education and research, and a relative liberation of both politics and culture came up against massive civil unrest, foreign war, and the growing anxiety, disillusionment, and alienation of young people. (25)
3. And that brings us to the third, and I believe the most important, lesson of this book, which concerns freshmen composition itself...I offer the following narrative, then, not only to help correct local misrepresentations of the history of Freshmen English at the University of Wisconsin but also to help compositionists at large better appreciate the role of "the long sixties" in the story of their discipline and to help everyone involved in higher education make better sense, even today, of "freshmen comp," a course that is, at once, inherently unstable and enormously resilient, constantly at risk of marginalization and yet surprisingly central, even inescapable, at key moments in our nation's cultural, intellectual, and material history. (26-27)

In the UW Freshmen English program, the most important development during these years was the rise of a short-lived but potent pedagogy, simultaneously critical and humanist, developed almost entirely by English graduate student teaching assistants working by and among themselves, and reflective of (but not reducible to) the new world created by the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the struggle for ethnic studies programs, and the other political, and ideological transformations of the time--as well as by the changing socioeconomic conditions of the 1960s and the new university that had materialized in response to them. (24)

In the terms of first-year writing, this is the story of the demise of current-traditional rhetoric and the birth of the process movement. (26)

Chapter 2: A Prehistory: 1848-1948

Focused on UW.

Chapter 3: The Postwar Regime: 1948-1968

Focuses on stability of current traditional model at UW until transitional period, near 1968.

Chapter 5: TA Experimentation: 1966-1969

But if the TAs cared deeply about the content of Freshmen English--about what their students were reading, writing, talking, and thinking about--they also paid close attention to pedagogical structure: where authority resided in the classroom, how goals were established and students evaluated, and so on. In fact, the TAs' experiments in educational process and procedure at UW in the late 1960s may be even more interesting, far-reaching, than their search for "relevant" content. I examine three such innovations below. (108)

1. First, the evidence indicates that many of the more radical English TAs at UW in 1968 and 1969 were trying to develop what one might call a teacherless writing class, in which authority is dramatically decentered and the student's responsibility for his or her reading, writing, and thinking--his or her own education and life--radically heightened. The idea is simple but, in the context of the old Lacy-Thomas course, revolutionary: in learning to write, students need to be personally engaged in what and how they are writing, to care enough as writers (as human beings, the TAs might have said) to truly reflect on and improve the ideas and language they are creating...Learning to write, in other words, could not be motivated from outside and above; it had to be a self-initiated and self-controlled process in which students themselves were empowered to take responsibility for their own education and allowed to discover meaning through their own language. (108-109)

"decentered authority"

2. This idea of adopting maximum flexibility toward the syllabus brings us to the second structural feature of the alternative freshman composition course English TAs at UW in the late 1960s seemed to be working toward. They were interested not just in the collaborative planning of the course with their students but in a new kind of planning altogether, not just a democratic writing class but an emergent one as well, involving a curriculum less prepackaged and more sensitive to the life taking place outside the classroom, the personal and intellectual growth of each student and the unfolding of the group's joint experience across the semester. If the idea discussed above concerns the teacherless classroom, where authority was radically decentered, this one concerns the syllabusless classroom, where the curriculum is every day an open narrative, changing according to the path that the participants, individually and together, pursue. We're talking, in other words, about taking the idea of contentlessness seriously, imagining a curriculum driven not by some prior and externally imposed syllabus, but by the constantly evolving desires of its actual participants, reflecting day-to-day on the meanings they wished to explore and construct, in dialogue with one another and the surrounding world (113)

3. Hand in hand with the teacher less, syllabus less curriculum was an insistence among English TAs at UW in the late 1960s that Freshman English move away from its obsession with the formal evaluation of student writing by teachers and toward informal evaluation by the students themselves, who would thus--it was hoped--be internally motivated to write and improve their writing, rather than be driven to do so by external compulsion and fear... This antipathy toward grades was tied in the 1960s, at least among radical and leftist educators, to a deeply felt neoromanticism regarding human growth and personal development, itself part of a wider antiauthoritarian, antibureacratic movement during the times. (116-17)

..."de-grading" the classroom was, along with proposals for alternative course readings, one of the two most frequently discussed and adopted pedagogical innovations among English TAs at UW in the late 1960s. (118)

Pedagogical innovations of English TAs at UW in the late 1960s:

• Employing relevant materials and topics
• Decentering classroom authority away from the teacher
• Opening syllabi to emergent needs and desires
• De-grading teacher-student communication (Figure 5.2, p. 123)

Reading, writing, and talking are always key in such projects because, according to radical teachers, it is only through the personal discovery, criticism, and cultivation of meaning that true growth can occur and freedom be attained. And this meaning must be radically substantive, that is, something completely different from the mere form that had previously characterized literacy education and language theory. (126)

The search for meaning in post-1960s discourse studies split between 1970s expressionism and cognitive rhetoric, both of which located meaning in the writer, and 1980s social constructionism, which located meaning in the reader, or rather, in society itself. The research reported here suggests that that split did not yet exist in TAs' pedagogical work or self-consciousness--to their and their students' credit. (127)

...one focused on meaning rather than form, dedicated to the pursuit of personal and social freedom, and requiring therefore a relevant, decentered, emergent, and non evaluative pedagogy... (128)

What I hope to have shown in this chapter is that for about two years, from the publication of the Mulvihill Report in early 1968 to the abolition of English 102 in late 1969, English TAs at UW engaged in a burst of classroom innovation, pedagogical reflection, and teacher organizing that may well be unique in the history of postsecondary education in this country. They experimented with new materials and techniques, organized and attended their own symposia, read extensively in educational theory, created study groups meant to develop alternative syllabi, conducted research on other writing programs, and reflected thoughtfully and honestly about their own teaching. (130)

Conclusion: Freshmen Composition at the Turn of the New Century

Or we could see it as part of the collision of incompatible institutional impulses that characterized higher education during the 1960s: the desire to meet the general education needs of the increasing number and diversity of entering students, on the one hand, and the growing pressure on faculty to produce specialized research, on the other. (195)

...I have tried to situate this story as much as possible within its particular historical context and to embed what happened in English 101 and 102 at UW in 1968 and '69 within a larger narrative about postsecondary education in th eland-grant public universities of the United States during "the long sixties" (196).

Part of this project, then, has been about emphasizing the radical specificity of the late 1960s within histories of twentieth century North American higher education in general an dog modern composition-rhetoric in particular. That's because I believe there has been a tendency within my own field to tell stories about writing and writing instruction in which the late 1960s are absorbed into narratives that are really about either the late 1950s-early 1960s and the birth of the "new rhetoric," or the 1970s and the rise of the process paradigm. In such accounts, the years 1967-1970 are made continuous with the events of earlier or later periods.

A more accurate account, I believe, would treat the late 1960s, at least in terms of freshman composition, as sui generic, its own cultural moment unassimilable to other periods, a time of radical rupture in the incipient discipline as well as higher education itself, when one era literally and figuratively came to an end and another, haltingly, incoherently, began. The late 1960s, from this point of view, was when current-traditionalism finally came up against a wall it could not surmount. Unfortunately, when that paradigm collapsed, there was nothing waiting in the wings powerful and attractive enough to take its place; at UW, for example, there was no discipline of composition that could supervise a new kind of course, no rhetoric revival in the English Department, no incipient process movement. At other schools, freshmen composition might have limped on for a few more years, intellectually orphaned, until the process revolution reinvented it, emerging at the end of the 1970s as the central project of a new, bona fide academic discipline, with full-fledged research programs, graduate degrees, and tenure-track faculty lines. (197)

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What has been useful about this book?

1. It's a history of an institution, as will be mine...
2. It's a history of a particular moment, a moment that I, too, am interested in...
3. There connections to be made between the "radical" and "leftist" pedagogies of the UW TAs and what the folks at UNH were up to...even though they, and especially Murray, did not frame what they were doing in these terms (I don't think).
4. The description of the program at UW gives me something to talk in response to or up against or in comparison to. It gives me a place to build from, and that is useful. Many times while I was reading, I wondered how I might use the UW story to help set up and contrast the story that I think I am starting to tell about UNH (both public, land-grant institutions, but UNH didn't even have it's Ph.D. program until around the time when the split at UW was happening).
5. Fleming provides a way of framing his project and argument that are helpful to me--just to see how the moves are made.