Local Histories: Reading the Archives of Composition (Donahue & Flesher Moon)

Ch. 1: Locating Composition History

When one works in the archives, one finds not only the official records of enrollment, curriculum, and achievement, but also--often uncatalogued, undigested, uninterpreted--personal copies of books, notes, and papers that mattered to those who read and wrote that place, at particular moments, on unique rhetorical occasions. Such items may be--most often, in fact, surely are--collected intermittently and without the kind of annotation that would help the researcher in the archives to assess confidently how typical--or not--were those moments and occasions at that place. Similarly, one cannot always trace the provenance of archival materials. (2)

...drawing on a wide range of archival documents, including, but not limited to: faculty meeting minutes, personal letters, student literary magazines, alumni magazines, yearbooks, course catalogues, reports to the trustees, class notebooks, student essays, unpublished lectures, and mission statements. (2)

This book's contributors attempt to reconstruct how students--variously inflected by class, race, and gender--have learned to write at different times, in different places, with different teachers, textbooks, curricula, and how teachers, also at different times, in different places, have developed pedagogies, built curriculum and programs, and contributed to the emergence of a discipline. (2-3)

We necessarily read the past from where we stand now. (11)

Local histories of composition test our theories about the influence of popular textbooks, innovative teachers, dominant pedagogies, and landmark curricular reforms. (12)

We hope that this book will inspire our colleagues to find their ways into and around their own institution's archives and to produce many more local histories... (12)

...explicitly reflective critical practice (12)

"Thinking Like That: The Ideal Nineteenth-Century Student Writer" (Welsch)

Through a close reading of five of Mahala's essays, I explore how Mahala's historical, social, and cultural influences converged with academic expectations and the rules of rhetoric outlined in Whately's Elements of Rhetoric--the "most widely used rhetoric text in American colleges between 1835--1865"--and Samuel Newman's A Practical System of Rhetoric (1839). The college bulletins of both Oberlin (beginning in 1838) and Antioch (beginning in 1866) list Whately's text as the primary text for the course in rhetoric; therefore, Mahala's writing at both institutions was guided by Whatelian principles. I am invested in a reading of these materials that works to understand them rather than evaluate them as wrong-headed. Although Mahala's essays may not reflex the type of student writing we value today, her attention to writing as a serious mental activity rather than mere preoccupation with correctness represents the kind of student writer nineteenth-century textbooks frequently describe. Her work presents us with the occasion to reconsider what we have come to expect of nineteenth-century student writing as either unengaged (Connors, "Personal") or resistant (J. Campbell "Controlling"; "Real")--and to read it as the work of a writer in context. (16-17)

Moves to establish significance (from last section):

• Mahala's essays offer us the opportunity to...
• Her work illustrates the way in which...
• She teaches us to...

(The Teaching of) Reading and Writing at Lafayette College (Donahue & Falbo)

...our project focuses on a widely celebrated figure about whom a great deal has already been written. (39)

But a considerable body of lore has accumulated around March, transforming him into one o the most resilient of pedagogical stereotypes, the "great teacher." (39)

The Trope of the Great Teacher (44)

Moves to establish significance (from last section):

• The inclusion of a figure like March...enlarges the parameters of the history of composition.
• Finally, the presence of March at Lafayette College in the nineteenth century underscores the fact that significant curricular and pedagogical innovation in composition can occur anywhere reading and writing are taught and practiced, but only if our assumptions about what constitutes proper evidence for such innovation are reexamined.
• ...he provides an early example of the use of writing to teach reading.
• ...we hope to complicate the notion that he saw himself as only a teacher of literature. Rather, March reminds us that any claims about the origin of literature as distinct from composition are suspect, and that the history of English is, indeed, a story of reading and writing.

And a final (interesting) concluding move: a call for more research:

In our effort to reestablish still another point of provisional beginning, our work on March has led us to ask what happened in composition pedagogy to make it posit reading and writing as in any way separable. (53)

A Chair "Perpetually Filled By A Female Professor" (Weidner)

Moves to establish significance:

• Butler University's composition history complicates these stipulations and argues for a reevaluation of scope and method when writing the history of composition. (58)
• Butler University compellingly shows that... (58)
• contextualized searches create histories that at times reflect, at times supplement, and at times complicate established historical narratives. (59)

Types of sources:

...composition narratives must be based on a broad inquiry, one that includes archival sources that represent the perspectives of the official college, of instructors, and of students: presidents' reports, board and faculty minutes, university catalogues, instructors' lecture notes and diaries, faculty publications, student themes and journals, student magazines and alumni memoirs. (59)

Disciplinary Histories: A Meditation on Beginnings (Patricia Donahue)