Studying Framing Chapters (Three Models)

1. Practicing Writing: The Postwar Discourse of Freshman English (2004)

Statement of Audience:

Anyone who has taken, taught, or administered a 100-level college course should find value in Practicing Writing. I suspect that anyone interested in the intellectual, cultural, and social development of the United States after World War II would also find it interesting. I have written this study, however, with two particular audiences in mind: academics from any field who are interested in literacy issues; and English scholars and practitioners, especially in the discipline of Composition. (xi)

Statement of Purpose:

Practicing writing shows how for a decade, the faculties at Northwestern University, Wheaton College, and the University of Illinois (Urbana and Chicago) tried to do x, y, z, and beyond, but the “problem” of freshman English resisted a solution. I hope that the anecdotes, examples, facts, and discussion of this study will maintain the interest of those both inside and outside English departments, and will show how the history of freshman English is important not only to those who teach it, but to everyone who has a stake in students’ literacy. (xi)

Practicing Writing should help anyone who cares about postsecondary education appreciate the complexity and the challenge of something seemingly as simple as offering or, harder yet, reforming a course that is supposed to teach undergraduates how to write. (xii)

Practicing Writing is also such a memory book. In it, I identify a system of presumptions that reveals the shape of the discursive practice of freshman English at a given time, or ate least its local representation at Illinois, Wheaton, and Northwestern. (23-24)

In my concluding chapter, I will explain how practioner-based history can enable teachers to bring about far more important and subtle changes than adopting a more self-reflexive theory or choosing and deploying more effective means of delivering education. Practice-based history reveals what Richard Miller has called the “bureaucratic constraints that both enable the academic enterprise and limit its scope” (Learning 210). Practicing Writing suggests how to develop the ‘far more sober and supple intellectual persona’ that Miller calls for in order to cope with such constraints (Learning 41) (25).

Research Question:

I ask, “‘What dichotomies pervade and support the structure of freshman English in the postwar era?’” (23)

Outline of Introduction

Section 1 (1-4): Critique and a Rationale: Situating the study within composition, establishing the need for a “practice-based” history of composition/Freshman English and critiquing “familiar histories” (Berlin, etc.)

• I sense a difference between many scholarly conclusions about writing instruction and my experience as a teacher… (2)
• In their attempt to document the history of writing instruction in American higher education, scholars have tended to study the most accessible kinds of evidence—textbooks, monographs by acknowledged leaders and experts in the field, journal articles, descriptions of writing programs, syllabi, biographies of notable teachers, administrators and theoreticians. (5) – example: Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality
• Several other commentators have observed the lack of attention to everyday classroom experiences in the histories of our discipline. (3)
• The kind of history North, Brereton, and Richard Miller call for would look quite different from the kind of work historians have offered previously. The established histories usually begin with an exposition of the generally accepted statements of theory at a given time, then proceed with illustrations via specific examples from program descriptions, textbooks, and articles. A practice-based history would begin with a detailed examination of the particulars of writing and its instruction at a given moment in history and proceed to a description of the presumptions that constitute the discursive practice in which those particulars are bound up. Practicing Writing provides an example of how to undertake such a project. (emphasis added, p. 4)

Section 2 (4-7): Method: “I have chosen a particular academic discourse, a particular time in history during which it was operating, and the archives of four particular schools. The first step in explaining this study is to clarify those crucial choices.” (5)

Section 3 (7-22): Overview of Data/Case Studies: Histories of the four institutions under examination, since their founding; and also histories of instruction in rhetoric and writing up to the post-war period.

Section 4 (22-25): Clarification of “Terministic Screen”—what he brought to the project or the lens through which he saw it and outlines the chapters of the book)

Section 5 (25-end): Attempts to articulate how "practitioner-based history" (of the kind that Practicing Writing purports to be) can help us.

 Interesting Quotes:

…I have chosen a particular academic discourse, a particular time in history during which it was operating, and the archives of four particular schools. The first step in explaining this study is to clarify those crucial choices. I have chosen a historical period with clearly defined boundaries and far enough in the past that I could look at the material with some perspective, yet recent enough that I might still find the kinds of evidence that seem to have been neglected in previous histories. Like Kitzhaber, Douglas, Crowley, Connors, Berlin and many others, I have chosen to look at the most common site of writing instruction in American colleges and universities—freshman English. (5) –explanation see p. 5/6.

Perhaps I can better identify my “terministic screen” by comparing and contrasting this study with Composition-Rhetoric. Connors begins with a much larger—yet more general—archive, and he attempts to tell a much more sweeping narrative…I have been trained as a pedagogue…out of the lumber room of my research and experience, some of it theoretical, much of it practical, emerges this book…My goal is not to show the benightedness of our forebears, but to look long and hard at all the evidence I could find of the actual experiences of real teachers and students, and to try to perceive what gave shape to their lives in the classroom. (23)

I am intrigued by this quote, which resonates with me, personally:

Apart from the conviction that other descriptions and analyses of freshman English did not capture my self-recognition of being a student and teacher, I did not enter into this research with a preconceived notion of what I might find or what I might prove. (23)

2. To Know Her Own History: Writing at the Woman's College, 1943-1963 (2012)

Key point: The title of the first chapter is: "Introduction: The History of Composition Is the History of Its People" 

Statement of Audience:

Statement of Purpose:

...the most important argument underlying a project such as this: that the history of composition studies is, in fact, a history of its people. (15)

To Know Her Own History is a sociohistorical study that focuses on the intertwined histories of first-year composition and creative writing at a public Southern women's college in the mid-twentieth century in order to examine how evolving definitions of literacy, as well as evolving views of women as writers, shaped American college writing instruction during the postwar era. I offer new historical insight into the historical happenings in women's writing postwar through an extended case study of the English department of the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, and spotlight the national curricular trends and local institutional conditions that affected this college's students and faculty. (12)

To Know Her Own History argues for the value of under recognized narratives, such as those of women's public college students, that make up our collective history of rhetoric and composition studies. (13)

In undertaking this book... I thus employ the rich history of women's education at my own institution as a vehicle and case study for my assertion that studying the pasts of individual programs can assist us in seeing important moments in our field's history. in this book, the moment under review is the political, curricular, and socioinstitutional intersection of composition and creative writing in mid-twentieth century America, at one public postsecondary institution. (4)

I believe there can be a more intricate and nuanced definition and exploration of women's composing within composition studies' history than Connors tries to provide, one that is dependent upon local conditions and key individuals and one that highlights rather than glosses this history across institutional types. (7)

I argue we now should dislodge our historical analysis of writing instruction from a critique of the institution of composition studies and its politicized machinery and relocated it instead in a larger contextual analysis of the predilections and communal values of its people, famous, infamous, and unknown, or heretofore unnamed. (8)

Even though there has been measurable attention paid to the feminization of composition via the significant number of underpaid, overworked composition teachers, far less attention has been paid to women as viable, agentic students, or as student-writers, in any subgenre of English studies. Their "noisy silences" are what I aim to represent in this book through a case study of postwar writing instruction at the Woman's College.  (8)

Such a singular case study of women's writing as this book attempts is sorely needed, because despite the significant number of archival studies in rhetoric and composition over the past twenty-five years, taking many shapes and spotlighting myriad scholarly agendas, little has been documented that works toward a historical counter narrative of any kind of the institution that is composition studies, and few studies have as their author an individual with a personal role, past or present, in the institution being studied. Archival works have catalogued and interpreted key historical documents in teh genesis and growth of the field (John Brereton's The Origins of Composition Studies; Jean Ferguson Carr, Stephen Carr, and Lucille Schultz's Archives of Instruction), and have reviewed and classified key pedagogical movements in the field (James Berlin's aforementioned Rhetoric and Reality and his Writing Instruction in Nineteenth Century American Colleges). Archival work has also critically analyzed the politics of our field's history (Sharon Crowley's Composition in the University; Susan Miller's Textual Carnivals; Robert Connors' aforementioned Composition-Rhetoric), as well as turned a narrow lens on subgroups within composition and rhetoric (Barbara L'Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo's Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration; Mary Soliday's The Politics of Remediation; Patricia McAlexander and Nicole Pepinster Greene's Basic Writing in America). In far fewer cases, scholars of the archives have studied specific programs, in isolation or in like groupings (Robin Varnum's Fencing With Words; Brent Henze, Jack Selzer and Wendy Sharer's 1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition; Thomas Masters's Practicing Writing; Patricia Donahue and Gretchen Fleisher Moon's Local Histories). (9)

Another noticeable oversight in this dominant archival history of composition studies is the absence of study regarding other types of writing as they have intersected with the development of first-year composition...far less attention has been paid to the relationship of composition to creative writing. (10)

This book thus advances Gold's call in Rhetoric at the Margins for a spotlight on marginalized voice types in the history of composition studies by focusing on the inhabitants of a women's public college, but also takes that call one step further by complicating the pedagogical and institutional content of this history through a cross-examination of composition adn creative writing as intertwined curricular activities and intellectual impulses in the Woman's College postwar. This focused dual analysis of writing at the Woman's College also clearly brings to bear my own cross-training in creative writing and composition, and casts it in an archival light--thus bringing my interests in history and writing full circle, but with good historical reasons. (11)

Finally, it is important for me to note that the historical study in this book is designed, in large part, to celebrate underrepresented voices in their own right, rather than to use them as a vocal counter statement to dominant histories of male voices in composition studies' archival histories. There is much to champion in studying women's writing for its own sake--its triumphs and progressive actions and actors--without setting it as the other voice that must speak against, or in opposition to, the male-centered, or more privileged, histories that have been highlighted before it. (11)

Research Question(s):

In reclaiming the literacy histories at work in this particular institution during the postwar era, and telling its heretofore untold stories, I mean to use the Woman's College as an archival vehicle with which to explore three central questions that add to existing archival perspectives on composition studies today. 

1. First, how was public education for women, particularly women's writing instruction, shaped by two influential movements in higher education--the general education movement and the surge in creative arts instruction--during these two decades of the twentieth century?
2. Second, in what ways did the rise of the status of creative writing at the college level undermine or lessen the visibility and importance of rhetorical and/or expository instruction in first-year writing at the Woman's College, as just one institution among those so critical to postwar educational opportunities for women, the (evolving) teachers' college? 
3. And finally, what contested definitions of literacy and schooling arose during this critical era in writing instruction at the Woman's College that might provoke similar archival investigations into the histories of other English departments and writing programs across the country? (13)

Outline of Introduction:

Section 1 (1-12): 

Section 2: (12-18):

Interesting Quotes:

To explore this local institutional history is a mandate that goes beyond a personal desire to better understand my own position in my program, or the legacy of writing at my university. Without history, to borrow from Santayana, there is no check on the practices of the present; without acknowledging and sometimes rectifying our pasts, we cannot confidently advance into our futures, feeling certain about the truth of then versus the next. (4)

To see the history of a community such as composition studies as a history of how its people interact with/in their institutional structures, we can begin to privilege the success stories--however small--and the less-studied voices of those success stories, as a critical part of our collective field history. (12)

3. Writing, Programs, and Administration at Arizona State University: The First Hundred Years (2011)

a historical case study of writing instruction (1)

...this dissertation considers changes in the place of writing instruction in the institution's curriculum in relation to four major movements in American higher education during the period under consideration:

• the normal school movement, 
• the standardization and accreditation movement, 
• the "university-status movement," 
• the research and tenure movement (1)

This study looks at writing instruction at a single institution over an extended period of time and attempts to place the conversation taking place in a broad historical context. (2)

...this study argues that the place of writing instruction in ASU's curriculum has, at various times and for various reasons, been shaped as much by national movements in higher education--and administrators' responses to those movements--as other factors, such as rhetorical theory and English department politics. (2)

...I argue that the influences I describe as affecting writing instruction at ASU actually had important affects at post-secondary institutions across the country and markedly shaped many writing programs and classes that currently exist. (5)

I am interested in understanding the intellectual and administrative structures that sustained writing instruction at ASU over time and shaped how it was manifested. Additionally, I consider how the structures that shaped and sustained writing at ASU might be understood in relation to conditions and developments at other institutions, in the discipline of rhetoric and composition, and in American culture beyond the academy. (13)

I ask the following questions:

1. In what ways did local, regional, and national developments in higher education impact writing instruction at different times in Arizona State University's history? 
2. In what ways did the development of Arizona State University from normal school to teachers' college to regional college to nationally-ranked research university impact theories and practices of writing instruction and program administration at the school? 
3. And how has the place of writing, programs, and administration at Arizona State University shaped and been shaped by the field of rhetoric and composition?