Final Murray Post

These are taken from Apple Notes:

3/7/22

Murray Book

My First Year Writing Course in a NutShell:

In the writing process approach, the teacher and student face the task of making meaning together. The task is ever new, for they share the blank page and an ignorance of purpose and outcome. They start on a trip of exploration together. They find where they are going as they get there. 

This requires of the writing teacher a special kind of courage. The teacher not only has to face blank pages but blank students worried by their blankness, and a blank curriculum which worries the teacher’s supervisors. The teacher has to restrain himself or herself from providing a content, taking care not to inhibit the students from finding their own subjects, their own forms, their own language. 

(“Writing as Process” p 18).

Final Chapter of Murray Book

The More Things Change…

Describe my UNH writing course that I still teach in FYW…

Draw on anonymous student comments to illustrate that so little has changed. 

Talk about my own ambivalence about teaching for transfer when it seems that what students really need is practice in writing…

Fun

Something surprising about this class is how fast its going by. It feels like its going by super fast, and thats a good thing, because it means I'm having a good time.

Voice/Authority/Freedom

Writing with meaning has been the most meaningful thing that I have picked up from this course. These topics are topics that I want to write about and that I want to speak about, rather than what the teacher/professor chooses for me. I feel like I finally have a voice that matters.

What surprised me is how creative I can be about my essays. There is no prompt which had scared me at first but now I understand how great it is to write about anything I want to.

Frequency/Quantity of Writing

I like that we are able to receive feedback on our writing. I have only had two other writing classes where we consistently gave our classmates feedback. However, we did not do nearly as much writing in those classes as this one. I already feel like I’m benefitting a lot from this class. 

I never envisioned myself writing a new paper or revising one every single week. I have never had a class where this much writing was required. For the most part in high school we would write maybe 2 or 3 big pieces each semester, but it seemed much more spread out than the writing in this class. 

I’m A Bad Writer/Empowerment

I was never a big fan of writing but this course has taught me that writing doesn't have to be such a daunting task. I think realizing that is the most meaningful thing that I learned in the course. I say this because writing is a valuable skill that can potentially have a lot of power.

The Gospel of Transfer

Should Transfer Even Be the Goal of Writing Classes?

Read over p. 63-end of Jarratt et al article. Note this passage, in particular

Why don’t students remember? e quandaries of the students quoted above, along with the mixed memories within the retrospective accounts of our other interviewees, lend credence to the perspectives on transfer o ered in the introduction: transfer is extremely di cult to chart and may in fact be the wrong question. Our study con rms Bergmann and Zepernick’s observation that, in general, “students do not look for . . . situations” in which knowledge from FYC can carry forward (139). (65)

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It's your story, and the form of the story should grow out of what you have to say. (Murray) 

http://pjnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/featurewriting.pdf

p. 17

To know where I need to go next I do not look to rhetorical tradition, past experience, rule books, I look at the paragraph I have just written. (A Writer’s Geography, p. 180) 

That’s the kernel of the idea around which he built his writing class

In school we teach logical thinking and I am anal compulsive, love charts, delight in the movement from A to B to C, from Roman numeral I to Roman numeral II, but while writing I usually practice associative thinking, swinging like an orangutan from one handy vine to another, allowing chance to lead me to meaning. Perhaps we should teach this ape-thinking in school. (A Writer’s Geography, p. 184) 

Teach students to pay attention to—and respect—their own thoughts and feelings by respecting them yourself. (A Writer’s Geography, p. 194)

This is the kernel of what Murray is about. 

One useful thing I learned from the article, "Before Writing: Remember What Makes Writing Easy" was "To write well I need to maintain faith in the draft". I found this useful because I always find myself doubting whether or not my draft is good enough, whether I'm putting enough effort into my draft, is my draft something that has been written before, do people even want to listen to what I have to say or simply, will editors or other writers accept it for what it is. It's hard to keep faith in a draft when all you can think about it the negative outcomes. 

The Transfer of Writing Knowledge: 

In what ways should we think of Murray’s work as providing an antecedent for or anticipating later work?

This was at the center of Murray’s work…but when did this word first start to appear most recently in Writing Studies? 

“Transfer is a concept that has been studied for years by educational and cognitive psychologists, only recently becoming an interest of those in composition. Compositionists most often rely on educational psychologists Perkins and Salomon’s (1992) conception of transfer, which they describe as “instances in which learning in one context or with one set of materials impacts on performance in another context or with other related materials” (para. 1). Although as early as 1908 educational psychologist Charles Judd’s experiments showed that transfer was, in fact, possible, it would take until very recently for those in composition to ask: “If transfer is possible are there ways we can teach writing to promote transfer?” One of the answers to this question is that teaching writing with an emphasis on metacognition can help facilitate transfer.” Excerpt From: Patricia Portanova, J. Michael Rifenburg, and Duane Roen (Eds.). “Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing.” iBooks. (Carillo p. 96-97)

“No matter their approach, all of the scholars mentioned above call for the importance of deliberately teaching for transfer by incorporating metacognitive exercises into writing courses so that students can succeed across courses and contexts both within and beyond academia.” Excerpt From: Patricia Portanova, J. Michael Rifenburg, and Duane Roen (Eds.). “Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing.” iBooks. (Carillo p. 100)

“Similarly, education scholar Erik De Corte argues for the development of “powerful learning environments for thinking and problem solving” that prepare students for future learning (De Corte & Masui, 2012, p. 365). To test the efficacy of such environments, De Corte and his colleague Chris Masui created a learning environment that privileged the dispositions of “orienting” and “self-judging,” as well as other “self-regulation skills” (2012, p. 375). Ultimately, the students in this learning environment were better prepared for and more successful in the new context—another course—than the students in the control group.” Excerpt From: Patricia Portanova, J. Michael Rifenburg, and Duane Roen (Eds.). “Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing.” iBooks. (Carillo 105)  — THIS IS WHAT MURRAY WAS TRYING TO CREATE

“Intentionally creating a specific type of environment that inhabits certain dispositions need not be something that goes on wholly behind-the-scenes. ” Excerpt From: Patricia Portanova, J. Michael Rifenburg, and Duane Roen (Eds.). “Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing.” iBooks. (Carillo 105)

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Anson/Moore Book:

See Ch. 1: Assembling Knowledge…

This is a mini literature review of early research in the area of transfer:

“A handful of studies (e.g., Anson & Forsberg, 1990; Beaufort, 2007; Bergman & Zepernick, 2007; Clark & Hernandez, 2011; Driscoll, 2011; McCarthy, 1987; Nelms & Dively, 2007; Wardle, 2007) followed localized groups of students navigating writing across specific critical transitions or examined faculty expectations for students’ transfer of writing knowledge.” Excerpt From: Chris M. Anson and Jessie L. Moore. “Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer.” iBooks. (11)

“Writing transfer is the phenomenon in which new and unfamiliar writing tasks are approached through the application, remixing, or integration of previous knowledge, skills, strategies, and dispositions.” (22)

“Students’ meta-awareness often plays a key role in transfer, and reflective writing promotes preparation for transfer and transfer-focused thinking.” (24)

Practices that promote writing transfer: “Asking students to engage in activities that foster the development of metacognitive awareness, including asking good questions about writing situations and developing heuristics for analyzing unfamiliar writing situations;” (25-26)

TFT Curriculum calls into question the efficacy and/or effectiveness of the Murray approach (see TC #2 in Critical Transitions article by Adler Kassner et al.

“As suggested in Threshold Concept #2, when the first-year writing course is grounded only in process, strategies, and skills, students are unable to conceptualize their knowledge about writing.”

Excerpt From: Chris M. Anson and Jessie L. Moore. “Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer.” iBooks. (p. 79)

I find myself thinking that I might try to write about where/how Murray’s work serves as an antecedent and where it does not…

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Reading Notes:

Sources:

“The Evolving Relationship Between Composition and Cognitive Studies: Gaining Some Historical Perspective on our Contemporary Moment” (Ellen C. Carillo) — Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing

important historical antecedents (Carillo, p. 108)

“Paul Kei Matsuda (2003) has aptly described what often happens as new approaches seek to replace older ones. He points out how “new ‘paradigms’ criticiz[e] previously dominant theories and pedagogies for certain features while appropriating or ignoring other features” (2003, p. 74).” Excerpt From: Patricia Portanova, J. Michael Rifenburg, and Duane Roen (Eds.). “Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing.” iBooks. (Carillo p. 101-02)

“Although writing research grew in large part out of the U.S. history and culture of first-year composition courses in higher education, the international community of writing research scholars continues to embrace cognition, using cognitive principles to inform writing research in multiple disciplines. ” (27)

Excerpt From: Patricia Portanova, J. Michael Rifenburg, and Duane Roen (Eds.). “Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing.” iBooks. 

Framework for Success in Post-Secondary Writing mentions metacognition as one of eight ways of approaching learning. So metacognition is a value in comp, for sure, but do we trace this to Murray? And where do we place him on the map 

Areas to research in Comp/Rhet:

Was Donald Murray an expressionist? Look at sources which define the term.

Write To Learn: WAC, writing to learn, where and when did this begin to get attention and should we connect Murray to this? 

Revision

Failure

Ethos: Who gives me a way to talk about our disciplinary/professional ethos, as a field and to help show how Murray contributed to this?

Conference Teaching: in “Perhaps the Teacher Should Cut…” Murray outlines early observations on conference teaching. But how do I find out when/how this (i.e. conference teaching) became “a thing” in comp/rhet? A history of that?

Threshold Concepts

Writing is an activity and subject of study

Can I connect Murray to this statement: 

“But at the same time that writing is an activity, it is also a subject of study. That is, it is possible to investigate writing as an activity and apply to it questions that provide insight both into individuals’ encounters and experiences with writing and into the multiple roles that writing plays within specific communities of practice. ” (Adler-Kassner et al in Critical Transitions p. 47)

or, per the microhistorian Giovanni Levi (2012), to “reinsert” him into the “concrete events” of the “specific form of society” to which he belonged (i.e. English Studies, the UNH English Department, the emergent field of composition and rhetoric, the writing process movement). 

By placing Murray within a historical context via archival research I believe we may, as a field, be able to move past the simplistic Donald Murray = Expressivist frame that has dogged him all these years. We will also be able to better “evaluate the success or otherwise” of Murray’s “efforts to change” our field (need Levi citation here). And that term change is particularly appropos in Murray’s case because his objective, from the moment he began to work with pre-service English teachers at UNH in the early-1960s, was precisely that—to change or reform the “particular, specific form of society” to which he “belong(ed)” (i.e. mainly, the field of English). 

It’s within this methodological tradition, one which McComiskey (2016) argues is “an extention and complication of existing revisionary histories” in composition and rhetoric (24), that I seek to work, for, as Stock (2016) and Gogan (2016), both of whom have sought to recuperate important disciplinary forebears from dominant historiographic characterizations, have demonstrated, microhistorical inquiry can function as an alternative to the broad-brush approach to history often deployed by our field’s first-wave historians. 

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Recent Murray notes

Organization by Decade:

1963-1968

1969-1976

Three “data” chapters (1960s, 70s, 80s) that track a number of themes across each “era” or “epoch” and introduce whatever new themes are relevant for each era covered. Track the following:

1. Writing at UNH
2. Theorizing of writing and publication
3. Writing Guru work

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Things I want to talk about:

1. building a new kind of writing class
2. working with teachers (beginning and evolution)
3. influence on the writing culture at UNH

How Did Donald Murray Extend, Change, and Develop the Institutional Writing Culture at the University of New Hampshire? (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WXpjVo23ZZjIQZZdOP-UqYBU4PgkbXPjj4CBWNlNO7U/edit)

4. trajectory of writing/scholarship ABOUT writing

The chapters should focus on events, what he was doing, and what he was writing, how his theory of what was in the black box was evolving. This is what Lewis did, right? Talked about BOTH what they were writing about and what they were doing…

This is basically what I’m trying to say:

Keynes’s book is essentially correct with regard to its most important arguments. But it was, and remains today, largely misunderstood. The enduring contributions of the book are to be found not in Keynes’ first dissenting clause (his “objection the treaty”), but in the second, about “the economic problems of Europe.” Keynes was sounding an alarm about the fragility of the European order. (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/opinion/keynes-economic-consequences-peace.html?algo=top_conversion&fellback=false&imp_id=265503620&imp_id=198889109&action=click&module=trending&pgtype=Article&region=Footer)

Why not START with the stuff about threshold concepts…the observation that Murray’s name is mentioned nowhere in the book, and yet…

Why am I not talking about the task Murray gave himself and his efforts at that task, no, problem. Somewhere he talks about the black box, an interview with chip, and that he was trying to see and understand what was in that black box. Why am I not tracing that intellectual journey, as Michael Lewis does with the work of Amos and Tversky. Start with the metaphor of the black box, of Murray’s recognition and dissatisfaction of others sense of what was in that black box, on his train rides back and forth to Durham during the summer before he began to teach, and then start trying to map his efforts to offer a better idea, theory?, about what was in that black box.... this is, perhaps, the most important thing I can do for Murray, teach his travels to unlock the mystery of what happens when people write. What were his discoveries along the way? In his article with Berkenkotter, this seems like an important moment on the journey, a realization that he had been wrong about some things, a clearer sense of understanding... and how about graves? How did he influence Murray or contribute to his thinking? And who else?

A half dozen years BEFORE Janet Emig published her girls launching dissertation on the composing processes of 12th graders, Murray was already at work on this problem, this question: what happens when human beings write? 

A history of ideas. An intellectual history.

Their work until then had always started as a challenge to some existing, widely accepted theory. They exposed the flaws in theories of human behavior and created other, more persuasive theories. Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project, p 306. 

This is what Murray was doing—challenging what he understood to be the existing, widely accepted theories about how to write. He twisted these theories in part because they were generated by people he couldn’t respect as writers and who lacked his experience and because he thought they were wrong. But what were these theories and what about them did he think was wrong? There is a review article of a textbook, look for this. It may reveal some things about what he felt wasn’t working....and read interviews, particularly the ones in WOE.

Why are you need to read this book: I am Magine a graduate student in a composition course coming across the naming what we know book, and then I run through all of the ideas in there that were Murray’s and then essentially point out how his name is never even mentioned in this book but he’s the man behind many of these things and you need to know his story and to know his story is to know our story during a particular period in the field so he is a kind of case study.

Possible new title: Donald Marie and the creation of composition

The new chapter verse chapter I still like the title Donald Marie’s literacy narrative. But I also like the phrase of silence Voice and I think that this chapter and some of what he wrote about his experience at your age when he fat began to find a sense of Voice as a person at the end when a chapter

Three sources the talk about the prominence in stature of the UNH program circa the mid-1980s: the article building a nationally recognized writing program over lunch, the Gary Lindburg interview in the UNH student magazine, and Bonnie’s chapter. He’s all give me the end point of the story and that might be a good place to begin to go back to the beginning. That is in the first date a chapter passed Murray’s autobiography. Also, what about the first dissertations? The creation of the two PhD programs and the first graduates from it, I think that happens around the same time. And was Mary on the committees?. And what about Newkirk being hired in 1978 not really the first composition list but sort of, and then Connors being hired around 83 or so. The first resurrection.

Someone in a review (Sue McLeod?) said that Murray’s ideas have become so much a part of the fabric of the field that we don’t even know that he was one of the first to say them, which is true. In TC 1.1 I come across this sentence: We don’t simply think first and then write. We write to think. (p. 19) — This is Murray and yet his name appears nowhere in the citations in this book…

How did it all begin? Start with Bonnie Sunstein’s piece, which is sort of where it all ended up. Work with her words in the introduction to convey a sense of what she experienced there, a unique time and place and then ask, when did this start, transition backwards. She is writing about the mid to late 80s, the end of the story I’m trying to tell. Well, to what moment do we trace the beginning?

Donald Murray was a game changer. What were other people saying about writing at this time? Look at the books that he was handed at you and H to teach with. What were they saying,? How did he want to be different? Maybe also look at the stuff that was going on in English education at this time in the early to mid60s with the federal government grants and the money that was coming in for the NDA, contrast him with the woman who was his foil at the 1968 NDA or look at some of the other NDA institutes in 1968, this would be a great idea, look at some of the other packets from other schools and see what they were teaching at other schools and how Murray’s in 1968 or maybe it was 1969 NDEA workshop was different. I definitely need to do that. Right to NCTE and ask for more examples of the institutes and what they taught about writing and put Murray’s course in comparison. Basically create a Contacts for understanding how he was a game changer. This might be a new introduction for the book.

Changes to chapter 3: move the stuff at the beginning and make it into the conclusion that’s a much better place for that. Lucian, sorry, introduction can start with the question as simple as: how did it all began? And that’s the story I’m telling you this chapter.

Something I want to emphasize more, though, is the idea of taking a look at Daryl Marie’s unvarnished first attempt and talking about the process of writing and teaching writing. I wanna_that’s what my discussion of writing is intended to do. Before he met really anyone or he got involved in in Cincy or his first thoughts as initial exclamations as regards to questions about how the writing works and how writing should be taught? And the purpose is to look at that book as a kind of clear unvarnished early statement and then that sets up thinking about how stinking involved and go to these two questions over the years. But also, to show how The ideas of the concepts of power meant agency and authority or ideas in his thinking, we’re at the center of his thinking, from the jump. And so these are the central ideas for which he should be known and his real gift to the field these things never changed about teaching of riding out riding worst dead.

Murray: Empowerment, empathy, agency, authority

I’m rethinking the structure of the book. I’m thinking that a first chapter needs to focus on his literacy narrative and only his literacy narrative of his childhood and his experiences with school. And this I guess I will argue is or was among his most important influence and informed everything that he did I need to make this argument more clear expanded talk about the way that his program of what he was trying to accomplish in terms of trying to empower students give them authority was rooted in his own experiencesAs documented in his literacy narrative. I think the narrative should begin with the first book in the first time he mentions it in print, writer reforms sorry, I read her teachers writing, that obscure passage deep into the book. It should begin their discussion should be in there.

From there I think that a much more involved discussion of his relationship to you and HUNH is in order. This institution that shaped him and that he shaped. This needs to be further developed an expanded his encounter with the institution and struggles against it, the class based elements of his struggle, his lack of authorityThat section in the existing first chapter is really long and I think that it needs to be coming to own chapter.

This would maybe push off the chapter on his work with the New England superintendence Council and Dick Goodman to a later chapter. I don’t know quite how this will work yet but it may be making chronology better or improving the chronological focus of the book and that the chapter could begin with his stories the new chapter could begin with his story from one of his essays of visiting you and H during his training for World War II and could grow from there

I need more and this could be a chapter in the book about how to characterize the different periods of Murray’s writing. Tom Newkirk is a few pieces that he finds to be most important for the late 70s maybe early 80s maybe this. When Mary started to look more carefully maybe because people had to think about how to do so at his own writing in a way that he wasn’t doing in the early part of his career so anyway I’m just thinking about if we go from the publication of a writer to just riding in 1965 until, I don’t know what they sayThe endpoint I don’t know what the endpoint would be 1981 already has auto biography that actually might be a very good place to add that might capture delete delete work but what are the different periods in his work and his writing how did it change revolve over the years and how do I push back against the narrative of him being expressive just by showing how his work evolved over time?

Tobin Notes:

“the legend” (8)

The history of composition is still written primarily through the stories we tell. Stories about the dreadful ways writing was taught—or not taught—when “we were in school”; stories about the miraculous changes brought about by the writing process movement, and, lately, stories about how some of those changes may not have been so miraculous…”

The basic trajectory is something like this: I entered UNH in 1992 and declared a major in business because doing so seemed to promise some kind of financially secure future. Four years later, as I prepared for graduation, I was writing and publishing essays and editorials in the school newspaper and literary magazine which signaled how much I had changed. 

at UNH in the early to mid-1990s I participated, as an English major, in something that felt to me, at the time, empowering, validating, and authorizing. 

If the history of composition is, as Lad Tobin has suggested, “written primarily through the stories we tell,” there are two stories that, as a proud son of the University of New Hampshire (UNH), loom large in  my understanding of our history—both of which center around the site of my disciplinary enculturation, the UNH English Department, and its most well-known writer and writing instructor, Donald M. Murray. 

The first is a Great Man story. In this narrative, Murray features as a heroic figure who single-handedly improved the way writing is taught in U.S. schools and colleges and universities and put UNH on the map as an institution with a national reputation for innovation in writing pedagogy. A survivor of the Great Depression, a soldier in World War II, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Murray is easily cast in the Great Man role. In penning one of composition’s most significant founding documents, “Teach Writing As Process Not Product” (1971), he gave the emergent field its disciplinary Declaration of Independence and in so-doing managed to cast himself as our Thomas Jefferson, in addition to our George Washington.

The second story is a Rise and Fall narrative. Here, Murray, at the pinnacle of his success in the mid- to late-1980s, comes under attack by the villain James Berlin. With Berlin’s damning assertion that Murray is an expressivist, after years of ascendence within the community of composition, Murray’s bright star begins its descent. Rather than defend himself against his detractors, Murray quietly exits composition’s primary stages, retiring not to his gentlemen’s farm but, instead, to a weekly column in The Boston Globe where he is free of disciplinary acrimony and accusations. In 2006, upon his death, both in person and in print, his acolytes offer encomiums to the Great Man whose disciplinary diminishment was, all agree, one of the great injustices in composition history.

New Murray Tasks

Task 1:

Google Scholar: search 

Murray

Teach Writing as Process

Figure out which articles have most citations

Look at most recent citations (2019)

How is Murray being used today? By whom? This might interesting in the intro somewhere…

This might be particularly useful for the article I am planning to write in commemoration of Teach Writing as Process (1972/2022)

Task 2: 

Begin with Freshman English at UNH, 1963 or so. What was the course? How did it work? What were they reading and/or writing? Quoting from the books? This will help create a sense of the context in which Murray was working. Maybe even start with the story of his journey on the train to Durham during the summer before his arrival and his reading over their rhetorics, etc. 

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Murray Things to Write About:

Breaking free of CTR at UNH with Donald Murray

Write an article/chapter about Freshman English at UNH before and after

How did Don’s thinking about writing and its teaching change or evolve over time? 

Who was Don in 1968 when he published the first edition of AWTW and what did he know? And who was he in 1985 when he published the second edition and what did he know then? At the first moment, there really was no field. At the second, there was a field. How did he evolve? 

What DID Murray say about personal writing? Was this his central interest or…? (Start with late in career where he was defending personal writing, but then go back to WTW1 where it wasn’t his central interest).

To DO:

1. historical resources to read to rewrite an explanation of Murray’s early years in the field:

(Connors 1999)

“Connors, Robert. 1999. “Composition History and Disciplinarity.” In History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalism of Composition, edited by Debra Journet, Beth Boehm, and Mary Rosner, 1963–1983: 3–23. Stanford, CA: Ablex.”

(Craig et al. in Michrohistory)

See Yancey in Naming What We Know p. 50-51

2. The new exigence for this project: Murray is not named. 

Zebroski, James. “The Expressivist Menace: Retrojected Histories, Mythic Origins” in History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition, 1963-1983. Ed. Mary Rosner, Beth Boehm, and Debra Journet. Stamford, CT: Ablex. 1999. 99-114. Print. 

Connors, Robert. “Composition History and Disciplinarity.” History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition, 1963–1983. Ed. Mary Rosner, Beth Boem, and Debra Journet. Stamford, CT: Ablex, 1999. 3–21. 

Heckathorn, Amy. “Moving Toward a Group Identity: WPA Professionalization from the 1940s to the 1970s.” Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline. Ed. Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo. West Lafayette, 

IN: Parlor P, 2004. 191–219.

Connors: Composition and Rhetoric and Collected Works

Book to Return

See email.

Book to Rent

Lloyd-Jones, Richard. “On Institutes and Projects.” Composition in Context: Essays in Honor of Donald C. Stewart. Ed. W. Ross Winterowd and Vincent Gillespie. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1994.152–66. 

AvailableAdams Library Main Stacks PE1404 .C625 1994

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Murray Book To Do List:

1. Reformer

So I am making the claim that Murray was a disciplinary and educational reformer. But do i SHOW that enough in the introduction to give the reader an idea of what I’m talking about? Do I walk them through HOW he wanted to reform things, or WHAT he wanted to reform—in English? In school? 

I need to do so and the passages from “Teach the Motivating Force” help me to do that.

Teachers become active participants, learning becomes pleasurable, authority is decentered, discovery is at the center—for teachers and students.

I have a lot of gold here to show how he wanted to reform English… and there is much more elsewhere in his pieces, especially in AWTW where he uses the metaphor of school being like church. That might be the piece to use to make my point about EDUCATIONAL reform and the passages from “Teach the Motivating Force” provides the material for my point about DISCIPLINARY reform…

I’m guessing that others have also noted this idea of “proposing a new kind of relationship between teachers and students”—Ballenger, Tobin, Dethier and I should mine them for some more gold on this point…

Here are more passages on this, from “Writing as Process: How Writing Finds its Own Meaning” (Learning By Teaching) that kind of crystalize this: 

It is very hard for traditionally-trained teachers who are not writing themselves to believe that students can write without instruction from the teacher or without assignment. (26)

Those of us who teach the writing process are comfortable with the constant change. This sets us apart from many people in the academic world who teach in a traditional or classical mode, believing there are truths which can be learned and passed on from teacher to student, from generation to generation. Their conception has its attractions; it is the one I was taught. But my life as a writer and as a teacher of writing leads me--as similar experience has led others--to a different tradition which some call developmental or truly humanistic. We do not teach our students rules demonstrated by static models; we teach our students to write by allowing them to experience the process of writing. That is a process of discovery, of using written language to find out what we have to say. (31)

2. Cognitivist In my ongoing efforts to argue that Murray should have been categorized as, if anything, a cognitivist, which I currently have moved to the Introduction section of the book but which might not need to be there and should, instead, be in ch. 6 (?), I need to utilize this passage:

Speculations about the writing process are fun to propose an entertaining to consider, but we will not understand the writing process unless we employe all of the methods and tools of modern research. Hypotheses suggested, such as the existence of an identifiable process of internal revision, must be subjected to tough, skeptical investigation. We must ask uncomfortable, demanding questions of the writing process. We will certainly not get the answers we expect—many of our pet theories will be destroyed—but the answers will bring new and better questions. Research into the writing process Will eventually produce an understanding of how people write, which will have a profound effect on our educational procedures. We now attempt to teach a writing process we do not understand; research may allow us to teach what we understand “(Internal Revision: A Process of Discovery,” p. 80).

Also, I need to frame this within the historical moment, of his breaking free of his dept chair duties, which he hated, of administrative work being over (1971-1977 or 78), and of the death of his daughter…. The end of his department chair initiates a period of real productivity until his retirement.

Three periods?

1963-71

1971-78

1978-1987

3. It occurs to me that chapter 4/5 could be about establishing, building authority and ch 6 could be about decentering and relinquishing authority. “as a writer still trying to learn my craft at fifty-four and as a writing teacher still trying to learn how to help students learn their craft, I feel an obligation to speculate upon the writing process. (“Writing as Process: How Writing Finds its Own Meaning”, p. 6)

9/30/22

Murray’s Main Contributions:

Transfer “Long before there were teaching-for-transfer curricula,”

Reflection/Metacognition

Disciplinary Identity Separate from English

This story contains significant implications for understanding Murray and his work, for what has been obscured by the Donald Murray = Expressivist frame (or just forgotten entirely) are the many arguments Murray advanced for the disciplinary reform of English and the central role he played in helping the emergent field of composition and rhetoric develop and articulate an identity separate from it. (36)

Decentering Teacher Authority

Decentering Teacher Authority

Because Murray typically built his authority on the foundation of his credentials as a professional writer (i.e., A Writer Teaches Writing), it is perhaps difficult to imagine him in this other capacity, i.e. as a struggling student, a high school dropout. And yet, from the earliest days of his work in the field, and throughout his career, really, we find evidence of Murray drawing on his experience to challenge teachers to de-center their authority and re-envision their role in the classroom. In A Writer Teaching Writing Murray summons the metaphor of the preacher to highlight the problem with traditional teaching methods: “If a classroom is designed for a sermon,” he writes, “with row upon row of desks facing the pulpit, few teachers will have the courage to resist the temptation to preach. It's safer behind the desk, and, after all, the student congregation can't leave while you talk” (109). Rather than preach, Murray argued that the job of the teacher was “to design a climate in which students can learn.” This included facilitating small group activity, leading writing workshops, and, most significantly, conducting frequent individual conferences. It involved listening to students and treating them as individuals: “When you talk to those teachers who motivate students,” he writes in 1968, in the first edition of A Writer Teaches Writing, “you begin to see, although the teachers may be young or old, male or female, strict or permissive, understanding or impatient, they are all interested in knowing the student. They listen to the student and the student knows it” (151). 

A few years later, in an article entitled, wonderfully, “What Can You Say Besides AWK?” (1973), Murray continues with his meditation on teachers-as-listeners, now identifying three roles the teacher can play: judge, Moses, and listener. In the role of judge the teacher acts as the “defender of the institution,” evaluating students and penalizing those “who break the law.” The problem here, as Murray describes it, is that when the teacher acts as judge the students “serve their sentence […] and then go on breaking the rules” (22). In the second role, Moses, the teacher functions as “the bearer of great truths,” not unlike the preacher. Here, in the case of the writing class, the teacher delivers “an absolute rhetoric written on tablets on high to the young.” In this way, learning becomes not something that belongs to students but something that is bestowed upon them by sages on the stage. Finally, in the role of listener, Murray’s preferred role, the teacher, with “few strict laws to enforce” and “few great truths to thunder,” enacts a simple formula: “he waits, he reads, he listens” (23). In this early articulation, we find the seeds of the responsive-teaching approach for which Murray would still be advocating a dozen or more years later, in his performance that day in Iowa City.

Among Murray’s many articulations of the listening, responsive teacher, my favorite comes in his article “The Teacher’s Craft: Telling, Listening, Revealing” (1982) where, now a seasoned educator, he reflects on the various stages he has passed through in his teacherly development. He finds three: teaching by telling, teaching by listening, and teaching by revealing. Of the first, teaching by telling, done standing up, Murray writes, “When I came to teaching nineteen years ago I thought the classroom a casual place where we would converse. Of course, I would do most of the conversing. They would listen, and they would learn” (56). After five nervous years of teaching by telling and feeling that he had accomplished little in the way of actually helping students learn, Murray graduated to teaching by listening, a sit-down affair. Of this phase he writes, “The chairs were not in rows, and there was no desk at the front of the room. There was a great rectangle of tables. I would have to learn to teach sitting down.” It took ten years, Murray confesses, to do so, but he eventually found that when he was seated among his students he “listened in a different way” and consequently they seemed able to “speak in a different way.” His classes’ interactions, he explains, became “more fun, more spontaneous.” “I learned from my students, and they were excited that I was learning from them as they were learning from me” (58). 

Finally, in the years just before “The Teacher’s Craft” was published, Murray found himself experimenting with a third approach, teaching by revealing. “I have become comfortable enough to teach by revealing my own learning,” he writes. Drawing on the work of Frank Smith and Richard Beach he explains that teaching by revealing is a process of publicly demonstrating one writer’s search for meaning through language. Simply, it was a matter of writing in public, sharing his process with students in real time, on the board, in the room. In revealing himself in this way Murray found that his “students share[d] their search for meaning with me” and that in this way they were able to “teach each other by learning” (60). Teaching by revealing, then, was Murray’s attempt to create a symmetrical process whereby the teacher’s authority was decentered so that student and teacher can learn from and listen to one another on shared terms. And, notably, it was an approach that was about as far away from the kind of teaching Murray experienced in his youth as one can imagine.

10/14/22

What happens when we write? What occurs as we compose? Can the processes by which individuals give shape and meaning to written texts be observed, documented, and understood? To what theories about composing could such understanding lead? (Sondra Perl, “Writing Process: A Shining Moment” 1994, p. xii)

Ch. 3 (new)

As a practicing writer, Murray was troubled by the fact that so few of the teachers he met and worked with seemed to do much actual writing, aside from the typical teacherly genres of lesson plans, etc. 

Long before there were teaching-for-transfer curricula,

Ch. 3

Once he joined the UNH faculty in the 1963, Donald Murray sought to build on and extend the inclusive and democratic extracurricular culture of writing Carroll Towle had established while simultaneously working to push back against the narrow and elitist vision of English he found within the mainstream of the English program. First and foremost among those things with which Murray came to quarrel was the liberal culture notion that writing was essentially unteachable, the gift of the chosen few. 

By the time he became a college English professor in 1963 Murray had been studying the testimony of writers on their craft since he was fourteen-years old (Crafting A Life 159). As such, he felt that liberal culture notions about writing, whether communicated to students directly or implied by curricula, were, at best, misguided, and, at worst, damaging. Early in the first edition of AWTW Murray addresses this issue: “I endeavor to show the students as I write with them that writing is not magic, but work.” He continues: “The writer does not put on a velvet smoking jacket, pick up a quill pen and let God direct his hand across the page. […] [T]he writer is engaged in a continual struggle to discover what he has to say and how to say it” (21). Elsewhere, Murray aims his arguments more directly at those whom he believes perpetuate the fiction that writing cannot be taught: “When we teach writing we do our students a disservice if we allow them to think that writing is a mystery. Writing is not a magic possessed only by the high priests of the English Department” (Instructor’s Manual, Write To Learn p. 23). Writing, Murray believed, could be taught and learned and he offered his own life and experience as evidence for this claim, but the way it was being taught by English teachers trained in literature, he felt, needed to change. 

“Can writing be taught?” he asks in an undated handout from his early years in the profession. “Yes,” he responds, “Immediately. Starting tomorrow.” And, he continues, “it can be done without a budget for special equipment, a redesigned classroom, a reduced load or even special training for the teacher.” 

During his first year at UNH, as part of his preparation to teach Expository Writing, Murray had gone out into the field to visit local schools and speak with teachers to learn more about composition pedagogy as it was being practiced in classrooms of the day. What he found concerned him. Writing education in the 1960s, he felt, had changed little since the 1930s, when he was a student. English teachers were still mostly teachers of literature first and teachers of writing second (if they were teachers of writing at all). By contrast, Murray was a writer first and a teacher of writing (not literature) second. In this way he inverted the professional identity of the typical English teacher or professor, and, as such, was able to articulate problems in the teaching of English, and the teaching of writing within English, that those who occupied more traditional disciplinary identities could not.

Teachers’ lack of insider knowledge about writing and, thus, their lack of writerly authority, made them, Murray felt, susceptible to curricula which guided them towards ineffectual deductive or top-down approaches to composition pedagogy which had been around for years but did not in the least resemble what Murray knew, from his own experience, actually happened when writers wrote. There was a world of difference, Murray came to see, between a writer teaching writing and an English teacher teaching writing and so this became the first problem he sought to address as he waded into his reform work: to teach teachers what writers know (and do) when they write so that they can pass it on to and make writers out of students.

Ch. 2 Epigram:

[E]ducation is geared up for sameness. We want our students to perform to the standards of other students, to study what we plan for them to study, and to learn from it what we or our teachers learned. Yet our students learn, at least in writing, if they experience difference. […] We must learn to accept and delight in the difference we find in our students. (“Writing and Teaching for Surprise,” p. 7)

Ch. 1

One measure of Berlin’s influence, beyond the virtual disappearance of Murray from important field summaries a la Adler-Kassner and Wardle, may be the frequency (and ease) with which his arguments have been taken up and 

  See Peary, 2014 and Gogin, 2016 for additional counter-readings.

Of course, composition and rhetoric today is no longer the place it was when Donald Murray occupied the bright spotlight of the field’s center stages. Murray’s arguments, grounded in a humanistic worldview that valued learning for its own sake, can, by today’s standards, sometimes seem old-fashioned, especially at a moment when many of us have had to adapt to the reality that students, parents, citizens, and administrators now conceive of higher education primarily as a form of advanced vocational training. There is value, of course, in such work, but during the years of the Writing Process Movement our forebears, more steeped, perhaps, in the humanistic ethos of English than we are, today, rarely argued that writing should be taught, as Murray put it, because “it can sell insurance.” “It is conventional,” Murray writes, “to find out the student’s career goal and then bring in reports from that field which show the importance of writing or have the student interview a person in the field who has found that writing is a significant part of the job.” 

The problem with this approach, as Murray explains, is that in its deployment “we diminish the power of writing” (AWTW p. 205), which comes in its ability to empower individuals, build community, and change the world. This Donald Murray, perhaps, is the one best suited for our times. “Writing is a way of understanding our world and breaking out of our anonymity and isolation by sharing our diverse understandings,” he argues in a passage that surely contains resonance for our world today (246, 2e). And to writing teachers, he offers the following: “Do not minimize the importance of our calling. It makes a difference when a person finds he or she can speak, and it makes a difference to others when they speak” (AWTW2, 246).

According to Lynée Lewis Gaillet (2010) “Historians of rhetorical practices examine archives in an effort to seek nuanced, complicated tales.” Further, as Gaillet explains, 

“Our adoption of recovery and revision methodologies often leads us to reexamine traditional ‘truths’” (28). So writes the historian Lynée Lewis Gaillet (2010). 

Chapter 1

The Marginalization and Recovery of Donald Murray: From Expressivist to Reformer

From Expressivist to Reformer: The Marginalization and Recovery of Donald Murray

Further, if we look at Murray’s 1972 experiment in teaching a writing class entirely by conference, as we will do in greater detail later in this book, we see that whereas Murray eliminated class meetings, assignments, textbooks, and even grades, the one essential element of a writing class he didn’t eliminate was the weekly conference between student and teacher. Murray believed that the kind of formal instruction he provided in conference was absolutely essential to writers’ growth. The right kind of teacher, which is to say one who had experienced and practiced writing herself and could thus teach from a position of experiential knowledge and authority was, to Murray’s way of thinking, critical to student learning. In sum, then, while Murray may have agreed with Elbow that teachers and the formal instruction in composition they provided circa …1968? 1978? maybe even 1988?... were part of the problem in the teaching of writing, he never advocated for teaching writing without teachers, or without formal instruction. Murray wanted better formal writing instruction, not none at all. 

Rather than encourage students to become independent agents and hope that they would intuit a set of principles, what Murray was after was a better understanding of the writing process itself—for his students and himself What happens when people write, he wanted to know, and, more specifically, what happens when people write successfully, and how can we ground our pedagogy in a better understanding of the knowledge gleaned from answering these questions so that students will learn to write better? Answering these questions was Murray’s main concern. And one last thing, as someone who penned an entire curriculum series aimed at grade school children (Write to Communicate: The Language Arts in Process, 1973) and several textbooks aimed at audiences of college students (Write to Learn, 1984; Read to Write, 1986), Murray surely didn’t think such work was “irrelevant.”

With Murray, this is easy, both because he cited so infrequently (recall that his highest degree was a BA) and because he tended to cite the same scholars repeatedly. In any case, Murray’s citations, I would argue, are perhaps the best indicator of his theoretical or pedagogical interests and commitments, and should be consulted by anyone attempting to categorize him or make sense of his approach to composition pedagogy. 

For Murray, trying to understand what happens when humans write, b

As with any scholar, who Donald Murray, himself, cited and referenced 

have never quite been recognized or acknowledged by those who have pigeonholed Murray as an expressivist.

if and when we seek to do so, by examining the people he cites and whose words he works with most frequently. 

This brief analysis has focused on a single instance in which the Donald Murray = Expressivist frame was invoked in our field’s literature. To be clear, my intention has not been to attack Henze et al or to argue that they should have categorized Murray as a cognitivist (although I think such a case could be made). Rather, my purpose has been to examine, closely, one invocation of the Donald Murray = Expressivist frame, to test it against the historical record. In this case I think Henze et al, following Berlin, miss a lot. Murray never argued that teachers should be removed from the teaching and learning situation. Nor did he advocate for a writing pedagogy rooted primarily in self-discovery. Finally, even a cursory review of his published writing reveals which community of scholars he felt drawn to and, himself, a part of. Henze et al paint with too broad a brush, associate Murray with ideas he did not espouse, and seem to misunderstand his primary motivation as a teacher and scholar of writing. That they are able to do so is due to the fact that, by 2007, the Donald Murray = Expressivist frame was already well-established in the field, having circulated in our literature by this point for almost twenty years. 

Multiple generations of scholars and practitioners, he argues, “have been introduced and initiated into the field of composition studies through Berlin’s work.” Many “continue to struggle with the normative legacy of [Berlin’s] reified taxonomies” (193). D. Shane Combs (2017) is one example. Of his experience as a newcomer to the field, Combs writes that for “a teacher and student coming into composition studies in a post-expressivist era” Donald Murray was strictly “off limits” (Composition Forum 2017). “[T]ime and the 1980’s ‘social turn’ made the option of my reaching out to and identifying with parts of Murray seem impossible,” Combs confesses. He is not alone in having felt this way. Arriving in the field myself in the early 2000s, I can say that this idea that Murray and other so-called expressivists were somehow “off limits” resonates, and this despite the fact that I pursued my doctoral education at UNH, in the long-shadow of Murray’s influence. The point is this: for many who joined the field at some time around the borders of the 21^st century, Murray and the others Berlin links with expressivism were actually made unsafe as topics of scholarly conversation and investigation. This is the extent of what Stock calls the “normative legacy” of Berlin’s influence.

It’s interesting to think about Berlin’s critique of expressionism and his use of Murray as an exemplar of this rhetoric in light of Murray’s own personal story, which I will explicate in considerable detail in the pages ahead and which I will argue served as the locus for his project of educational and disciplinary reform. As we will see, Murray’s working class childhood south of Boston during the Great Depression contains strong notes of social and especially educational disenfranchisement and alienation. In the two memoirs he published in his retirement, but also splattered throughout his academic writing, Murray relates the challenges and struggles he experienced in school. As he writes in his first major publication in the field, A Writer Teaches Writing (1968), in a section entitled “How to Reach the Unreachable,” “I quit high school each year and did not graduate. My parents were told that I did not belong in school. […] I cannot forget the years when I was told I was stupid, year after year, and I believed it. The students and their parents usually believe us” (WTW1, p. 160). 

What Murray did not do, however, was situate his story of educational “mystification” within a larger framework of class struggle, as Berlin would have likely wanted him to do and perhaps required him to do, were Murray somehow to have shown up in one of Berlin’s writing classes at Purdue University (of course, this would have been impossible as Murray was almost 20 years Berlin’s senior). Nor did Murray ground his student-centered approach to composition pedagogy, once he was in a position to advance such a cause, within the kind of Marxist framework Berlin advocated.

As we will see, throughout his life Murray sought not so much to engage his working class roots or claim them as grounds for a larger critique of American society as he sought to transcend them. For Murray’s story is a typically American tale of striving and social uplift, and not much looking back. Further, as someone whose highest degree was a bachelor’s in English literature, Murray never had the theoretical apparatus to engage in the kind of social and political analysis in which Berlin’s social-epistemic rhetoric asks composition instructors to engage their students. In other words, if Murray was a proponent of expressionistic rhetoric, and its impossible to read Berlin without thinking that in important ways he was, it was by default. He knew no other way. 

Once he was in a position to do something about the kind of educational inequity, following his transition to college teaching in 1963, he exerted great energy, the entirety of the second half of his career, in fact, to challenge the ideology of schooling (and the discipline of English, as well). As a result of his own experience Murray was deeply concerned about what Berlin calls “the economic and political consequences” of schooling. 

As a working class student Murray’s concerns translated into action in the form of undergraduate and graduate courses, textbooks, professional development seminars and workshops, and more individual writing conferences with college students than arguably any single college professor of English has conducted in the history of our discipline. 

What Murray did not do, however, was organize his approach to composition pedagogy around an examination of the material conditions of students’ lives and the false consciousness it had produced in them. His was not a critical pedagogy in the spirit of Berlin or Ira Shor, whom Berlin draws on extensively in “Rhetoric and Ideology” to articulate and illustrate the workings of social-epistemic rhetoric. Murray’s was a pedagogy of individual empowerment, to be sure, but 

So no, Murray did not…

At the end of a section called "How to Reach the Unreachable" Murray writes: 

As I will argue, the educational and disciplinary reform work on which he embarked once he transitioned to college teaching was aimed at changing schools and the teaching of writing within them “in and through” a great deal of “social activity.” In other words, 

And Berlin is not wrong to note a strong thread of individualism in Murray’s work. In the first edition of A Writer Teaches Writing, just one of two Murray sources Berlin lists in his Works Cited page, Murray is emphatic about 

12/20/22

Conclusion Notes…

If Ken Burns were to make a documentary about important figures in the history of composition and rhetoric, he would start with Donald Murray. Not only was Murray’s life, in and out of the field, Burns-worthy, the fact that he saved everything, filling his archive with over 126 boxes of journals (“daybooks”); memos and reports; drafts of articles, books and textbooks, poems, and speeches; letters to and from friends and fans; and books, videos, cassettes, CDS and magazine articles would mean Burns’ would have more than enough material to work with.

(Can this feed into a brief rundown of his life, from the documents called:

Bio Adapted from Current Biography

Don Murray Notes on Upbringing

Donald Murray Revised Chronology

circle back to 1963, he came in 1963!!!

Circle back to TCs

What did his students say?

What did his colleagues say?

Emeritus status? 

Heart Attack? Health? (Heart attack and triple bypass (1987)

1990 Honorary Doctorate at UNH

1992 Honorary Doctorate at Fitchburg State College

1997 Honorary Doctorate at New Hampshire College

1997 Donald Murray Journalism Lab opened at UNH

Legacy: 

The National Council of Teachers of English honored Donald Murray at a conference in Charlotte, N.C., in 1997. Hundreds of participants packed the session. Tom Romano, Murray's friend and colleague, wrote, "They leaked out the doorways into the lobby and adjacent room, where more people stood or sat on the floor." 

At UNH

When I arrived I was assigned to initiate a journalism program. We now have a program run by a senior member, who has been directing it for eleven years, and we have two find young faculty members on tenure track. Later I became involved in establishing a composition program. We now have a senior member with a national reputation running that program and Freshman English. We have a young scholar, also with a national reputation, on tenure track. If I am replaced in this field there will be an academic unit in place that can continue its undergraduate and graduate teaching, and its administrative responsibilities while continuing to maintain the reputation of the University of New Hampshire in composition theory and practice. (Letter to Stuart Palmer, 12 August 1986) — See Personal Items/Retirement

Again, I was the first person to be involved in composition. Now, besides Tom and Les, we have Tom Newkirk, a senior faculty member with a national reputation, and Bob Connors, a distinguished young professor and on tenure track. If I am replaced in composition we will have the critical mass appropriate to continue our reputation as one of the best universities in composition theory and practice. (Letter to Carl Dawson, 12 August 1986)

Composition and Rhetoric

Testimonials

See Newport Foreward at Memorial Service (NewportTribute.jpeg)

Joseph Elias Hight (UNH 65)

The first draft of my first assignment in Murray's class came back with so many red checkmarks floating in the left margins I thought I was getting an "F." But I learned that Murray never graded on a first draft. He would say, "Don't fear shitty first drafts." 

I took only one course with Murray. I missed out on his journalism courses and didn't work with him on the student newspaper. I spent only 48 hours in a 16-week course called Expository Writing, meeting three times a week. If we add in the one-on-one conferences outside of class, perhaps it was 60 hours I spent with him. Sixty hours out of a lifetime of over 500,000 hours. Why was he so often in the back of my mind? How in the hell did he do that? 

Murray gave the answer when he wrote in line one of Chapter 1 of the second edition of A Writer Teaches Writing, "It is time to give away the secret: Teaching writing is fun." He was having fun, we had fun, and the memory of that stayed with me through the years.