"English Writing Instruction" (Berlin and Cobbs)

Berlin's Key Actors in the 20th century drama of "conflicting positions on the most effective method for teaching writing" (264):

Summary: During the between-wars period "the insistence of liberal culturalists on genius as the essential element of writing at its best was now givena  democratic application. Each and every individual was seen to possess creative potential, a potential the proper classroom environment could unlock and promote" (260)

1. sponsors of socially-based rhetorics (Dewey & Scott): an "insistence that writing is a social act performed through a complex interaction of writer, audience, subject, and language" (263) & "Those in the camp of social rhetoric, on the other hand, lay the blame for these disorders at the feet of the social and political arrangements generated by capitalism" (263).
2. sponsors of expressive writing (Hugh Mearns, Harold Rugg, John T. Frederick, Theodore Baird): "writing from this perspective enables students to get in touch with the private and the personal, the source of all that is meaningful" (261) & "those supporting the value of expressive writing looked to private and personal resolutions to the economic and social catastrophes of the day" (263). Dominant during the between-wars period, according to Berlin.
3. Social efficiency movement (G.K. Hall): "This movement argued for considering a student's stage of psychological development in planning instruction. Schools were also to become attentive to the needs of the workplace...Finally, school and work were regarded as places of equal opportunity where the best, the brightest, and the hardest working were to be rewarded in accordance with the strictest meritocratic principles" (256-57)
4. Liberal culturalists: "genius as the essential element of writing at its best" (260)
5. Life Adjustment: "personal and social adjustment became the great concern of post war education" (264), the "dominant influence in secondary school writing instruction" (265)
6. Communications Course: "a combination of writing, reading, speaking, and listening activities" (265) & "strongly influenced by the General Education movement during the 1930s and by the General Semantics school of linguistics" (265)

My Periods:

• 1945-1960 (p. 264-269)
• 1960-1975 (p. 269-275)
• 1975-1985 (p. 275-282)

As Lester Faigley has pointed out, an enormous expansion due to Baby Boomers came about just as composition studies was aspiring to disciplinary status: from 2.7 million in 1949-50, to 3.6 million in 1959-60, to more than 8 million in 1969-70 (250)

YALE!!! And liberal culture...

Of course, current-traditional rhetorics did not go unchallenged in the new college and university. Thier most important opponent was situated at Yale and other established prestigious Atlantic seaboard colleges. These schools cam eot stand for an ideal of English studies which has been labeled "liberal culture." It was Yale, after all, which in 1892 opposed Harvard's use of literature to teach composition, arguing that literature ought to be studied for its own sake. The proponenets of liberal culture argued that the literatrey text was the expression of hte highest potential of human nature, representing the perfect fusion of truth, goodness, and beauty. From this perspecdtive, the claims of current-traditional rhetoric were altogether too democratic, arguing mistakenly taht writing, like enginnering or farming or pharmacy, could be taught.

(this passage continues for another page or so and is useful in thinking through the backgrounds of Bingham and Towle, in particular)

See Palmer, Glenn. "Culture and Efficiency Through Composition." English Journal 1.8 (1912): 488- ?.
(A summary of the disagreement between Harvard and Yale was found in this essay...)

1945-1960

For expressionistic rhetoric, writing--all writing--is accordingly art. This means that it can be learned, and learned by all, but not taught. The work of the teacher is to provide an environment in which students can learn what cannot be directly imparted in instruction. The expression of the writer is the product of a private and personal vision that cannot be expressed in normal, everyday parlance. This language, after all, refers to the public world of sense data and social experience. The writer must instead learn to use metaphor to express meaning that is separate and above this limited realm. Sensory experience, on the other hand, is also very important since it provides experiences that can be used as materials for metaphor. Writing from this perspective enables students to get in touch with the private and the personal, the source of all that is meaningful. It therefore empowers the student to shape a newly uncovered and better self--that is, half creating and half discovering the source of all truth and value. Furthermore, this product of the authentic writing experience--the truly personal--is organic, representing the perfect fusion of form and content. Finally, this method of teaching writing is concerned with power and politics, sometimes by implication and at other times openly in its critique of the dehumanizing effects of industrial capitalism. Its response is to enable each individual to realize his or her true self in order to bring about a better society. In other words, the private and personal is always prior to the public and social, the latter being an effect of the former. (261)

...the communications course was varied in the form it assumed in colleges during the late 1940s and the 1950s, even including attempts to introduce life adjustment into the college. Most of these courses, however, were conservative, offering a current-traditional approach that presented communications in the service of the democratic ideals recently challenged from abroad. (265)

The distinguishing feature of the 1950s in considering the relation of literature to composition is that, for the first time since the Uniform Lists, college professors were in large numbers insisting that the best way to teach composition is through reading literature and writing about it. This was, in large part, a result of the sense of professional identity achieved by teachers of literature following the war... As indicated earlier, the arguments offered in defense of this view came directly from the tradition of liberal culture, still alive in literary studies. Students, it was charged, had nothing to say and literature provided them with rich subject matter. Writing about themselves required "a flair amounting to genius," and most were certainly "not geniuses." Reading literary texts and writing about them provided the knowledge and stimulation that the student needed to become liberally educated and enabled the teacher (almost certainly at this time a male) to keep his career alive and vital.  (266-67)

...the liberal culturalist notion of the uses of literature in the writing class is offered in the name of democracy. College is to prepare the leaders of a democratic society, and literature is the best means for doing so. (267)

Writing about literature was also offered in the interests of the college teachers themselves: after all, it was literature that they knew best and, if they were to be forced to teach writing, they ought certainly to do so by focusing on their own area of expertise. That this might mean serving the professional interests o the teachers more than the instructional needs of the students was not considered. (267)

The New Rhetoric and its proponents--including such as Janice Lauer, Richard Young, Frank D'Angelo, Richard Larsen, James Kinneavy and George Yoos--would in the next decade work to establish rhetoric and composition as a discipline. Their vision of composition teaching would continue to impact theorists and practitioners through the end of the century, with the majority of graduate programs offering coursework in historical rhetoric. (269)

Steward, Randall. "The Freshman Course Needs a Current of Ideas." College English 17 (1955): 16-19.

1960-1975

...the National Defense Education Act in 1958. This measure was at first designed to improve school instruction in math and the sciences, but by 1964 it also included the study of literature, language, and composition--particularly the latter two. (270)

James Berlin and Catherine Hobbs point to a number of measures by government agencies and private foundations during the late 1950s and early 1960s aimed at addressing the perceived crisis in public schools that arose, in large part, as a result of the Russian launch of Sputnik in 1957. The National Defense of Education Act, initially targeted at improving the teaching of math and sciences, ultimately expanded its mission to include the study and teaching of literature and composition. A "Basic Issues" conference on English studies was held in 1958 to investigate the issue of the English curriculum in the public schools. In 1959, the College Entrance Examination Board appointed a Commission on English to propose standards of achievement in English instruction. Berlin and HObbes argue that the most significant development for the teaching of composition during this time was the Woods Hold Conference of 1959 and its resultant report, The Process of Education (1960). Here, Jerome Bruner, the director of the conference, argued for a a school curriculum built around the structure of academic disciplines that would be presented to students in a sequential manner and according to their cognitive level of development. A final development was the establishment of Project English, a program for funding research founded in 1962 by the United States Office of Education. (270-271)

Berlin/Hobbes credit Bruner with providing the inspiration for what would become the "cognitive model" of composition instruction, for while Bruner was interested in the application of cognitive psychology to education, broadly speaking, the implications of his thinking for writing instruction, in particular, were clear....and developed by folks like Emig, Britton and Moffatt (see 270).

A second important development of this period came out of the 1966 Dartmouth conference. "Here the emphasis was not on mastering the composing process because of its value in solving writing problems, but experiencing it because of its value to the personal development of the student.

As Kantor has argued, the differences between the cognitive process of Bruner and the expressionist process of the Dartmouth Conference can be stated in a number of clear-cut oppositions: cognitive learning and intellectual development against affective response; a process of knowing "a body of material in a 'spiraling fashion' against a 'process of personal development"; communication for practical purposes against symbolic expression for self fulfillment; discovery through induction against creation through intuition. (273)

The result of the Dartmouth Conference was to reassert for United States teachers the value of the expressive model of writing. (273)

College English teachers who employed the expressionist process methods were Donald Murray, Walker Gibson, William Coles, Jr., Elizabeth Cowan, and Peter Elbow. It shouldn't finally be noted that the cognitivist process and the expressionist process were most often called upon to support divergent political perspectives. The expressionist process was frequently taught in classes organized around resistance to dominant political formations, particularly during the 1960s, in the interest of preserving the integrity of the individual. The cognitive process, on the other hand, most commonly adopted the stance of disinterested rationality, either avoiding political conflicts or addressing them as rational problems to be addressed in the terms of one academic discipline or another. The result was a tendency to reduce social, political, and personal problems to problems in technical management. Both cognitivists and expressionists emphasized the private and psychological elements of composing, the first the rational and the second the emotional. (274)