Revisiting the Current-Traditional Era: Innovations in Writing Instruction at the University of New Hampshire, 1940-1949 (Tirbassi)

Abstract

This institutional historical study highlights how the archival records of even one institutions's writing culture can complicate the field's current views of the current-traditional period and issues a challenge to some of the assumptions in composition studies about 1940s writing instruction. I argue that organizing writing theory and pedagogy in terms of periods can limit ways that we conceive of, study, and write about historical and current shifts in writing theory. (xv)

The findings from my study illustrate that institutional writing cultures emerge from reciprocal relationships between the formal writing curriculum and the writing initiatives in the extracurriculum. (xv)

Overall, this dissertation demonstrates that the study of institutional writing cultures is a productive means of understanding and analyzing contradictions, connections, and intersections among various sites of writing in localized contexts... (xv)

Chapter 1

Overall, my dissertation project explores innovations in writing instruction during the 1940s, using as its focal point a historical institutional case study of the University of New Hampshire (UNH) writing culture during this decade. (12)

However, we could also consider the possibility that the first-year course might be representative of traditional values of writing instruction--one of the last elements of the curriculum to change, rather than one of the first. Because all students entering the university must take the first-year composition course, and because faculty across the curriculum have opinions about the teaching of writing, the stakes are high in undertaking curricular change for this course and these changes must be vetted through a hierarchical series of institutional approvals (both official and unofficial). It seems that focusing our attention on the first-year course does not give us a complete understanding of the conversations shaping beliefs about writing and writing instruction--rather, this course provides us, in many cases, with existent, traditional or institutionally-approved views, rather than emerging views. (30)

One of my primary questions throughout this study has been how a focus on first-year composition histories can cause us to miss "writing instruction" in the periphery of the university setting. (31)

It is true, for example, that the University of New Hampshire first-year course looks much like the so-called current-traditional courses described by many composition scholars. However, we have the benefit of looking backward, of knowing what innovations in writing instruction came, in part, through scholars from this university just twenty years later, in the 1960s. Some of these scholars were students at UNH during the 1940s and were ostensibly influenced by the writing culture at UNH at the time, raising questions about what other aspects of the institution's writing culture we need to know more about. If we think of the first-year course as part of a larger writing culture, including creative writing or, under the larger umbrella of English Studies (since, at that time, the distinctions were not as solidified as they are now), then the field of composition might gain a more complete understanding of writing instruction before the field came into being...and perhaps how more current pedagogies, influenced by an institution's or region's writing culture, came into being. (32)

In this dissertation, I reconsider writing instruction in the 1940s and argue that innovations in writing instruction emerged in the 1940s in part due to the strictures of the formal curriculum, the diverse interests of the faculty, and extracurricular initiatives. I also discuss how external factors such as World War II, the GI Bill, and the interest in developing a nationalistic identity in the development of an American literary identity contributed to curricular shifts in formal and informal writing instruction. As part of this discussion, I do, naturally, include the first-year composition course at UNH, but I also look to innovations in the institutional periphery to gain a better understanding of how the extra curriculum and the formal curriculum shape one another (33).

Rather than focusing on extracurricular learning alone, I consider intersections between extracurricular and curricular approaches to writing instruction--how each arena influenced each other, and what influences contributed to a writing culture at the University of New Hampshire during the 1940s. I argue that the extra curriculum and formal curriculum blended, in a sense, to form that writing culture. (34)

Ch. 3: Considering the State of a University and of 1940s Writing Instruction

What is English Studies?: Establishing a Disciplinary/Departmental Culture (p. 89-102)

Throughout the 1940s (and even today), the faculty at UNH was comprised of primarily literature professors, yet there were many non-literature specialists in the department whose areas of concentration were quite varied: advanced composition (Carroll Towle), freshman composition (Lucinda P. Smith), reading (Robert G. Webster), speech and communications (Edmund Cortez, head, Ray Keesey, instructor), theatre/drama (William Hennessy), and journalism (Harold Scudder). In the mid-1940s, Professor Gwynne Dagger also added a Humanities course of study to the English Department curriculum. Though the interdisciplinary--as we might term it now--of the English Department was celebrated publicly by the faculty and by English majors, several of these specialized areas of study eventually separated from the English department. During the 1940s and even through the majority of the 1950s, however, these areas remained firmly seated in the English Department. While sub-fields in the department often struggled for legitimacy in proposing courses beyond the lower level, since upper level courses were reserved for the English major; upper level speech or writing courses were seen as additional or supplemental advanced electives that students could take if they had the time in their schedule. Although the literary emphasis of the department was well-established by the 1940s, the existence of sub-fields within--not yet splintered from--the English department and significant changes in the university culture that I have described above ensured that debates would continue about the nature of English studies as well as the types of training English majors should receive to be adequately educated in the field of English (90-91).

Such debates were also quite prevalent at the University of New Hampshire, especially after World War II. From 1945-1949, multiple departmental meetings were spent discussing the types of courses that English majors needed to take and the ways to measure whether an English major had gathered the knowledge the faculty had tried to impart. The discussion about which courses to take represented a theoretical tug-of-war regarding which subjects should be taught in English studies. Whether the discussion was about how to restructure the English Education track or whether to reduce course offerings, referred to in the minutes as "contracting courses," the core of the discussion always focussed on literary studies. (92)

A second example of the literature-centeredness of the department arose in the Fall of 1945, when the faculty considered "restructuring" the English major. (93)

(regarding fall 1945) What I want to highlight here is that while some advanced courses were offered in dramatics, speech and composition, almost all of the courses required for the English major were literature courses. (93)

Here are three specific examples of these views from an English Departmental meeting on October 24, 1945:

Mr. Bingham thought that the emphasis should be "on literature or reading" (94)

In practice, however, the Department Chair's literary focus seems to have had the most sway with the rest of the department. (94)

The primary nature of the senior examination at UNH was performance-based; the English faculty wanted to test students' knowledge of the literary canon. (96)

Each of these smaller departmental discussions as well as Young's letter highlights the fact that the UNH English Department, like many departments across the country, was engaged in a moment of disciplinary definition. These endeavors to articulate the types of courses English majors should take and to assess the knowledge of English majors represent incremental steps toward the creation of a particular vision (or version) of English Studies, one that, while consonant with the national trend, grew and developed in the local context of the UNH English department. For UNH English faculty of the 1940s, these attempts to define their daily work was both pragmatic and philosophical in the sense that as they were shaping and revising the curriculum, they were describing "what they do" and "why" to themselves and to other faculty, students, and administrators. The examples I have presented here, the course requirements and the comprehensive exam for the English major, suggest that on the macro level, the UNH department's theoretical leanings were towards literature as the "most" legitimate course of study for English. While some members of the UNH English Department faculty held wider interests than just literary pursuits, a point I will explore in the following section and in subsequent chapters, this structuring of the English major around literature courses privileged this pursuit of literary study in particular. That faculty took a more conservative approach toward designing the major provides some insight into the development of the English Studies department at UNH but it also raises questions about whether this design was motivated by personal philosophies or by other external influences such as institutional or administrative pressures. (100)