Historians on 1963-1970

Crowley

The earliest advocates for process pedagogy wanted to exploit its potential for relieving the teaching situation brought about by the universal requirement. (Crowley 191)

"Around 1971, the story goes, 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). In this chapter, I'd like to take a look at what Donald Murray, whose article "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product" Crowley draws on to contextualize her work, had already accomplished before 1971 or 1972, when Murray, a savvy rhetorician, grafted his existing project onto the newfound language of process.

[P]rior to the 1970s, composition teachers had focused their professional attention on the maintenance of a course rather than on a body of research. This focus changed around 1971, because composition teachers discovered a subject upon which they could do research: The composing process as practiced by student writers. (195)

Relevant to Freshman English at UNH in the 1950s:

Interestingly, Bruner’s critique of traditional education could be aimed directly at current-traditional composition instruction, which imparted knowledge of the humanist canon at the same time as it drilled students in the mechanics of written discourse; neither practice aimed at providing students with a “general understanding” of composing. (196)

The complaint that knowing rather than doing takes center stage in traditional education is of course reminiscent of Dewey’s educational philosophy (196)

The privileging of personal or expressive writing would become a central theme in process pedagogy. It is hard to say whether this preference stems from its early theorists interest in the composing accounts of literary writers or whether it reflects the humanist assumption that the point of composing is the expression of one’s cultivation. Perhaps the preference has to do with the ideology of liberal individualism that undergirds process pedagogy. Or maybe process theorists preferred expressionistic discourse simply because, to their way of thinking, it was not current traditional. (199-200)

Crowley’s Review of pre-1971 Figures

• Rohman and Wlecke (1965)
• Emig (“emig began to make important theoretical contributions to composition even before she published her famous monograph” 200). “The Uses of the Unconscious in Composing” (1964)

What existed in terms of composition theory when Murray first experienced the Freshman English course and the Expo course during 1963/64? Where could he turn for answers or even colleagueship???

Emig’s most important contribution to composition theory may have been this habit of treating her own composing process--as well as those articulated by professional writers--as exemplary sources of insight into composing in general. Her 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 of the face of it, in the context of current-traditional instruction Emig’s insight was revolutionary. [...] In the new dispensation ushered in by Emig’s work, poets, novelists, teachers, and students alike struggled while composing. Furthermore, composing processes were as varied and as idiosyncratic as the people who deployed them and the occasions on which they were used. (202)

Crowley puts Murray on the AD side of 1971: “the freedoms she [Emig] listed are very like those that Murray would mention five years later” (202)

The only source Crowley references in her chapter on the the emergence of process pedagogy, in her section “The Development of Composition Theory” is Murray’s 1972 “Process not Product” essay. This is curious and troubling...no mention at all of A Writer Teaches Writing or Murray’s other 1960s essays…

Notably, in A Writer Teaches Writing, Murray is NOT after expressive discourse, he’s after expository discourse...and there are many examples of the kinds of expository discourse he has in mind…

In The Methodical Memory (1990), I tried to establish that current traditional rhetoric had a well-formed theory of invention consisting of at least three steps: select a subject, narrow it, and compose a thesis statement. (footnote 9, p. 276)

A truly paradigmatic alternative to current-traditionalism would question the modernism in which it is immersed and the institutional structure by means of which it is administered. Process pedagogy does neither. It retains the modernist composing subject of current-traditionalism--the subject who is sufficiently discrete from the composing context to stand apart from it, observing it from above and commenting upon it. Furthermore, this subject is able to inspect the contents of the mind and report them to a reader without distortion, using language that fully represents a well-formed composing intention. (212-213)

My conclusion: Crowley shortchanges Murray by not including him in BC 1971.

Thomas P. Miller

Dixon and other American advocates of personal growth such as James Moffett and Donald Murray emphasized “creative expression” in ways that have been criticized for demarcating the personal from the political. This criticism is well-founded… (191)

However, Britton’s theories look to social transactions as the ends of discourse in ways that are broader than the “interior view” adopted by American “expressionists” such as Donald Murray (see, for example, Murray’s “Teach Writing as a Process”). (191)

Berlin

*** In Rhetoric and Reality, in characterizing Murray’s work, Berlin draws on just two texts: “Finding Your Own Voice” (1969) and “The Interior View” (1970)

I would now like to examine briefly the works of the leading expressionists of the sixties and seventies: Ken Macrorie, Walker Gibson, William Coles, Jr., Donald Murray and Peter Elbow. Unlike the behavioralists, who were oblivious to the political and social unrest of the period, these men were attempting to create a comprehensive approach to composition that included the political while avoiding what they considered to be the excesses of certain members of their camp (152)

Macrorie, Gibson, Coles, Murray, and Elbow all agree that writing is art and, as such, can be learned but not taught. All that the teacher can do is provide an environment in which the student can learn, relying on such activities as free writing, rewriting, journal writing, editoral groups, and the encouragement of the original metaphor. (152)

See full passage p 152-53.

His emphasis [Elbow], like that of all the expressionists considered in this section, is on the “I,” on defining the self so as to secure an authentic identity and voice. (153)

This type of expressionistic rhetoric focuses on a dialectic between the individual and language as a means of getting in touch with the self. Indeed, even the dialectic between the writer and the editorial group is designed to enable the writer to understand the manifestation of her identity in language through considering the reactions of others--not, for example, to begin to understand how meaning is shaped by discourse communities. And it is this commitment to an epistemology that locates all truth within a personal construct arising from one’s unique selfhood that prevents these expressionists from becoming genuinely epistemic in their approach, despite their use of activities--such as the editorial group--that on the surface are social in nature. (153)

In the last analysis, however, for Elbow as for other expressionists, the personal is the political--the underlying assumption being that enabling individuals to arrive at self-understanding and self-expression will inevitably lead to a better social order. (155)

As indicated earlier, all of the rhetorics considered in this chapter [Major Rhetorical Approaches: 1960-1975] were inevitably a part of the political activism on college campuses during the sixties and seventies. They were in fact involved in a dialectical relationship with these uprisingings, both shaped by them and in turn affecting their development. The demand for “relevance” in the college curriculum was commonplace, and these rhetorics--particularly the classical, expressionistic, and epistemic varieties--were attempting to respond. We have already seen this response made explicit in a number of the essays considered--in those by Corbett, Murray, and Bertoff, for example. (177-78)

Connors

No mention of Murray in the entire book--mention of a “progressive tradition” that includes all the usual suspects EXCEPT for Murray (p. 326). Likely that he strategically left Murray OUT of the book given his institutional affiliation (Connors’) at UNH, Murray’s homebase.

Fleming

In the terms of first-year writing, this is the story of the demise of current-traditional rhetoric and the birth of the process movement. (26)

I believe this study tells us new things about the history of freshmen composition. In particular, it helps compositionists across the country make better sense of a period that, oddly, has not been well accounted for in our disciplinary histories, narratives that have tended, in my opinion, to privilege the decades from 1946 to 1966, when "comp-rhet" emerged as an academic discipline, and 1971 to 1991, when the process paradigm established itself as the dominant approach to teaching writing in this country, but have largely skipped over the handful of tumultuous years in between, from 1967-1970. (22)

In the UW Freshmen English program, the most important development during these years was the rise of a short-lived but potent pedagogy, simultaneously critical and humanist, developed almost entirely by English graduate student teaching assistants working by and among themselves, and reflective of (but not reducible to) the new world created by the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the struggle for ethnic studies programs, and the other political, and ideological transformations of the time--as well as by the changing socioeconomic conditions of the 1960s and the new university that had materialized in response to them. (24)

Part of this project, then, has been about emphasizing the radical specificity of the late 1960s within histories of twentieth century North American higher education in general and modern composition-rhetoric in particular. That's because I believe there has been a tendency within my own field to tell stories about writing and writing instruction in which the late 1960s are absorbed into narratives that are really about either the late 1950s-early 1960s and the birth of the "new rhetoric," or the 1970s and the rise of the process paradigm. In such accounts, the years 1967-1970 are made continuous with the events of earlier or later periods.

A more accurate account, I believe, would treat the late 1960s, at least in terms of freshman composition, as sui generis, 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. Unfortunately, when that paradigm collapsed, there was nothing waiting in the wings powerful and attractive enough to take its place; at UW, for example, there was no discipline of composition that could supervise a new kind of course, no rhetoric revival in the English Department, no incipient process movement. At other schools, freshman composition might have limped on for a few more years, intellectually orphaned, until the process revolution reinvented it, emerging at the end of the 1970s as the central project of a new, bona fide academic discipline, with full-fledged research programs, graduate degrees, and tenure-track faculty lines. (197)