Janet Emig, Frank Smith, and the New Discourse about Writing and Reading... (Nystrand)

Some interesting things in this piece that I thought I would put down, quickly...Mostly, on methodology.

Using Bakhtin's (1986) dialogic framework of speech communication, I focus here on the impact of two of these scholars, Emig's influence on writing, and Smith's on reading, and attempt to show that while Harvard clearly played a fundamental role as a key formative context for the work that these individuals did, a full account of their influence also requires accounting for the receptive contexts beyond Harvard that valorized their ideas. Which is to say, it is important to examine which cultures supported their thought: the intellectual culture of the university and the culture of the world beyond the university. Understanding the eventual, unpredictable influence of these innovative scholars requires a close look at how, in Bakhtin's terms, their work was refracted and valorized, often in surprising ways, by teachers, by other researchers, by government officials, and by the general public—by the culture of their times. That is, by the unique sociocultural contexts, or chronotopes, of North America during the 1970s and 1980s. (122-123)

Like Murray...

Emig and Smith both sought to reform instruction, and each argued that effective reform required neither new curricula nor novel instruc tional techniques, but rather a fundamentally new conceptualization of the nature of literacy instruction, emphasizing learning rather than teaching. (124)

A concise statement of Emig's significance:

At the time, few might have predicted that within a few years Emig's work would become widely recognized as a pioneering work in English education. By all accounts, Emig's dissertation study began to have con siderable influence among North American writing teachers and researchers by the mid-1970s. It established the composing process as a key concept in the new discourse about writing, and shifted pedagogical attention away from prescriptive characterizations concerning model texts to empirical descriptions of the real-time composing processes of ordinary student writers. (126)

I was struck by Nystrand's discussion of the "temperament" of Noam Chomsky and I'm wondering or thinking about the role of temperament in Murray. Of Chomsky, Nystrand writes:

Moreover, his intellectual temperament challenging existing ideas and official accounts in both linguistics and national politics was completely consistent with vigorous protests and challenges to estab lished authority ofcampus administration and to the established powers in Washington. (130)

Later, Nystrand quotes Wayne O'Neil, head of the linguistic's department at MIT, who said of Chomsky:

But uh, yeah, if you're a questioning person, you don't need limit your questions to any particular set of issues. (131)

I like these passages because I think they capture a sense of Murray's temperament, too. He, too, was a questioning person...and this seems worth talking about.

Ways of writing/organizing claims:

• Smith be came a reading scholar and Emig a writing scholar less through will and career plans than by cultural change that supported disciplinary shifts both inside and outside the academy, which conferred professional status upon them. (138)
• The movement in Emig's case is just the opposite: it is about bringing the world into the academy. Her intellectual legacy was making empirical descriptions of ordinary student writing legitimate as a research problem. Her personal stoiy is that of a woman's struggle from the margins of academia to win respect as a female academic interested in both writing and instruction, or as Emig put it in my (1995) interview with her, "There's an intertwining among status/as a woman, status of writing, and status of teaching—three classes of second-class citizenship going on simultaneously." These were difficult challenges. (138)
• Emig and Smith figure as protagonists in my narrative because their work so clearly played a key role in these developments. Both Emig and Smith drew from then current concerns and intellectual traditions a set of more or less coherent ideas about language and mind. They transformed them into concepts and arguments that met a receptive audience in professional and instructional contexts, including departments of English and writing classrooms. (139)

More on methodology...

Thus, the emergence of the new discourse on writing and reading in North America in the 1970s, like any new discourse, is appropriately conceptualized as a semiotic problem. In dialogic terms, the problem is one of understanding the value and use of any given utterance, text, or voice by relating it (as a link in Bakhtin's chain of speech communication) to the voices and texts that precede and influence it, and to the voices and texts that follow and are influenced by it, which is to say, those that accept and find value in, or "valorize" it. In other words, tracing the influence of various actors and voices in the development of a field requires two complementary inquiries. Attention must be paid first to the formative contexts which influence the actors, and then to their receptive contexts in which their ideas are valued, used, and resonate. It is just such use and resonance, of course, that enable actors to become voices. Moreover, actors become disciplinary voices and elements of intellectual histories only if their work somehow bridges both formative and receptive contexts, and indeed, this is why Emig's Composing Processes ofTwelfth Graders and Smith's Understanding Reading became key texts in the new pedagogical discourse about writing and reading. Disciplinary fields are fields of voices and texts. These voices struggle, echo, resonate, "refract," and sometimes "strive to ignore" each other, as Wertsch (1985, p. 65) puts it. Some, but not all, of the voices in the new discourse about writing and reading were conventional and institutional, including the instructional voices of teachers and students, as well as studies, dissertations, and published articles and books. The main formative voices came from graduate school, but some of the voices were cultural and political from sources much larger than the academy itself. Together these voices constitute the "textual space" in which disciplinary voices have meaning and gain influence (cf. Nystrand, 1982). (139-140)

Our study shows how questions about the influence of Emig and Smith raise a key, Foucaultian question concerning discursive formation: What was it about historical circumstances and conditions in North America circa 1970 that promoted cognitive conceptions of writing and empirical methods of research and eventually fueled the new discourse about writing and reading? Why these ideas then?

[Smith and Emig's] paths of influence begin to make sense only when we expand our inquiry to include the contexts of their education and work, especially the latter. The receptive contexts are far harder to grasp than the formative contexts; indeed, we have only to survey the citations in their major publications to gain areasonable understanding of many if not most of the varied voices that influenced their thinking. Less obvious are the effects of the receptive contexts in which their works were used and achieved resonance. It is the receptive contexts that introduced some of the most intricate twists and turns in their careers, and so they complicate our efforts to understand their influence. (141)

There is a lot here to borrow and use methodologically speaking...