How the Writing Process Came to UMass/Amherst (Charles Moran)

Though Moran claims to be telling the story of just one institution, he describes a series of changes that occurred in almost every university in the country. (Tobin, 12)

There are many things to like about this chapter, which is also a history and a kind of reflection/personal meditation.

Rather than focus on a crisis moment as others have done (although there is a sort of a crisis or at least moment of transition woven in), Moran frames his article as a kind of evolution. He begins:

In 1981 the University of Massachussetts had what Richard Young and Maxine Hairston then would have termed a "current traditional" freshmen writing program: some subject-matter (literature, film), interspersed with writing assignments that were completed, then graded, then returned. In 1982, one year later, the university had a radically different writing program, one based on the work of Janet Emig, Peter Elbow, Roger Garrison, Donald Murray, and the other pioneers of what was then known as a "process" approach to writing... How did such a radical change come to pass? (133)

So, on the one hand, this is a history. How did the program at UMass transition from "current-traditional" to "process" in the course of just one year (but what was that current-traditional approach previously in place, exactly)? What were the "complex processes of institutional change" around freshmen English and writing instruction at UMass? (answer:

There is also, though, a really excellent assessment of Garrison and Murray and Moran, in several places, attempts to describe the ways in which Murray's thinking about the teaching of writing changed over the years. This chapter gives me something to work with (and against). So, let's get to it. First, the program itself. What happened?

Early on in the chapter Moran concedes that he will tell an "extraordinary" story in the pages ahead. The story is extraordinary, unique and, I would add, significant, in three ways, according to Moran:

• an English Department at a Ph.D.-granting research university was instrumental in undergraduate curricular change;
• an English Department served as a locus for curricular change in a field it apparently did not value, the teaching of writing;
• and an English Department at a Ph.D.-granting research university was influenced by texts from two communities it did not often encounter, the community of professional writers and the community of two-year teachers. (134)

Here are the basic details of the timeline

• 1967: Walker Gibson arrives (from Amherst?)
• 1970: Gibson establishes the Rhetoric Program, a separate unit from the English Department (thus English is separated from Freshmen English). English subsequently suffers as the number of majors drops and it no longer has the responsibility to teach Freshmen English or a two-semester lit sequence.
• 1971: UMass English faculty, at the urging of the chair, begin outreach beyond university (lasts into the early 1980s). Connections forged with community colleges (Springfield Technical Community College) and public schools (Springfield Public Schools).
• 1973: initial exposure to work of Murray and Garrison
• 1973-77: With Tom Carnicelli and Lester Fisher, Garrison runs the "UNH-Westbrook College Summer Institute for Two-Year College Writing Teachers"
• 1973: Leheny and Moran begin to experiment with the Garrison/Moran model in collaboration between MAT program and Jim Collins at Springfield Technical High School.
• 1978 & 1980: Collins and Moran host NEH-sponsored institute on the teaching of writing for MA secondary English teachers
• 1981: Rhetoric Program at UMass collapses after a decade of underfunding by college and avoidance by English faculty. Moran (and Lehany?) create a new first-year writing course for UMass (which includes a junior-year WAC program)

On Murray

Though Garrison and Murray promulgated remarkably similar pedagogies, though both were New Englanders, and though Garrison taught at Murray's home institution during the summers of 1973-77, the two men hardly knew one another. (136)

The reasons for the difference have to do with character and situation. Garrison was a self-styled outsider and iconoclast, a person who deliberately remained outside the growing community of scholars in the field; Murray was, and is, a generous and sociable man who moves comfortably in the world of professional conferences. (137)

Murray's book came to us, as had Garrison's monograph, through channels outside those normally open to professors of English Literature at research universities. Indeed, as Tom Newkirk has recently suggested, Murray's approach "was defined as in opposition to writing practices of the university" (6). As its title suggests, Murray's work drew on a non-academic, "writerly" tradition--he himself a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a novelist, and essayist. (138)

Moran has a section called "The Newsroom" in which he organizes a discussion of how the Garrison and Murray approach worked under the model of the newsroom that both men brought with them to higher education. He opens this section with an interesting line: "Both what now seem to us the good and the bad in Garrison's and Murray's work inhere in the analogy they drew between the freshmen writing classroom and a journalist's newsroom. (141)

Garrison and Murray bring the newsroom--a writer's workplace--into the regular freshmen writing classroom, and it is accepted, despite what might seem to be a bit of a problem--there's no newspaper. (142).

For both Garrison and Murray the teacher is an editor, the students are cub reporters, and there are facts to be collected, column inches to be written, deadlines to be met. (142)--the passage on p. 142 where Moran works this metaphor seems a bit forced in Murray's case...?

Murray's anti-intellectualism: "Less the pugilist and more the man of letters, Don Murray quoted Frost--in support of his victim, "be specific; don't generalize;" "Intellectuals deal in abstraction. It's much safer that way" (1968, 5). (145)

We guess that Garrison's and Murray's a-rhetorical view of writing was the result of three factors:

• the a-rhetorical stance of most English departments, then and now;
• our continuing reluctance to look at the rhetorical situation of the student in what we call "academic writing";
• the fact that both Garrison and Murray were journalists (he then goes on to expand on the third point (...the journalist's audience is an audience that one "learns" on the job and which, once learned, disappears from the writer's consciousness). (146)

On pre-writing: "For Don Murray in 1968 and again in 1978, pre-writing was chiefly done off paper. You'd think, and maybe sketch an outline, and then write. For all the "process" that there is in the first edition of A Writer Teaches Writing, it still foregrounds a think-then-write model" (147). See rest of paragraph for further elaboration and also how Murray reconsidered this as time went on.

UMass Program

Since its inception in 1982, the University Writing Program has evolved, with the field of composition studies, away from models we first found in 1973 in Garrison's and in Murray's work. So, too, has Don Murray. While Garrison remained outside the culture of composition studies to the end of his life (he died in 1984), Murray has evolved with the field and has lived long, holding fast to his base but acknowledging and incorporating the theory and practice of his colleagues in the profession. James Berlin notes a post-1975 "tendency of certain rhetorics within the subjective and transactional categories to move in the direction of the epistemic" (183); Murray, and we, have participated in this move. Indeed, Murray's entirely rewritten second edition of A Writer Teaches Writing (1985) is one of the three books that our Writing Program gives today, in 1994, to each of its new teachers. (143)

We can't say that we have improved, though we may think we have, but we can say with assurance that we have evolved. It is my belief that the model that Garrison and Murray provided in 1973--the one-to-one editorial conference--has made this evolution possible. (143)

The Garrison/Murray writing classroom format made it possible--not inevitable, but possible--that we would see and understand our student writers, modifying our pedagogy to suit particular students and particular times. (143)

Moran then sets up a what-have-we-kept/what-have-we-ditched explanation of the current program at UMass, circa 1994:

Kept:

• conferencing
• activity is what happens in the classroom
• students publish their work
• prompts are preferred over assignments
• grades are delayed
• content of the course is student's writing

Ditched:

• We've left behind, too, Garrison and Murray's early-1970s belief that there is a single-style, a single "good." Both men were essentialists and positivists. Beneath all that fat there was bone. (145) and These assumptions--that there is a single good style, that this "good style" is a superior communicative instrument, one with special access to our "common core"--sit nicely with New Criticism, still in the 1970s the dominant school in literary studies, and with our colonial past, but not so well with post-structuralist criticism and a post-colonial, emerging cultural democracy. Moreover, our move since 1980 into "Writing Across the Curriculum" is founded upon the belief that differences among worlds of discourse are an appropriate focus for our pedagogy. (146)
• In addition, we've left behind the early-70's assumption, found in both the Garrison and Murray texts that came our way in 1973, that writing is at its most important level a-social, a transaction between writer, teacher/editor/diagnostician, and text. (146)
• In addition, we've complicated our sense of what pre-writing might be, including in our pedagogy Peter Elbow's work on free writing. (147)
• We have also left behind Garrison's reliance on the "modes of discourse" as a framework for a semester's work. (147)
• We've also modified our vision of the writer as an autonomous unit. (148)

Some Questions:

• Woven into the texture of this narrative is the assumption that student writing is really "endless stacks of mediocre papers."... Murray, too, despite his evident faith in the latent skill and competence of student writers, occasionally engaged in some genial student-bashing. "No teacher," Murray wrote, "will convert all the hard-core anti-writers" (1968, 160). 
• Murray on free-writing...how else did this evolve?
• How else did Murray's thinking evolve between 1968 and 1986 or so?

I love this line:

I need to say that the Garrison/early-Murray model still lives deep in me, accounting for much that I consider good in my teaching and much that I now consider less-than-good. (149)

It captures in a concise way a good deal of what I, myself, have felt as of late and a good deal of what I think I am trying to work through with this project.