A Course Emerges

One thing that my autobiographical writing has focused on is this notion of a UNH writing course--this somewhat coherent, sort of stable, recognizable thing that emerged and evolved over time during the 1970s and 1980s (and into the 1980s) at UNH. It consisted of a few basic PRACTICES or ACTIVITIES.

I wonder about using the notion of Communities of Practice as a lens or thinking about my UNH community...

I'm thinking about how to make the emergence of this course a key part of what I'm writing about here. On the one hand, there could be an article about this--but in particular, I'm thinking about practices, a word that is defined in the communities of practice framework. For example, what were the practices of Freshman English at UNH PRIOR to the Murray revolution and what do they reveal about the community? One practice would be the "theme" and/or in-class writing "exams" vs post murray, writing conferences.

Anyway, I guess there are a few points here:

1. I feel like one thing I haven't considered is the extent to which a UNH writing course, this thing I've been saying or naming or trying to write about really is one of the key, important outcomes of the period post-1965 or so, that era. Up until now, I've thought of the outcomes of that period as things like a semiannual writing conference, two doctoral programs, a national reputation for writing and pedagogy. But now I'm thinking about the course itself as an important outcome that I need and want to discuss. But how?

It can't really be a thread or theme that I pull through the book because I don't know enough about the course as it existed during the earliest years of the department's existence (era 1).

There could be an article, though, about how the course changed in the late 60s/70s. That's something I know a good deal about and could write about, from sources. Before and after...

The take-away here, though, is this: Think of the course itself as an outcome of the era, in the same that in the post-war era, the doctoral program was an outcome or an achievement. Something with identifiable features that also offered opportunities for inquiry and scholarly work, as Newkirk demonstrates in "The First Five Minutes" and "Barriers to Revision." This is interesting, too: that the course functioned not just as something one did, but as something one looked into.