Crowley Shortchanges Murray

Among those who have tried to understand the earliest years of the writing process movement, Sharon Crowley is significant in that, as far as I have been able to tell, she is among the first to have given historians of the field a date for the movement’s founding, ambiguous though it may be. “Around 1971,” Crowley writes in her chapter of the same name, “composition teachers stopped relying on the correction of finished essays as their primary means of instruction--the product--and instead began to offer assistance to students while they actually composed, thus intervening in the process” (187). Crowley’s argument that the writing process movement began “around” 1971 is useful in that it provides historians of the discipline wiggle room within which to work and honors the inevitably uneven pace with which U.S. teachers of writing and writing programs shifted towards a more process-oriented teaching paradigm.

In making her argument about the emergence of process around 1971, Crowley briefly surveys important figures in the development of composition theory during this period, pointing to the work of Rohman and Wlecke (1964) on pre-writing, to the adaptations by writing teachers of the work of Jerome Bruner, and, in particular, to Janet Emig, with whose work “Historians of composition associate teachers’ widespread adoption of process pedagogy” (200). In her survey, Crowley, who devotes a good deal of space to Emig and the significance of her pre-1971 contributions to the field, claims that Emig’s most important contribution to composition theory “may have been [the] habit of treating her own composing process--as well as those articulated by professional writers--as exemplary sources of insight into composing in general” (202). Further, in a passage I quote at length for its relevance to my purposes here, Crowley argues:

[Emig’s] innovation was to assume that all human beings face the same problems and issues when they compose; students were no different from professional writers in this regard. While this does not seem like an earth-shaking discovery on the face of it, in the context of current-traditional instruction Emig’s insight was revolutionary. In that milieu, students’ composing processes were thoroughly prescribed. Moreover, students’ writing was sharply distinguished in kind from that produced by the poets and novelists they read in class, which was presented to them as though it had been created in an instant by the inspired insight of “great” minds. In the new dispensation ushered in my Emig’s work, poets, novelists, teachers, and students alike struggled while composing. Furthermore, composing processes were as varied an as idiosnycratic as the people who deployed them and the occasions on which they were used. With the benefit of this insight, composition teachers could focus on tactics or strategies for instigating and maintaining each student’s process as it developed on each composing occasion, and hence students themselves, rather than the texts they produced, became the locus of instruction. (202)

It’s hard to read Crowley’s favorable assessment of Emig’s contributions to early composition theory without thinking of Donald Murray who, similarly, and at roughly the same time as Emig, treated his own composing process and those of professional writers as containing important insights into writing and, similarly, argued that student writers should be treated and understood not as students but, rather, as writers. Murray does show up in Crowley’s account of the emergence of process pedagogy, but not in the way Emig does. Drawing on his well-known 1972 article “Teach Writing as Process Not Product,” Crowley places Murray on the right side of 1971 on the historical timeline whereas Emig is placed to the left of 1971 and is thus positioned as a key pioneer in the development of composition theory during the earliest years of the writing process movement. Referencing Emig’s 1967 article in which she argued that there were two kinds of interventions teachers might make in their students’ writing processes (i.e. proffering freedoms and establishing constraints), Crowley writes “The freedoms she [Emig] listed are very like those that Murray would mention five years later” (202). This passage further underscores the extent to which Murray, in Crowley’s mind, followed Emig, the extent to which Emig, in essence, was first to these claims about writing and its teaching, with Murray (and others) following.

But was this the case? And if not, what role did Donald Murray play in the emergence of process pedagogy around 1971?

In his book From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957-1974 (2011), David Fleming argues that composition historians like Crowley have often failed to account for the complexity of the pre-1971 era. The late sixties, Fleming argues, were a period so unique in both higher education and composition studies, that they are deserving of historical inquiry in and of themselves. Too often, Fleming argues, “the years 1967-1970 are made continuous with the events of earlier or later periods.” A more accurate account, he suggests, “would treat the late 1960s [as] its own cultural moment unassimilable to other periods, a time of radical rupture in the incipient discipline as well as higher education itself, when one era literally and figuratively came to an end and another, haltingly, incoherently, began. The late 1960s, from this point of view, was when current-traditionalism finally came up against a wall it could not surmount.” (197)