Notes on Postwar Composition (1960/70-)--Berlin & Connors

Berlin/Hobbes

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)

Connors

Contemporary world of Composition-Rhetoric (1960-)

The modern period lasts through 1960 or so, after which its tenets are challenged by a variety of rising theoretical and pedagogical movements that had begun in the 1940s. The critique mounted by these disparate movements results in a rather rapid shift after 1960 into the Contemporary world of composition-rhetoric, which is defined by being informed by scholarly work in a new discipline, composition studies. Part of the definition of the Modern period is that it is marked by the slow development of a group of discontented writing specialists, a Loyal Opposition that waxes and wanes, but always powerfully questions the status quo of current practice. (15)

There have been several strands to this contemporary interrogation, which has today been institutionalized as the new discipline of compositon studies.

1. New Rhetoricians: …the product of a traditional group of academically-based scholars, proposed that rhetoric had taken a wrong turn in the 19^th century in terms of its content. The needed reforms, this group proposed, would involve rediscovering the wisdom of the nearly lost older tradition of classical rhetoric, we’re paying new attention to the canon of invention, which had been downgraded by composition rhetoric, or of using new linguistic methods to teach sentence construction. This group of reformers in there earlier incarnations were called the New Rhetoricians. (15-16)
2. Empiricists/Cognitivists: A slightly later group of scholars identify themselves with the scientific bent in modern research, and they proposed that composition-rhetoric needed to be placed on a firmer research footing. Better-designed experiments and studies would discern what writing really was, what readers really expected, what teaching techniques actually works. Usually referred to as empiricists or cognitivists these scholars moved Contemporary composition-rhetoric toward epistemological questions, definitions of problems, data-gathering. (16)
3. Reformers (Writing Process Theorists): The final strand of post-World War II reform in composition was concerned not so much with what students were taught as how they were taught. In the minds of these teachers, the problem with composition-rhetoric went deeper than mere issues of content, and the received methods of teaching writing were not merely inefficient or unworkable. The way in which composition was taught, to these theorists, was at best a bad method. At worst, it was actively destructive, leading to desiccation of the student’s creativity, to useless fear about meaningless (and probably fictional) entities such as Emphasis and The Paragraph of Comparison and Contrast, to writer’s block paranoia about mechanical issues, and to dead, imitative, ponderous student prose that attempted to mimic the dead, imitative, ponderous prose of academia. These reformers, often referred to by the shorthand notation of “writing-process theorists” (or, by their critics, “expressivists”) have probably been more genuinely subversive of the methodology of Modern composition-rhetoric—and the creation of its Contemporary pedagogical form—than either of the other groups. (17)

Under the triple censure of these reformers, composition-rhetoric has changed in the last three decades more quickly and in more ways that at any time since the period 1870-1900. (17)