Each new generation (and half generation) of rhetoric and composition scholars from Kitzhaber and Berlin to Gere and Johnson extends our understanding of archival recovery by producing a version of history that in turn prompts new questions and concerns about the historiographic process and product. (24)
As Robert Connors writes, the historian's project in rhetoric and composition is "the telling of stories about the tribe that make the tribe real [...W]e are telling the stories of our fathers and mothers, we are legitimating ourselves through legitimating them" (234).
In the field of rhetoric and composition, it has become almost commonplace for researchers to devote space in their manuscripts to revealing their standpoint and interestedness in relation to their project. (21)
This understanding of one's position inside of and approach to the final text must accompany each scholar from the initial stages of archival inquiry through the completion of the writing, steadily inter- animating the multiple acts that constitute the writing process (21).
Often, it is one's positionality that creates a fruitful, research-launching dissonance. At the outset of our historiographic projects, both of us felt dissonance in our intellectual lives, with our field of study, with received-at-the-time history. Instead of contributing positive value to our daily life, traditional histories of rhetoric and composition offered shortcomings... (21)
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In their book chapter "Invigorating Historiographic Practices," Cheryl Glenn and Jessica Enoch encourage composition historians to reflect critically on the process of conducting archival research. Glenn and Enoch ask us to reconsider the texts and locations of our investigations, the role of the various agents we come into contact with in the archive, and the role of reflection during the research process. They remind us that composition history is always both partial and interested, "partial in the sense that it remains incomplete with respect to the reality it presumes to depict and interested in the sense that it is an interpretive rendering of evidence" (21). They assert that, in regard to the interested nature of composition histories, it has now become common for researchers in the field to convey their perspective and investment in their projects within their texts and they point out that it is often one's very positionally within a historical project which can "create a fruitful, research-launching dissonance" (21). "At the outset of our historiographic projects," they write, "both of us felt dissonance in our intellectual lives, with our field of study, with received-at-the-time history. Instead of contributing positive value to our daily life, traditional histories of rhetoric and composition offered shortcomings" (21).
In keeping with convention, in what follows, I attempt to convey a sense of my own positionally within this historical project, a project which emerged from a similar (but different) kind of dissonance as that described by Glenn and Enoch. As is often the case with such experiences, this one began with an act of naming--an encounter of one's self or, in this case, one's work, that felt both uncomfortably familiar and strangely inaccurate. The moment of dissonance came while I was reading James Berlin's well-known article "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class" (1988) in graduate school. In some ways, I recall finding Berlin's article helpful--acts of naming often are. As a newcomer to the field and a relative newcomer to the teaching of writing, I was not aware that my method of teaching had a name and was known, among others who had been in the parlor longer than I, as expressivism or, per Berlin, expressionistic rhetoric.
What wasn't as helpful, or what felt untrue and inaccurate, was Berlin's characterization and dismissal of expressionistic rhetoric as politically ineffectual. This way of teaching writing, which I had experienced myself as an undergraduate at UNH and which I was now deploying in my own classroom seemed, to me, just the opposite--seemed empowering, both politically and personally.
In the "Introduction" to their history of the Penn State writing program, 1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition, Brent Henze, Jack Selzer and Wendy Sharer, assert that while individual styles and preferences certainly play a role in shaping one's philosophy of teaching writing, "the teaching of composition is [also] shaped by the available means of persuasion that are presented to us by intellectual and professional communities (broadly considered)--communities shaped, inevitably, by culture, circumstance, and history" (3). In my own case, the "available means of persuasion" shaping my thinking about writing and writing instruction came, in large part, from my early exposure, as an undergraduate, to the process pedagogies of writing advocated by the English Department of the University of New Hampshire (UNH) in the early to mid-1990s and my experiences as a pre-service teacher in the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program at the University of Iowa in the late 1990s. As an undergraduate at UNH, I experienced pedagogies which encouraged me to use writing as a tool to explore my experiences and my world. As a graduate student at the University of Iowa, under the tutelage of Dr. Bonnie Sunstein (herself a graduate of the doctoral program at UNH) and other process advocates, I learned pedagogies which allowed me to teach others how to use writing as a tool to explore their experiences and their worlds. At Iowa, I very much felt two things simultaneously. First, I felt as though the curtain was being peeled back and I was learning the "tricks of the trade" that had guided my teachers at UNH. If, at UNH, I had begun to learn the how of writing, at Iowa, I had begun to learn the how of teaching writing, and the why. Second, and of equal importance, under the tutelage of Dr. Sunstein, I felt myself being initiated into a new generation of writing teachers in what I have come to think of as the UNH School. As I began to read the work of folks like Donald Murray and Donald Graves and then Sunstein, Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater, Lad Tobin, Donna Qualley, Tom Romano and others, I began to see that I could trace a kind of UNH lineage and could even locate myself within this tradition and I took pride in doing so. In this way, it's not just that my philosophy of teaching writing was shaped by the "culture, circumstance, and history" of the UNH School. Having experienced the curriculum of this school myself as an undergraduate and having felt in profound and deeply personal ways its value in my life, my allegiance to it came to go beyond one's typical commitment to a method of teaching. Being of the UNH School was a process of forming strong identifications with a particular community and its practices and values. Roz Ivanic (1998) has defined identification as all those "processes whereby individuals align themselves with groups, communities, and/or sets of interests, values, beliefs and practices" (11). My allegiance to the UNH School came to be nothing short of an act of identification--as much a process of becoming the kind of teacher and person I wanted to be as a process of learning particular methods for teaching writing.
I have taken the time and space here to try to convey a sense of my commitments to and identifications with what I am calling the UNH School as a way of helping readers appreciate the degree of dissonance I felt when I encountered Berlin's articulation and repudiation of expressionistic rhetoric, a pedagogy he explicitly links to one of the founders of the UNH School, Donald Murray, and thus, to the UNH School itself. For, when I encountered Berlin's article, while I had only recently learned the term for what the UNH School was a reaction against (current-traditionalism), I had long since pledged my allegiance to what seemed to me to be its core tenets: writers should write what they know, but also use writing as a tool to learn; good writing requires both thoughtful response and a sense of community; writing is revision and revision is writing; and, most significantly, while writing is never easy, there should be some pleasure in it. Lad Tobin, himself a product of and advocate for the UNH School, has suggested that the most important question one asks when contemplating composition pedagogies is the question of whether the course should be "organized around production or consumption"(15). At the time when I encountered Berlin, I was squarely in the "production" camp and an adherent to the process approach to the teaching of writing that I had experienced at UNH, learned to implement at Iowa, and come to associate with the UNH itself. I thus felt secure and probably a bit over-confident, as those just past the newcomer stage of professionalization processes sometimes do, that I was on the "right" side of history.
Reading Berlin called all of that into question, a necessary but still frustrating development--necessary in the sense that, while I can agree that, as Berlin wrote elsewhere, "The test of one's competence as a composition instructor [...] resides in being able to recognize and justify the version of the [writing] process being taught, complete with all of its significance for the student" (Berlin, 1982, p. 777), I can still feel frustrated that, in his scheme, expressionistic rhetoric comes out the loser (along with cognitive rhetoric). While others (Ellsworth, 1989; Durst, 1999) have already advanced concerns about, as Berlin puts it, "making the very question of ideology the center of classroom activities" (478), my concerns when I first read him and still, today, have more to do with the truth value of Berlin's characterizations. Specifically, Berlin claims that expressionistic rhetoric--which he identifies with several well-known scholars, but specifically Murray and Peter Elbow, whom he singles out as exemplars--seeks to vest all power in the individual, thus rendering impossible the possibility of collective action or political protest. With expressionistic rhetoric, he asserts, there is "only the individual, acting alone and apart from others, who can determine the existent, the good, and the possible" (486). Berlin's full critique of expressionistic rhetoric and, by extension, Murray, and by further extension, much of the UNH School, comes in the following passage, which has haunted me ever since I first encountered it and which I quote at length for its clarity and fairly damning tone:
Expressionistic rhetoric continues to thrive in high schools and at a number of colleges and universities. At first glance, this is surprising, unexpected of a rhetoric that is openly opposed to establishment practices. This subversiveness, however, is more apparent than real. In the first place, expressionistic rhetoric is inherently and debilitatingly divisive of political protest, suggesting that effective resistance can only be offered by individuals, each acting alone. Given the isolation and incoherence of such protest, gestures genuinely threatening to the establishment are difficult to accomplish. Beyond this, expressionistic rhetoric is easily co-opted by the very capitalist forces it opposes. After all, this rhetoric can be used to reinforce the entrepreneurial virtues capitalism most values: individualism, private initiative, the confidence for risk taking, the right to be contentious with authority (especially the state). It is indeed not too much to say that the ruling elites in business, industry, and government are those most likely to nod in assent to the ideology inscribed in expressionistic rhetoric. (487)
With this critique, Berlin effectively turns a method for teaching writing which many, myself included, have experienced as empowering into yet another tool for manipulation of the masses by the power elite. In attaching names to this rhetoric, Berlin effectively turns those individuals and the many who identify with them into dupes of the system. While, on the one hand, attaching names as a kind of shorthand is understandable and useful as a point of reference, on the other hand, identifying actual people with the various pedagogies or rhetorics that one is judges ineffectual feels rather personal and, well, unfair.
In his response to and refutation of Berlin, Thomas Newkirk (2008) advances two arguments. First, he calls into question the notion that writing pedagogies lead inevitably towards certain kinds of outcomes. Pointing to the myriad examples of writers who have gone on to use what they learned via so-called expressionistic rhetoric of the kind practiced by Murray and others of the UNH School to effect social and political change at local and national levels, Newkirk asserts that "it is debatable--if not doubtful--that one can predetermine the ideological or political use that will be made of a writing pedagogy" (51). Second, Newkirk calls into question whether or not Murray's work (or Elbow's or any composition theorist's, for that matter) can so easily be reduced to a single rhetoric or ideology. As I will show in this book, Murray's thinking about the teaching of writing evolved a good deal over the course of his career. In fact, those who look closely at the full range of his writing will find that Murray was always interested in the cognitive aspects of writing. In "Rhetoric and Ideology," Berlin references just two of Murray's published works in his attempt to articulate how Murray's pedagogy fits into the expressionist rhetoric camp: his first book, A Writer Teaches Writing (1968) and a single article, "Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in an Age of Dissent"(1969)--both of which were written early in Murray's career and one of which, "Finding Your Own Voice," was published at the peak of the student protest movement and so should have been better contextualized within that frame. That Berlin, writing in 1988, at the end of Murray's career, with countless of Murray's books and articles to consult while summoning evidence for his claims, drew solely on the above two works to make his case seems short-sighted and less than rigorous.
While I find the logic of Newkirk's arguments compelling, my primary objection to Berlin's assertions is far more personal. While personal experience, offered as a form of evidence, is inevitably viewed with skepticism by those advancing claims in academic settings, and while it is not the only evidence I will summon in this book as I try to tell a different story about both Murray and the UNH School, my own personal experience suggests that the writing pedagogies I and thousands of other undergraduate students experienced at UNH, which Berlin and would dub of the expressionistic variety and, therefore, politically ineffectual, have, certainly not in all cases, but probably in many and at least in one (my own), had the exact opposite effect as Berlin would have predicted. To put my experience in the terms of the framework that Berlin himself draws on in "Rhetoric and Ideology,"advanced by Goran Therborn, I will attempt to show how the UNH school provided me with the opportunity to address Therborn's first question for analyzing ideology, "What exists?" which then lead me to the point where I could begin to address Therborn's second two questions, "What is good?" and "What is possible?" (Therborn, qtd. in Berlin, 479). By drawing on textual artifacts from my time at UNH as an undergraduate, I attempt, in chapter one, to show how what I learned via the UNH School functioned to move me to the point where political action became possible.
As one can see, this history, like all such projects, is an invested one. In addition to an attempt to trace the professional significance of a single man (Donald Murray) and single institutional site of writing (UNH), it is also an attempt to re-articulate for one's self the value of something--in this case, a way of thinking about writing and the teaching of writing that I have come to think of as the UNH School. But this history is interested in another way. At the end of his article, Newkirk (2008) concisely articulates the consequences of works like "Rhetoric and Ideology" for a generation of composition scholars and teachers: "[A]fter twenty years, 'expressivism' has been part of the vocabulary of composition studies, a frequently used shorthand that dissolves the complex work of Murray and others into a compact position that in my view was never accurate in the first place" (51). If, as Newkirk asserts, expressivism and all that that term came to connote was never an accurate label for the work of Murray and others of the UNH School, how should we think about him and about the UNH? And if we open the gaze outward from UNH itself, how should we think about the contributions of Murray and the UNH School to the field of composition and, perhaps, English studies during the period under investigation?
Far from disinterested, my purpose here is to discover and advance a history of the contributions of the UNH school, that, to borrow from Glenn and Enoch, can contribute "positive value" to my life and to the lives of those who associate with this school and to do justice to the considerable efforts made by those of the UNH School to improve writing instruction in the United States during the final quarter or third of the twentieth century.
Discuss the article by Yagelski...
But Berlin pushes one step past Tobin, insisting that "Everyone teaches the process of writing, but everyone does not teach the same process." He continues: "The test of one's competence as a composition instructor, it seems to me, resides in being able to recognize and justify the version of the process being taught, complete with all of its significance for the student" (Berlin, 1982, p. 777). As a doctoral student, I was now learning, per Berlin and others, to distinguish between process approaches. There was, I was learning, more out there than what I had intuited NOT to teach, the current-traditional method, and what I had learned to teach, the process approach--which I associated with the UNH school.
What I found notable about "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class" when I read it back then and what I still find notable today is the fact that Berlin actually calls out names in the article. While, on the one hand, doing so is understandable and useful as a point of reference for readers, on the other hand, identifying actual people with the various pedagogies or rhetorics that one is about to judge ineffectual feels rather personal--to those individuals and to those who identify with them--especially given the lack of rigor and analysis Berlin brings to some of his analyses and critiques. In the section of his article called "Expressionistic Rhetoric," for example, Berlin calls out both Peter Elbow and Donald Murray as exemplars, but in the case of Murray, he references just two of Murray's published works in his attempt to articulate how Murray's pedagogy fits into the expressionist camp--A Writer Teaches Writing (1968) & "Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in an Age of Dissent"(1969)--both of which were written early in Murray's career and one of which, "Finding Your Own Voice," was published at the peak of the student protest moment nationally and locally, at UNH, and so should have been better contextualized. My critique of Berlin's taxonomy then and now is, no doubt, influenced to a considerable degree by my own identification with Murray and the UNH school that he helped create, but even a less interested reader would find Berlin's selectivity when marshaling evidence for his claims a bit on the flimsy side.
Two kinds of dissonance:
1. frustration with the characterization of the education I received at the hands of Jim Berlin
2. a desire to reconnect with the pedagogies I experienced as an undergraduate after moving away from these pedagogies during doctoral training and during the early years of my professional career--a desire to revisit, reclaim, reconnect, rediscover that which I knew contained much meaning for me while I was experiencing them but which I no longer believed in in the same way
Search for a stable self
Social and political consciousness
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After I left Iowa, I taught English for three years before entering into the doctoral program in composition at UNH (one year in a public high school and two more years as an adjunct instructor in a diverse range of public and private colleges and universities). Everywhere I went I spread the gospel of the UNH school:
(Footnote, in Bonnie's book chapter, she draws on the work of Don Graves to offer the following four terms, which perhaps sum-up the UNH approach: time, choice, community, response, p. 109).
Because I felt that the UNH school approach to the teaching of writing had empowered me as an undergraduate, had helped me to understand both myself and my world better and had developed in me a sense of political and social consciousness, I felt it my obligation to provide the students with whom I was working a similar kind of opportunity.
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