Notes to Myself (email query to Alice Horning)--Murray contributions

This is from an email to Alice Horning that I wrote in response to a CFP for the Peter Lang series:

I’m currently at work on a book in which I investigate the career of the late Donald M. Murray, whose archive was recently made available to scholars for the first time in more than a decade when it returned to the University of New Hampshire in spring 2017. In my book, tentatively titled A Writer Reforms Writing: The Life and Work of Donald M. Murray, 1924-2006, I argue that our thinking about Murray and his place in the field’s history has been dominated by the Donald Murray = Expressivist conceptual frame and I seek to reframe Murray by attending to the historical details of his life and work. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources and interviews, I root Murray’s reform efforts in his troubled childhood, frustrated experiences of schooling, and struggles with the discipline of English as it was presented to him as an undergraduate student at the University of New Hampshire in the 1940s. I investigate Murray’s efforts to reform the teaching of English and writing in primary, secondary, and post-secondary instructional contexts and show how his concerns with learning transfer, metacognition, difference and diversity, emotion, and identity helped set the stage for many of the field’s ongoing interests and areas of inquiry. In sum, I try to offer new frameworks for thinking about Murray which rescue him from the debilitating Donald Murray = Expressivist frame and which are rooted in a historiographic approach. Because Murray’s career overlaps roughly with the years of the writing process movement, there is much in his story which sheds light on the larger story of the development of the field of composition and rhetoric during this time; in writing about Murray I am able, also, to write about the field and its history and development, more generally.

And some more: from an earlier brainstorming session:

Murray Contributions

1. Revision (see p597 in Jess Enoch’s recent CCC article)
2. Peer tutoring (conference)
3. Emotion and writing as healing
4. Reflection and metacognition
5. Alternate assessment mechanisms (later, portfolios)
6. Cognition--he was most interested, really, in this