Article: Freshman English at the University of New Hampshire

Framing Quotes:

"In a course such as freshman English, where the development of skills is important, constant participation in class is most desirable to increase interplay between student and teacher." (draft, "Revisions of the Freshman English Program" Freshman English Planning Committee, 12/5/1968)

The course must be taught by the students writing and the instructor responding in conference, and therefore the class meetings are the least important part of the course (memo from Don Murray and Les Fisher to the Council for Educational Innovation, "An experimental program for English 501 -- Expository Writing, 2/26/70)

More on Murray and conference teaching:

There must be something wrong with a fifty-four-year-old man who is looking forward to his thirty-fifth conference of the day. It is twelve years since I really started teaching by conference. I average seventy-five conferences a week, thirty weeks a year, then there's summer teaching and workshop teaching of teachers. I've probably held far more than 30,000 writing conferences, and I am still fascinated by this strange, exposed kind of teaching, one on one. ("The Listening Eye," p. 13-14)

These two quotes beautifully juxtapose the differing visions of Freshman English that were competing in the late 60s/early 70s. There is an article here, for sure:

Evolution:

• Phase 1: The post-war vision of the course, highly prescribed, tightly controlled, current-traditional in focus.
• Phase 2: Searching for a new Freshman English--one document that would be enormously helpful here would be Carnicelli's 1968 report on Revisions to Freshman English--you can see in this report how change was coming incrementally. Another document that would be helpful would be Murray's 1966 proposal for an experimental section--that may provide the forerunner for what was to come.
• Phase 3: this is when the course really became more of a process class, with conferences as a kind of centerpiece, post 1971.

Bottom line: I don't think anyone but Murray was able to imagine how ELSE Freshman English might be taught, other than the way it had always been taught. When you look at Carnicelli's memo, you can see how they are still in the same mode of thinking about the course, using the same terms, etc., Murray's way of writing about a writing course is so different from the way that Carnicelli writes about it in that report.

Also, take a look at Appendix B, "Principles of English 401," included with the 1968 report.

Also, as a symbolic thing--look at the way that there was NO final exam in the proposed ENGL 501 syllabus but a final exam did exist in the revised ENGL 401 syllabus (on writing proficiency).