Academic Autobiography: Taking Stock

My pedagogical emphases today and how they conflict with the ethos of my tribe:

• WAC/WID: emphasis on helping to prepare students for academic writing (Murray and Graves disdained academic writing, traditionally conceived, and did not conceive of a writing course as being charged with teaching students how to write academically.)
• WAW: emphasis on teaching the content of our field (There is a content, it is the knowledge of our field, and it should be taught to students—and may be the very thing that is most likely to transfer, if that is our concern.)
• Genre Theory: emphasis on the stituatedness of writing and on social context (Genre theory has no dog in the fight of schools needing to be reformed. It is somewhat apolitical. It is rhetorical. It starts not with the writer but with the genre and with the context. The writer acclimates him/herself to the genre, which is, itself, fluid. Focus is not really on the writer.)

Michaud Section

• Section 1: This is a section about coming to embrace a specific kind of writerly subjectivity. In this first section, I am trying to convey a sense of the literacy "gift" (writing as a contribution to the development of a person) that I feel the tribe gave me during my undergraduate years. I am also trying to convey a sense of how I became an insider in the tribe without knowing I was doing so and I came to adhere to certain tribal beliefs and values.
• Section 2: This is a section about how one begins to take on new subjectivities--in my case, writing teacher. Here, I think I am trying to do two things: a) convey the sense that one stage of my development was ending and another was beginning, b) convey a sense that I was beginning to take on a new identity in the tribe (writing teacher) by pulling back the curtain on the classroom practices I had participated in as a student and beginning to understand them as a teacher.
• Section 3: This is a section about a clash of identities. This section tries to describe a kind of struggle I experienced in Iowa, where I worked to negotiate between three different selves--writer (creative), pre-service teacher, scholar. I think that in this section I conclude that I became more comfortable with the idea of academic work/scholarship and came to see that this was a part of the work of my tribe, as well. But in the end, I remained, as my central identity, a writer of the creative type.
• Section 4: This is a section about becoming a UNH writing teacher. I was finally the writing teacher I had aspired to become since my undergraduate days. But it's the fact of the unproblematized nature of this that stands out to me. This is the story of unproblematized implementation.
• Section 5: Graduate School...things get complicated, particularly with Jim Berlin, but especially with Dias et al World's Apart because here is where I began to really question whether process was enough...and what about my dissertation? How does that factor in? Seeing the diverse kinds of writing people produce outside of school and thinking about that?
• Section 6: Into the Classroom...you can't go home... But what can you save or salvage?

KEY INSIGHTS:

KEY INSIGHT #1:

I no longer see my students as in need of rescue, in need of finding their voice or helping them to recover a like/love for writing and/or school, as I once did, or to even necessarily discover meaning in their lives. I no longer construct them in this way. I no longer construct them as budding or aspiring essayists who need the opportunity to use language to explore their worlds.

Perhaps because of my work in WAC, I now construct students as newcomers on the doorstep of a new community. I see myself in the role of a kind of guide. I feel like I know things about what is about to happen to them and that I need to help them think about how to prepare for these things… I think that both WAW and WAC have positioned me in this way….

Here's a passage that might bring this out:

At the same time, we are taken by McCarthy's (1987) metaphor of a stranger in strange lands, and despite the controversy surrounding the metaphor of travel as a guiding concept for composition... we understand the kinds of shifts students have to make--from course to course, from genre to genre, from writing task to writing task, generally across contexts--as a kind of travel, a kind of "boundary crossing" that might work much better, and be more satisfying as well as instructive, if students have the kinds of assistance expert travelers do: a passport, a travel guide, a portfolio of key terms. (Writing Across Contexts, p. 33)

KEY INSIGHT #2:

Because I no longer identify most strongly as an essayist, I see no need to help students cultivate that kind of writerly self. I see myself as a scholar and researcher and so I tend to see the students in that way, too. The projects that I ask them to take on, in ENGL 230, for example, or in FYW, are more scholarly or academic or research-oriented in nature. WAW encourages me to encourage them to “look into writing.” I’ve adopted this as my primary teacherly persona, for better or worst.

KEY INSIGHT #3:

I need to think in terms of pedagogies. The way I teach, it’s not just one thing. I once perhaps thought that one had to choose—process model vs. current traditional model. But one doesn’t have to choose. The way I teach incorporates multiple pedagogies and the emphases depend, perhaps, on the course—in one course I may lean more on digital/online approaches, although digital/online permeates everything I do. In ENGL 232 this spring I experimented with community-based pedagogies. In ENGL 230 I am working from Genre Theory and pedagogy. But what about FYC? There I am drawing on WAC/WAW.

UNH Section

Sections:

1963-1973
Interlude on Donald Murray
1973-1983
Interlude on Donald Graves
1983-1987 (?)

What is this thread of the paper supposed to accomplish?

It should answer these questions:

• How did a unique culture focused on writing, the teaching of writing, and the researching of writing arise at UNH from the years 1963-1987?
• What were key moments in or key periods of development of this culture? 

Svehla uses this term, which seems to accurately summarize the UNH model: “student-centered, process-oriented, writer teaching writing pedagogy” (Svehla 387)

Timeline of Significant Events

1963-1973

• 1963: Arrival of Donald Murray
• 1967-69: NCTE/NDAE Summer Institute
• 1968: A Writer Teaches Writing
• 1971: Establishment of Doctoral Program in Literature
• 1971: Failed MFA proposal (culmination of shift in emphasis in English major)
• 1971-74: Murray chair of Freshman English
• 1973: First graduate level course in the teaching of writing, ENGL 817: Seminar in Teaching Writing

1973-1983

• 1973: Arrival of Donald Graves
• 1976: Founding of Writing Process Laboratory
• 1978: Tom Newkirk, first compositionist, hired
• 1978: Graves publishes Ford Foundation report, Balance the Basics: Let Them Write
• 1978-1981: Graves conducts National Institute of Education-funded study “A Case Study Observing the Development of Primary Children’s Composing, Spelling, and Motor Behaviors During the Writing Process” (Atkinson Academy)
• 1980-1983: Newkirk secures NEH Grant ($150,869)
• 1980: New Hampshire Literacy Institutes, first year
• 1983: Graves publishes Writing: Teachers and Children at Work

1983-

National reputation in teaching (consolidation)

• 1985: Establishment of Ph.D. in Reading and Writing Instruction (Dept of Education)
• 1986: Establishment of Ph.D. emphasis in composition (English Dept)

Establishment of fall writing conferences (?)

First dissertations—Comp? Reading and Writing?