“We All Got History” Process and Product in the History of Composition (Gannett et al)

Abstract:

This review essay places Local Histories in the context of recent books and studies examining the wide variety of composition and rhetoric courses and pedagogical practices that existed in nineteenth-century America. The book has two general foci as represented in its split title: Local Histories, or microhistories of institutions, curricula, and figures; and Reading the Archives of Composition, an extended look at several hitherto unexamined archival sources and their associated projects. The editors identify three central purposes for their book: to challenge the “Harvard narrative,” which, they claim, places the origin of “composition” at Harvard and other elite Eastern colleges; to offer several alternative “microhistories” from various institutional sites, and to document, interpret, and interrogate specific archival holdings and the nature of archival work in composition. While the reviewers find the challenges to “the Harvard model” as history and historiography overstated, overall, they find the collection important for its studies of diverse sites and its attention to less visible figures: teachers who acted as early innovators, and students whose written compositions, informal diaries and letters offer new lenses for making history.  The authors of various chapters who unveil their documentary and archival work in process, disclosing both finds and gaps and offering their developing understandings of the archive as construct, perform a valuable service to future scholars of composition studies.

Some helpful nuggets in this piece--just language that will be useful in framing my project.

Framing:

As composition studies has undergone its social turn(s), we increasingly focus on the situatedness of practice, pedagogy, people, and programs, and our disciplinary attentions have been drawn anew to questions of local origins and local histories: of movements, moments, mentors, and mandates. Composition’s first serious histories generally worked to make some sense of macrohistorical trends, focusing on what could be readily identified as major figures, projects, and initiatives in sites such as Harvard, Yale, Michigan, and Amherst, to forward the nascent discipline’s visibility and prestige.(426)

 ...a new generation of books devoted to creating micro-rather than macrohistories of composition (426)

Together, these volumes (along with many others cited in the collection) are all working to reanimate and reconsider the history of composition as a teaching subject, valorizing the whole mosaic of formal and informal educational sites. (426)

Local Histories is not alone in doing this, of course, but the work is still really important. Thus, the chapters in Local Histories tell hitherto untold or undertold stories to demonstrate composition’s early days among the nonelite colleges and universities, institutions that have, until recently, received less historical attention. This kind of historical work examines writing pedagogy and practices set in individual institutions at critical moments defined by the authors’ interests and the insights derived from new archival sources. Many of the chapters also consider how these nascent writing curricula and pedagogies were inflected by various external and institution-specific forces—the institution’s type, region, situation, and historical moment. (430)

A third related, and powerful, purpose of Local Histories is to showcase the work of archivists who attend explicitly to the processes and materiality of archival work, highlighting decisions made, identifying what might constitute relevant artifacts, and rendering new archival materials available and accessible to democratize historical inquiry. (430)

Welsch and Student Texts as Archival Documents:

In chapter 2, “Thinking Like That: The Ideal Nineteenth-Century Student Writer,” Kathleen A. Welsch discusses the writing of Mahala Pearson Jay, a student in the first class of Antioch College while it was under the leadership of Horace Mann. Welsch provides a model for a contextualized analysis of student writing and of pedagogical documents when they are available to the researcher; more specifically, she avoids research questions that overlay present-day biases of what is “good” in the writing by seeking to understand what genres the student writer emulates. Welsch borrows from Charles Paine in asking the question, “What was it like . . . to think with these ideas” (16), noting that she is “invested in a reading of these materials that works to understand them rather than evaluate them as wrong-headed” (17). To read Jay’s work in its context, Welsch states that Jay followed the principles of writing she saw modeled in Whateley’s Elements of Rhetoric, the primary composition text used at Antioch College during that time. Welsch claims that Jay viewed writing as “a serious mental activity rather than mere preoccupation with correctness” (17).

At the close of her chapter, she signals her hope that more scholars study student writers in their institutional and temporal contexts. She adds a caveat, however, that finding student writing in the archives is very difficult and “requires perseverance, creativity, precise inquiry and the sharp vision and comprehensive knowledge of a special collections librarian to find it” (36). But this chapter clearly issues a call to historians to take up this important work. (433)

On Method:

Weidner begins by describing her work in the archive and the types of documents she found there. What we find especially useful about this attention to process is that she provides her readers with a wide range of possible sources of information in a local archive, and she allows her readers to see how a researcher embarking on this type of research might make sense of what she calls this “web of intertextuality” (59). (434)