"Introduction: Locating Freshman English (from Nuts and Bolts)

The chapter begins with this lovely anecdote... "To understand Freshman English at the University of New Hampshire, you need to picture the third floor of Hamilton Smith Hall." (1) It's worth borrowing this very lovely picture Tom paints or, to use his words, renders, to bring to life the Freshman English program.

When I directed the program, visitors would occasionally ask about the curriculum. We had "official" material for them, but I was tempted to suggest they stand by the water cooler, for it as there that the curriculum for the program was made and remade each day. While the directors could sometimes change the guidelines, these changes were given substance (or they were successfully--sometimes wisely--defied) in the casual talk around the water cooler. I came to see this oral culture as the primary form of instruction for new teachers. (3)

I'm struck by Tom's acknowledgement of the cultural or tribal elements of the UNH writing community, in passages like this one: "Previously, the folklore had been passed on in bits and pieces; that, after all, is how an oral culture works." (2)

He calls the book "a series of snapshots taken in the early 1990s" which is, of course, when I was there!

He says, "It is a dipping into a largely oral culture to describe the range of practices and to bring them into a kind of order" (2)

In a section called "The Purification of Freshman English" Newkirk writes that his task in the introduction of the book is to "trace the institutional and intellectual developments that led to the snapshots in this book." He offers this as a kind of "case study that illustrates the evolutionary development in composition teaching over the past twenty years." (3)

And then he writes: "The central question in this history is: what is the function of a writing course in the institution that requires it?" (3)

Newkirk constructs the Freshman English program as somehow "separate from" the rest of the university. He writes, "Even the physical location of the third floor of Hamilton Smith Hall [which he identifies as the physical instantiation of the program], its isolation, its relative inaccessibility, points to the central question--how does a writing course fit in?" (3)

I'm sure that administrators and most faculty view the writing course as a service course to the academic disciplines. But what happens if those chosen to teach the course come to reject many of the features of academic discourse, particularly the impersonality and exclusivity that seems to characterize much of it? What happens if a writing course pits itself agains the institution that surrounds and supports it? Can a writing course in the academy be anti academic (which is not the same thing as anti-intellectual)? It is this tension--call it the "third-floor problem"--that I will explore here. (3)

A new thread of interest, something I haven't thought of yet:

Reading finished texts does not reveal the processes that produced the texts. In fact, the finished text is something of an illusion; its very orderliness hides the disorderliness of the creation. Murray argued that we need to let students in on this disorderliness--and he began to formulate (and reformulate, and re-reformulate) the elements or stages of the process. (4)

What am I interested in? The idea of "let[ting] students in on this disorderliness." Letting students in on...things is a big part of what I've been thinking about today as regards my tribe. And I'm not sure I've written enough about that in my memoir.

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[Murray] was proposing a bigger change than this: he was calling into question the very model of the writer that informed the traditional composition course.

The writer in the traditional course was an initiate into the world of academic discourse, writing about established texts chosen by the instructor. The student was on foreign turf, the teacher's turf. The student was not writing as an expert but as a neophyte, mimicking a language and authority he or she did not possess. In Murray's view this was an inversion of the position of writers outside the academy--where the writer, not the reader, is the expert on the topic.

Murray's truly radical move was not to stress the writing process by two claim that the professional writer should be the ideal around which the course should be constructed. The title of his first and best-known book, A Writer Teaches Writing (1968), announced this new ideal. Freshman English, from this time forward, might be technically in the English department, but it was no longer of it. It looked elsewhere--to established writers--for insights about teaching and learning. (4)

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Freshman English was "no longer about any specific subject (i.e. literature); it was about a process of making and shaping meaning" (4)

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In one of many quotations from writers' testimonies, Murray cites James Baldwin on this point:

One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. (Quoted in Murray 1982, 134)

If this was true for the artist, Murray argued, it was true for the student. (4-5)

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...Murray, during his sort term as director of Freshman English, virtually banished the use of published writing from the course. The texts that mattered now were those that the students were writing--and the texts of their lives from which they drew. (5)

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