While origin stories of composition studies abound, historians of the field seem to agree that there are two branches to the "beginning" of composition as a subject of interest in the university. The first branch would be the study of the cultural history and practice of rhetoric, which has existed in various permutations from antiquity through the present... The second branch, arriving in force in the nineteenth century, would be the institutional imperative to inculcate in students the principles of composing--specifically, to create in students the proper markers of taste, and, arguably, class, as exhibited in written compositions, usually based on the analysis of literary works. (1-2)
Different historians of the field will position the "start" of composition studies at different points. Some will argue that U.S. college composition was born at Harvard in the 1890s; others will argue that it was not truly born until the beginning of the 1970s. Still others will position the birth of the field at various points in between, including 1911, when the National Council of Teachers of English was formed, or 1949, when the first Conference on College Composition and Communication took place, or 1950, when the journal College Composition and Communication debuted. The date one chooses has much to do with what one insists is being born. Is it the first-year course that one sees as the origin of things? If so, then the 1890s sounds about right--though some forms of writing at the introductory level were offered in colleges several years before this, and extra-institutional writing collectives excited even earlier in the nineteenth century as well. Is it the emergence of a collective recognition that writing is an important aspect of education, and thus an organization needs to be formed to unite its teachers? Then 1911 would be the best date to choose, and is in fact the date we feel is the best start for a modern "origins" story of composition studies. Or is the issue the birth of composition studies as an academic field? If so, then the 1970s sounds about right, since this decade gave us the first doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition, and a series of prominent studies about writers and writing, significantly using cognitive scientific approaches and arguing for the field as a site of research. (2-3)
The most important thing that we might suggest that readers take away from this brief historical overview of writing students and writing pedagogies is that composition studies is a dynamic field that, perhaps more than any other area of academic study, mirrors the institutional and non institutional forces within which it operations. (6)
Showing posts with label Comprehensive Histories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Comprehensive Histories. Show all posts
Friday, October 24, 2014
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Composition in the University (Crowley)
Chapter 1: Composition in the University
...it is not easy to imagine the required course outside of the humanist underpinnings given it by its association with English departments. (2)
The history of composition studies has been written in the fortunes of the required introductory course in composition. (4)
The required introductory composition course was invented at Harvard in the late nineteenth century. From Harvard it quickly spread to other colleges and universities, and it has been required at most schools ever since. During the nineteenth century the course was taught at Harvard and elsewhere by regular faculty. However, in the early years of the twentieth century, the work of teaching the required course fell onto the shoulders of probationary faculty, primarily because full-time faculty realized that there was no professional future in teaching a course that produced no research. Graduate students began teaching the course during the 1940s as universities came increasingly to be defined as aggregates of specialized disciplines in which research was the primary pursuit. Their numbers began to be supplemented by part-time teachers during the 1950s and 1960s, when colleges and universities were so overwhelmed by postwar enrollments that they were forced to recruit adjunct faculty to teach the required course. (4)
Some interesting thoughts about this passage--for one, comp continued to be taught at UNH far longer because of the lack of graduate training, but interesting to note that at the moment when graduate training began to take precedence (later for UNH, perhaps, than other institutions, but on target, perhaps, with other "publics" of its time), comp was shifted to others to teach. I guess the point is that this: "However, in the early years of the twentieth century, the work of teaching the required course fell onto the shoulders of probationary faculty, primarily because full-time faculty realized that there was no professional future in teaching a course that produced no research" was not necessarily true at UNH. Full-time faculty continued to teach the course at UNH, in the humanist tradition, right up until the early to mid-1960s. In some ways, UNH was just behind other public schools, like Madison or whoever else in that UNH did not come to be defined as "aggregates of specialized disciplines in which research was the primary pursuit" until the early to mid-1960s. It is likely, however, that they had to start supplementing full-time folks with part-timers in the 50s as a result of swelling enrollment, as elsewhere.
The course was required of all students precisely to insure that only persons who displayed the tastes and habits of educated persons would populate the academy. Humanist goals shape first-year composition curricula even today, although this orientation is currently being challenged by pragmatist approaches. Pragmatist models of education focus teachers' attention on students' activities, trusting that students' repeated engagement in relevant activities will construct the desired subjectivity. (9)
FYC... its traditional function of imparting a universal subjectivity [i.e. "the good student" or "educated persons"] (9)
As this analysis implies, the first-year course is a historical holdover from an era in which college curricula were informed by an older sense of discipline, the point of which was to shape students' character and conduct by means of repeated practice and correction. The traditional function of the required first-year course is increasingly hard to reconcile with the professionalization and specialization that now characterizes the American academy. (10)
Since composition is traditionally housed in English departments, the persons who have spoken most frequently for composition have been literary scholars. (10)
I argue that the scholars who invented the required first-year composition course also identified with Arnoldian humanism. Furthermore, they justified the requirement of Freshman English on humanist grounds, and they designed a curriculum for the course that furthered humanist agendas. (12)
The humanist claim upon composition is typically enacted through the practice of requiring students to read literary texts in the first-year composition course. (13)
A fundamental assumption of this book is that the humanist approach to the first-year course is not the best approach to teaching composition. (13)
1. modern humanists privilege reading over writing
2. humanism takes a respectful attitude towards already-completed texts, while composition is interested in texts currently in development as well as those that are yet to be written. That is to say, composition is primarily a productive or generative art rather than an analytic or interpretive one. (13)
To assert, as I do, that the act of composing differs appreciably from the act of reading is to challenge two fundamental premises of modern humanist pedagogy, namely, that the point of composition is to express oneself and that the point of writing is to represent or reflect upon the quality of one's reading and experience. While teachers of composition do analyze completed texts, they do so in order to gain a better understanding of how texts are composed...they are not interested, as humanists are, in demonstrating how a given text either questions or upholds a supposedly permanent or quasi permanent set of human values. (14)
3. A third problem is posed for humanist composition by the fact that humanism has tended to be an exclusive educational tradition, insofar as the humanist impulse is to impart instruction to a select few who are considered able to inhabit a humanist subjectivity...Composition instruction, on the other hand, has or can be configured to have a democratic social agenda. There is nothing inherent in the notion of teaching people to compose that is by definition exclusive.
4. A final problem: humanism--at least in its Arnoldian version--has more in common with metaphysics than it has with rhetoric. Indeed, Arnoldian humanism is hostile to rhetoric, and it is suspicious of composition as well. (14)
During the 1940s, for example, advocates of general education argued that the required course ought to be "modern" and "practical"; they insisted that literary study was neither. Their effort to turn the first-year course toward instruction in what they called "communication skills" enjoyed a heady, if brief success--the communication skills curriculum did not survive the 1950s in most universities. However, its short history demonstrates the tenacity with which humanist assumptions about education cling to first-year pedagogy. (15)
English teachers whose primary intellectual alliance is to humanism have not reacted positively to the occasional association of required composition with non-humanist rationales.
Pragmatism is an action-oriented, forward-looking philosophical orientation that eschews the search for first principles; that is to say, it is more interested in the questions "what shall we do?" and "what are the consequences of our actions?" than it is in metaphysical questions such as "what is true?" Or "what is real?". (16)
However, composition teachers commitment to social reform through education has been somewhat less marked... Efforts to implement pragmatist educational goals and schools eventually succumbed to pressures exerted by powerful ideological and institutional forces, including a romantic notion of individualist Expressionism and humanist respect for traditional learning. (16)
Dewey's work also influenced the development process pedagogy during the 1960s. Janet Emig, the theorist who is ordinarily credited with the invention of the process approach to teaching writing, asserted in 1980 that Dewey is "everywhere in our work" (17)
Pragmatist composition curricula have a distinct advantage over the humanist approach to writing instruction insofar as they're focused on active learning suggests that people who want to learn to do something should actually practice doing it. However, the appropriations of pragmatism that have made their way into composition studies and first-year pedagogy have limitations. Not the least of these, in my opinion, is that most such appropriations have neglected Dewey's insistence that pragmatist educational efforts aren't always to be politically and socially motivated. I argue that with the widespread adoption process pedagogy, the politics of first-year composition altered from conservative to liberal. Unfortunately, the instrumentalist or functionalist character of some strains of pragmatism (and of American liberalism itself) have made it possible for teachers of composition to forget Dewey's commitment to education as a primary means of bringing about social change. (17)
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So, I found this section so interesting because I'm suddenly fascinated by this idea of humanism, so clearly in place at UNH during the time before Murray and under assault in the 1960s, from two quarters: 1) the process folks (or, Murray) who perhaps cared less what the content of a writing course was, but wanted it to focus on writing and, 2) a new group who wanted to find ways to engage students in content which would speak more to them, thus undermining the humanist imperative to pass on "the best that has been thought and said" to the younger generation.
First, to what extent was Murray under the sway of humanism? I think he was to a considerable extent, but I think he had an interesting and complicated relationship with humanism and his humanist fore-fathers at UNH. He came of age during a time when humanism reigned as the rationale for the study of English and yet, my sense is that, when push came to shove, humanism may have made Murray uncomfortable. It's interesting that he went on to become a journalist, a newspaperman, and not...well, something else. And especially not a literary critic. His class was all wrong for humanism--that and his sensibility.
Was Murray a humanist? In some ways, yes. But in important other ways, no. If we look at the four tenets of humanism that Crowley articulates in relation to Murray's teaching, we can make a strong argument for his non-support of humanism. One, "modern humanists privilege reading over writing." Surely, there is little to debate there. As Murray got further and further into the teaching of writing, reading came to play a smaller and smaller place in his thinking about what should happen during the writing process. The reading he was most interested in was the reading of STUDENT writing. Two, "humanism takes a respectful attitude towards already-completed texts, while composition is interested in texts currently in development as well as those that are yet to be written." The second part of this passage speaks directly to Murray--an interest in "texts currently in development." This was what Murray was most interested in and it was his contention that it is our task to intervene in the process of texts as they are being developed by students.
(go to "Teach Writing as Process" as evidence for these assertions...)
Three, "humanism has tended to be an exclusive educational tradition, insofar as the humanist impulse is to impart instruction to a select few who are considered able to inhabit a humanist subjectivity." While Murray's pedagogy was not radically or even overtly liberal or democratic, the spirit underlying it was. Murray had a thing for the daydreamer, the unlikely writer. He had no patience with the cynical games often played by the smartest and most able students who wanted to "ejaculate correct little essays" for the grade. Furthermore, Murray, himself, came from a very non-exclusive place in his own life. While he may have desired, as a young man, to inhabit a humanist subjectivity, I don't think this was ever him. I recall something of his where he says he is concerned that UNH is no longer a school that serves first-generation college students, like he was. Murray was convinced that anyone could write if the (humanist) English teachers would just get the fuck out of the way. His disdain for English professors, likely of the humanist bent, is scattered in asides and bitter comments throughout his writing.
Pete Hamill "Newspapers for Working People." p. 59 Defining Moments in Journalism, Woodhull & Snyder
I am Still a Newspaperman (Jim Romenesko)
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Chapter 2: The Toad in The Garden
She missed teachers advocated the reading of literature, along with practicing composing, as the course of study that would create "self-cultivation self-refinement "in its students. (21)
Where composition must be offered, humanist English teachers have always preferred to turn the course toward literary study. The association of first-year composition literary study is so fundamental to the ideology of English studies conversations about it appear in the professional literature only when the practice is threatened. (22)
But for humanist teachers, their preferred ways of reading seem natural rather than shaped by the store call and institutional circumstances. (24)
... The humanist notion that everyone needs to learn how to read and write about literature "for life." (28)
The notion of research, imported from Germany universities by men like heart, posed a challenge to the American assumption that the point of our education was to inculcate in students the received civic and religious wisdom of the community. Hard put the challenge in this way: by five Wissenschaft the Germans mean knowledge in the most exalted sense of that term, namely, the ardent, methodical, independent search after truth in any and all of its forms, but wholly irrespective of utilitarian application" (1874, 250). This definition of knowledge as a nonutilitarian search for new truths implied a redefinition of the role of teacher. In Germany, Hart wrote, "the professor is not a teacher, in the English sense of the term; he is a specialist. He is not responsible for the success of his hearers. He is responsible only for the quality of his instruction. His dugy begins and ends with himself" (264). Hence, the German attitude toward knowledge devalued pedagogy. (55)
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Interesting side-bar...the German research ideal, very much ascendent at UNH during Murray's era, in its purest form, would have appalled Murray. He was not in for intellectual masturbation. And so I am struck between these forces that Murray was stuck in between: on the one hand, the professionalizing ethos of the period and the focus on research at the obvious expense of teaching, on the other hand, the humanist ideal which emphasized the value of teaching, but a kind of teaching or orientation towards teaching that Murray would likely have been uncomfortable with. I'm struck by his desire to steer a different course. Again, I'm drawn back to pragmatism and the possible argument for Murray's pragmatism.
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...the Arnoldian tradition of liberal humanism, a tradition distinguished from its classical ancestor by its dimunition of the rhetorical impulse and its reverence for the maintenance of the cultural standards exemplified in a textual tradition. (62-63)
And in 1873 there is the "first demand for a theme," as Byron Hurlbut, one of the early teachers of composition at Harvard, notes in his history of the entrance examination (Hill's account in teh same volume dates this demand to 1874) (Hill et al. 46, 8). This first demand for a theme was accompanied by the requirement that students be acquainted with a list of half a dozen literary texts. (66)
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Interesting to think of the very humanist strain of ENGL 401/402 at UNH and their use of the word "theme" in their discussions of student writing. And how this likely changed. And the final exam, which was a version of the kinds of exams given at Harvard.
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Chapter 3: The Bourgeois Subject and The Demise of Rhetorical Education
Chapter 4: The Invention of Freshman English
...the Arnoldian tradition of liberal humanism, a tradition distinguished from its calssical ancestor by its diminution of the rhetorical impulse and its reverence for the maintanence of the cultural standards exemplified in a textual tradition. (63)
Modern composition focused on the Bourgeois project of self-improvement, just as English-language literary study did. (77)
Chapter 5: Literature and Composition: Not Separate But Certainly Unequal
Rather, the ability to express oneself is the sign of hte quality of one's reading, a sort of guarantee that one is acquainted with "the best that has been thought and said," to use Arnold's famous phrase. In this formulation the ability to express oneself is not as important as intellectual cultivation; it is the fact of being well-read that counts. (84)
... the point of humanistic composition is not to create better writers but to display the cultivated character that is the sign of an educated person. In the humanist dispensation, the only way to develop an appropriate character spent a lifetime reading the right texts, guided by the example or supervision of appropriate teachers. (86)
Freshman English has been required at most American universities since about 1900. However, it is difficult to generalize about what was taught when in Freshman English, since massive historical work still remains to be done in university and college archives. (87)
Other historical evidence establishes that literary texts were steadily used in required composition classes from the inception of Freshman English in the 1880s until at least 1970. (87)
The ostensible goals of the required freshman course have remained stable across time as well...Writing in ENglish Journal in 1912, Glenn E. Palmer characterized the available traditions of teaching composition as those of "culture" and "efficiency" (488). The first approach was associated with Yale, the second with Harvard. According to Palmer, the tradition of culture held that "the business of the professor of composition is to produce writers" (that is, people we would now call "creative writers"--authors of fiction, drama, and poetry). Accordingly, advocates of the cultural approach placed "emphasis on the inspiration of literature, recognizing that there can be no literary production without culture." Palmer characterized "the other party" as claiming that "the best we can do for the Freshman student is to cultivate in him good language habits." Thus they laid "stress upon painstaking drill in the writing of short themes, assuming that the average Freshman comes to the university with little knowledge of grammar and less of the organziations of the paragraph and the composition." (88)
The classical approach treated literary texts not as repositories of personal human experience but as a resource for models of stylistic excellence, worthy of imitation by all. In this approach, students read literature, to be sure, but the experience of reading literature was not treated as an end in itself; snippets of literary texts were used, rather, to illustrate principles of composition. This approach was a remnanat of an older, more rhetorical pedagogy, which was grounded in the ntion that clear and elegant expression could be cultivated through principled and explicit study of composing techniques used by admired authors. (89)
The two approaches that Palmer called "culture"and "efficiency," on the other hand, emerged from modern humanism, where the pedagogical goal was the self-improvement of individuals rather than maintenance of community values. In keeping with the aesthetic bias of Arnoldian humanism, advocates of these new approaches to composition rejected the study of rhetoric. Culture advocates regarded rhetoric as an elementary study of rules, on the order of grammar; efficiency advocates regarded rhetoric as a mummified body of theoretical texts whose study interfered with practicing composing. Indeed, advocates of the "culture "approach eschewed direct instruction in composition altogether, preferring instead to immerse students in reading and discussion of literature. Advocates of "efficiency," on the other hand, engaged students solely in writing practice. (89)
... the culture approach at Yale (90).
By 1900, current-traditional pedagogy and swept the field of competitors for the time devoted to non-literary matters in the required composition course. By 1910 standard churros for the course were collection of readings (either expository essays or literary texts), Handbook, the rhetoric expounded supposedly universal current-traditional principles of unity, coherence, and emphasis. (94)
So humanist literary study and current traditional rhetoric were far from hostile to one another. As we shall see, they happily cohabited in the required first-year course through at least the first half of the 20th century. This suggests to me that the current traditional theory of discourse was the perfect vehicle for literary humanists insofar as it allowed them to meet the supposedly necessity of installing the literate correctness and every student who enrolled in university at the same time as it exempted from the responsibility of actually reading students papers. Encourage traditional pedagogy, students papers are not constructivist messages that might command I sent a rejection. Nor do curved traditional teachers constitute an audience in any rhetorical sense of that word, since they read not to learn or be amused persuaded to weigh and measure of papers adherence to formal standards. Hence the current traditional theory of discourse is not a writer but. Graphic display, so it perfectly met humanist requirement that students expression of character be put under constant surveillance so that they could be "improved" by correction. (96-97)
Advocacy for the use of literature in required composition instruction was not a strong team in professional literature published during the 1930s and 1940s. During the 30s, instruction in the required course settled into a comfortable pattern that combined current traditional formalism with more or less literary study, depending upon the history and mission of a given college or university and the intellectual bent of faculty who designed the course. During the 1940s and 50s, however, traditional ways of teaching freshman English we're seriously challenged by the advent of interest and communication skills. (103)
With the notable exception of communication skills, freshman English underwent almost no theoretical development between 1900 and 1970. In the 1950s and 1960s, introductory composition was still being taught according to the dictates of the current traditional theory of discourse it inherited from the people who had given the course its original shape in the late 19th century. (103)
... the staples of the humanist approach to composition: literary study combined with drill in usage, grammar, and mechanics. (113)
Studies of freshman English programs in the 1960s
Kitzhaber, Albert. 1963. Themes, Theories and Therapy: The Teaching of Writing in College.
Hoblitzerlle
Wilcox
Chapter 6: Terms of Employment: Rhetoric Slaves and Lesser Men
Composition was not always staff the way it is now. Until 1940 or so, composition classes were taught by full-time teachers, although they generally were the newest members of the permanent faculty. This changed when disciplinary specialization began to affect staffing in the undergraduate curriculum. With the narrowing the faculty interests that accompanied adoption of the research ideal, it became increasingly difficult to find full-time faculty were willing to teach general or introductory courses, and by 1950, American universities with graduate programs had begun to rely on graduate students to staff the required first-year composition course. It also begun the practice of hiring part-time help to meet staffing demands imposed by the postwar explosion in college enrollments. (118-119)
… humanism's conflicted attitude toward composition instruction. In the humanist worldview, composition must be maintained in order to maintain the class distinction that is captured in the paired but unequal dichotomy literature-composition. The presence of composition establishes the superiority of literature just as the presence of universal requirement establishes a class affiliated boundary at the gate of the university itself. And yet, forcing this point of view, there's nothing to teach composition, because clear and eloquent expression results from the disciplined reading great literature and the concomitant development of character. That essay, on a humanist model, composition has no subject and no substance. Perhaps it's insubstantial nature explains why it's teachers seem to be invisible in the academy. (120)
Here Thomas indulge nostalgia for an older model teacher, the intellectual and cultural polymath whose job was to impart knowledge to his young charges and to instill in them the character appropriate to men of affairs (123).
In 41, Theodore Gates argued that the willingness of senior faculty to turn over "The job of teaching composition too… The generally ill clothed, ill fed, and ill housed "had to drive the freshman course of attention from the professions most respected thinkers. Gates asked, rhetorically: "where will you find a full professor concentrating his best thought and energy, or even a fair portion of it, the problem of teaching adequate control of thought and the clear expression of it? " (69).
Chapter 7: "You Can't Write Writing": Norman Foerster and the Battle Over Basic Skills at Iowa
But it does point out the fact that you're reconcilable differences existed between Forster and advocates of progressive education. Where Progressives begin with students, he would begin with subjects and texts; where progressives idealized individual potential, he vallorized a common cultural heritage. (141)
He subscribed fully to the modern humanist assumption that informed acquaintance with great text was adequate preparation for those who wish to express themselves in writing (143).
The problem was that on the romantic model there is no way to explain the perceived superiority of some literary texts without the notion of individual genius, unless credits are willing to fall back on a more rhetorical critical theory that maintains that standards of taster constructed by the communities that produced consumed part. Romantic critics are ordinarily averse to doing this. (150)
…the humanist desire for a firm and universal center; to accept radical individualism is to accept the principle of difference, and Foerster's tirades against progressivism demonstrate he was not willing to accept such a principal (150).
A humanist theory of composition requires some notion of a superior individual, just as Romanticism does. The difference is that humanists allow for the effects of education; the ability to express oneself is the product of superior breeding, but it may also be cultivated by reading the right books, going to the right schools, and hanging about with the right people. Students, by definition, are still undergoing this process of education, and hence they cannot be thought of as contenders for the status of genius. (150)
Chapter 8: Freshman English and War
Universal requirements prosper in wartime wars cause university teachers and administrators to circle the curricular wagons, to multiply requirements, and clampdown on in electiviy. (155)
The communication skills episode affected the history of freshman English in a number of important ways. For one thing, the development of this new approach to the basic course instigated the establishment of a professional association for its teachers: the Conference on College Composition Communication. The definition of writing as communication rather than expression moved teachers to consider rhetoric as a possible theoretical resource for composition instruction for the first time since the course was invented. (156)
The required course aims at the improvement of students use of language, there's no reason why oral communication should be excluded from its purview. Put this in institutional terms, the programs designed by the Armed Forces made it more difficult for English teachers to argue that materials and skills taught in the basic course were specific to their discipline. The military course presented in the apartments with a part whole problem they have been unable to resolve since, as the Lindemann-Tate discussion demonstrates. Either the basic course "belongs "to English departments, in which case it was teachers are perfectly justified insisting that its content reflect the instructional mission that they take to be primary, that is, I study; or the course "belongs "to the college for the entire university, since all students, regardless of disciplinary affiliation, I required ticket. From this supra-disciplinary point of view it can be argued that basic course curricula should reflect the interests of all students and teachers, and on this view, literary study is as relevant to the course as physics. (160)
The simplest way to account for the rise of interest in general education is to suppose that it was a response to the elective system put in place near the end of the 19th-century once the notion of elective study was adopted by American universities, no theoretical limits could be imposed on the proliferation of courses. In addition, once their adoption of the research ideal released faculty members from the duty of teaching a received common curriculum, they quickly realize the professional advantages and Eric specialization. (161)
Specialization and proliferation flourished virtually unchecked (though not without criticism) during the first three decades of the 20th century. (161)
General education wasn't part, then, an attempt to bring some order into the chaos of courses and specialties that university curricula had become. Most general education programs have three components: one or more basic courses (usually in English, physical education, and perhaps not Madix), required of everyone who could not test out of them; core area requirements for courses in three large categories of knowledge – science, social social science, and humanities; and a major field of study. (161-62)
The general education was also motivated by quite different concerns that were foregrounded by the advent of the second world war once America under the war, educators lost no time arguing that the point of education was the preservation of democracy, and those who talented general education advertised it as a means by which the education of citizens in a democracy should be pursued. In other words, the war and its attendant rhetoric folded to desire for return to be older, more centralized and unified approach to higher education the formerly been designated "liberal". But it is important to remember that general education was not the same as liberal education, although contemporary sources often assumed affinity between the two. (162)
Dewey insisted the point of education was not the accumulation of knowledge but instillation of the desire to grow and become wise (164).
In other words, Dewey's educational philosophy was far from this interested: the point of formal education is to get individuals stake in the outcome, not only of their own lives, but of the affairs of the entire polity. Education is meant to equip individuals to become active members of the group, influencing it and being influenced by it. Gary Miller puts it like this: "Dewey saw inquiry as an instrument of personal and, ultimately, social transformation. His concern was less with the fixing of belief that with the transformation of situations to achieve a more satisfactory environment" (Miller qtd in Crowley, 164).
The influence of progressivism on freshman English was first felt widescale during the 1940s, by which time some of its principles have made their way into talk about general education. It's advocates agree that a primary point of general education was to develop the relationship of the individual to the culture in which she lives. In other words, general education would immerse students in a critical examination of their present circumstances and the relation to those circumstances. This focus on present needs was, of course, anathema to humanists. (164-65)
Is worthy of note that freshman English was the only course the remained as a universal requirement throughout the 50 years (1880 – 1940) during which the American professoriate created a large number of specialized disciplines expanded their curricula accordingly. This loan requirement, although taught by single department, was widely excepted is so necessary for students advancement that it remained inviolate throughout the years of growth, diversity, and specialization. (167)
Perhaps the most important of these potentials was the emphasis on communication rather than expression. To make medication central to a pedagogy suddenly makes audiences, messages, and situations important. In such a milieu humanist focus on self-improvement face from view, and teachers attention is wrenched away from the texts outward, for the world and its problems. (171)
In 1956, near the end of its heyday, Jean Malmstrom proposed a fourfold classification of the kinds of communication skills programs that were that in place in American colleges and universities. (176)
Whatever their motivation, the emphasis on the content of messages, the importance of public opinion, and the attention to citizenship in the Minnesota program mark a radical departure from business as usual in freshman English. (180)
Whether these assessments are fair or not, they do establish the contemporary teachers saw traditional composition instruction is very different from communication skills. They were correct. The goal of freshman English was to create humanist subjectivities. It's pedagogy centered on examination of humanist texts. It's instructional tools – literature, current traditional discourse theory, and traditional grandma – we're treated as exemplars or standards to which students were expected to measure up. Communication skills courses, on the other hand, were grounded in theories of discourse borrowed from the social sciences. There in indebtedness to social science was apparent in their use of the circle testing, in the emphasis on the social uses of language, and their interest in public rather than private uses of this course. Such courses supposedly fitted instruction to students abilities rather than the other way around. (181)
Furthermore, the emphasis on communication open the course outward toward the world rather than inward toward students' expression of their experiences and insights. (181)
Under pressure from students, many universities dropped the universal requirement composition during the early 70s (Smith; Hoover; Connors 1996). However, it was firmly back in place by the late 1970s, thanks note out to the media's fabrication of the literacy crisis and the supposed impact of open admissions on "standards." (185)
William Spannaus argues that calls for more "unified "curricula, such as the general education movement, our responses to humanist realizations – brought on by the internationalist perspective that wartime inevitably imposes – that people living in other parts of the world do not necessarily accept the ideological positions reified within American culture. In the face of ideological threats to humanist concepts such as "freedom "or "man," general education (like liberal education before it) was an attempt to reaffirm the singularity and superiority of American culture. (25)
Chapter 9: Around 1971: The Emergence of Process Pedagogy
A large body of textual evidence attests that a pedagogical turn this sort was widely recommended in professional literature published during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Advocates of this process generally made one of two sorts of recommendations: that teachers pay attention to students' composing before they had actually begun to write, and that teachers adopt a set of so-called "student centered "classroom practices. (187)
Findings of this list, very implied that teachers who used traditional pedagogy focused on text other than those composed by students, ignored the discovery process, insisted that students compose only one draft of each assignment, confined student writing to certain forms or genres of discourse, geek prominent attention to mechanics, did not allow sufficient time for composing to occur, grated every paper, and forced every student to follow the same absolute rules. What he described by omission then, was the pedagogy of current-traditional rhetoric. (188)
With the advent of process pedagogy, the classroom truly was a more interesting place to be, because the burden of filling three class hours a week was now shared by students who are doing your reading group brainstorming. The class was also much more interesting to think about that it had been prior to the advent of process, because composition teachers now give themselves permission to think of their students as writers and themselves as people who had something to teach. Composition teachers, in short, began to think of themselves as professors of a field of study. (190)
Processed pedagogy brought about three rather remarkable changes to composition in the university. Most important, it professionalized the teaching of first-year composition. This was accomplished by means of the theoretical discovery of something on which to do research: students' composing processes. Another way to characterize this contribution is to say that the discovery of the composing process was at the same time the discovery that composition could be theorized. Second, if it ushered in a reconceptualize nation of composition teachers has disciplined professionals, process pedagogy also stimulated a reconceptualize nation of students as people who right rather than as people whose grammar and usage needs to be released. Last, but certainly not least, the advent of process pedagogy made composition a lot more fun to teach. (191)
The veterans who return to school after World War II where the most serious and successful group of students who had ever entered American higher education (192).
He far preferred this individualized, process oriented approach to the "old method of making a scene assignment, letting the student flounder a load through the process of writing it, and then triumphantly pointing out its many weaknesses." (Mills qtd in Crowley, 192)
In 1982, only 10 years after Murray's essay appeared, Maxine Hairston wrote that "the admonition to single 'teach process, not product' is now conventional wisdom" (194).
She put her finger precisely on the real achievement of advocates for process pedagogy: they supplied composition teachers with something to study, something on which a field could be erected and a discipline could subsequently be based (195).
Something else happened to composition when its teachers turned to process pedagogy, something that has not been widely remarked: the profession's politics altered from conservative to liberal. (Footnote 4 page 276).
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. (200)
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 it 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 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. 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 texts they produced, became the locus of instruction. (202)
She [Emig] defined teaching not as analysis and evaluation of completed texts, but as "the intervention, usually by an older person, into a process, usually of a younger person, to improve that process or the product of that process." (128). The freedoms she listed are very like those that Bernie would mention five years later… (202)
Process pedagogy offered teachers are much less radical way to respond to students insistence on "relevance" in their courses. In a recent interview, Gary Tate remarked that in 1971 "there were… experimental courses going on around the country as teachers, under the influence of changing social, political, and educational attitudes, began trying to make the classroom more student centered, more responsive to the rapidly changing world outside the classroom"(McDonald 37). (205)
If nothing else, then, student unrest caused composition teachers to ponder ways in which they might redistribute authority in their classrooms. One way to do this was to reject current traditional rhetoric, which channel authority from institution through teacher to student. (206)
As we have seen, teachers characterized this rejection as a transfer of attention from "a body of arcane knowledge" to the lives and experiences of their students. (206)
Gorrell argued for a more balanced perspective: "the development of the student seems to me infinitely more important than the sanctity of the topic sentence or rules for using a semicolon. But I do not believe concern for the student's growth precludes trying to get him some help, even some information"(266). Gorrell worried that, in their rush to eject current-traditional rhetoric from the introductory course, teachers were in danger of rejecting substance altogether. (206)
But I think that historians should not discount student unrest as well as teachers' weariness with the teacher-centered pedagogy of current-traditional rhetoric, as important stimuli to the adoption of workshop pedagogy. (207)
Even though current-traditional rhetoric had a truncated theory of invention, current-traditional teachers did not pay explicit attention to invention when they made writing assignments. In current-traditional classrooms, students wrote outside of class, except when they were asked to compose an impromptu theme in the space of a class hour. (This exercise was intended to insure teachers that at least some student writing was not plagiarized). Students' work was read and evaluated with an eye toward their mastery of formal correctness rather than the quality or the extent of the material discussed. Hence the notion that teachers or peers might intervene in students' composing was something of a novelty, as was the notion that students might complete more than one draft of an assignment. (208)
Invention was configured as a holy mental activity and Kurt traditional lore, and so the theoretical transfer of invention from mind to pen might be said to be a hallmark gesture of the shift to process pedagogy. The contribution of literate heuristics by number of composition scholars during the 1970s consolidated teachers dawning awareness that invention might take place in writing itself. (208)
The easy accommodation of process-oriented strategies to current-traditionalism suggests that process and product have more in common than is generally acknowledged in professional literature about composition, where the habit of contrasting them conceals the fact of their epistemological consistency. A truly paradigmatic alternative to current-traditionalism would question the modernism in which it is immersed and the institutional structure by means of which 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 on 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. Nor did process pedagogy change the institutional situation of composition: the introductory courses are still required, and composition teachers are still overworked and underpaid, just as they were prior to 1971. The failure of process pedagogy to dislodge the universal requirement is particularly pointed, since its early advocates argued that process-oriented instruction was especially adapted to the composing needs of individuals or small groups of students working in laboratory settings. Its more widespread advocacy during the 1960s and 1970s, then, presented teachers with an opportunity to rethink what Barriss Mills called "mass methods" of instruction (25). Unfortunately, this did not happen. (212 – 213)
Chapter 10: The Politics of Composition
Series of process constructed a self-directed student who would take control of his or her own writing process; this projected student subjectivity was to replace the domicile, rule-bound, grammar-anxious student subjectivity produced by current-traditional instruction. The institutional paradox, of course, is that students are forced to take the class in which they are to be constructed as self-directed writers. (217)
I argue further that the switch to process pedagogy can usefully be described as an ideological alteration of the politics of first year composition instruction from conservatism to liberalism. I will also try to establish that the liberal politics process pedagogy is an insufficient and inappropriate response to the contemporary situation of composition in the University (218)
Current traditional pedagogy is conservative in the ordinary sense of that term in so far as it resists changes in its rules and preserves established verbal traditions and institutional lines of authority. Current traditionalism preserves traditional social and academic hierarchies insofar as students are taught to observe without question rules of discourse that were constructed long before they entered the academy and to submit their native grapholects to grammar and usage rules devised by a would-be elitist class. Current traditional pedagogy is teacher centered: the teacher dispenses information about the rules of discourse and evaluate the students efforts in accordance with those rules. Students themselves are constructed in current traditional rhetoric as potentially unruly novices whose work needs to be continually examined and disciplined (218).
Current traditionalism and the institutional practices associated with it represent an attempt by those in authority to impose order on student discourse (218).
See p. 218-219 for a TERRIFIC overview of liberalism's influence on process pedagogy and also the shortcomings of process pedagogy.
Chapter 11: A Personal Essay on Freshman English
No outcry through most of the 1960s, when current-traditional rhetoric was nearly universally prescribed for writing assignments in Freshman English, no matter who taught it. Though I obviously can't document this claim, I will cheerfully wager that during all those years, most institutions of higher learning in America mandated a textbook, a syllabus, perhaps even assignments and a grading scale for use by teachers of Freshman English (238).
Chapter 12: Composition's Ethic of Service, The Universal Requirement, an the Discourse of Student Need
Composition teachers and theorists did not make serious moves toward achieving disciplinarily until the 1970s--eight to ninety years later than most fields of study in American universities. (253)
...it is not easy to imagine the required course outside of the humanist underpinnings given it by its association with English departments. (2)
The history of composition studies has been written in the fortunes of the required introductory course in composition. (4)
The required introductory composition course was invented at Harvard in the late nineteenth century. From Harvard it quickly spread to other colleges and universities, and it has been required at most schools ever since. During the nineteenth century the course was taught at Harvard and elsewhere by regular faculty. However, in the early years of the twentieth century, the work of teaching the required course fell onto the shoulders of probationary faculty, primarily because full-time faculty realized that there was no professional future in teaching a course that produced no research. Graduate students began teaching the course during the 1940s as universities came increasingly to be defined as aggregates of specialized disciplines in which research was the primary pursuit. Their numbers began to be supplemented by part-time teachers during the 1950s and 1960s, when colleges and universities were so overwhelmed by postwar enrollments that they were forced to recruit adjunct faculty to teach the required course. (4)
Some interesting thoughts about this passage--for one, comp continued to be taught at UNH far longer because of the lack of graduate training, but interesting to note that at the moment when graduate training began to take precedence (later for UNH, perhaps, than other institutions, but on target, perhaps, with other "publics" of its time), comp was shifted to others to teach. I guess the point is that this: "However, in the early years of the twentieth century, the work of teaching the required course fell onto the shoulders of probationary faculty, primarily because full-time faculty realized that there was no professional future in teaching a course that produced no research" was not necessarily true at UNH. Full-time faculty continued to teach the course at UNH, in the humanist tradition, right up until the early to mid-1960s. In some ways, UNH was just behind other public schools, like Madison or whoever else in that UNH did not come to be defined as "aggregates of specialized disciplines in which research was the primary pursuit" until the early to mid-1960s. It is likely, however, that they had to start supplementing full-time folks with part-timers in the 50s as a result of swelling enrollment, as elsewhere.
The course was required of all students precisely to insure that only persons who displayed the tastes and habits of educated persons would populate the academy. Humanist goals shape first-year composition curricula even today, although this orientation is currently being challenged by pragmatist approaches. Pragmatist models of education focus teachers' attention on students' activities, trusting that students' repeated engagement in relevant activities will construct the desired subjectivity. (9)
FYC... its traditional function of imparting a universal subjectivity [i.e. "the good student" or "educated persons"] (9)
As this analysis implies, the first-year course is a historical holdover from an era in which college curricula were informed by an older sense of discipline, the point of which was to shape students' character and conduct by means of repeated practice and correction. The traditional function of the required first-year course is increasingly hard to reconcile with the professionalization and specialization that now characterizes the American academy. (10)
Since composition is traditionally housed in English departments, the persons who have spoken most frequently for composition have been literary scholars. (10)
I argue that the scholars who invented the required first-year composition course also identified with Arnoldian humanism. Furthermore, they justified the requirement of Freshman English on humanist grounds, and they designed a curriculum for the course that furthered humanist agendas. (12)
The humanist claim upon composition is typically enacted through the practice of requiring students to read literary texts in the first-year composition course. (13)
A fundamental assumption of this book is that the humanist approach to the first-year course is not the best approach to teaching composition. (13)
1. modern humanists privilege reading over writing
2. humanism takes a respectful attitude towards already-completed texts, while composition is interested in texts currently in development as well as those that are yet to be written. That is to say, composition is primarily a productive or generative art rather than an analytic or interpretive one. (13)
To assert, as I do, that the act of composing differs appreciably from the act of reading is to challenge two fundamental premises of modern humanist pedagogy, namely, that the point of composition is to express oneself and that the point of writing is to represent or reflect upon the quality of one's reading and experience. While teachers of composition do analyze completed texts, they do so in order to gain a better understanding of how texts are composed...they are not interested, as humanists are, in demonstrating how a given text either questions or upholds a supposedly permanent or quasi permanent set of human values. (14)
3. A third problem is posed for humanist composition by the fact that humanism has tended to be an exclusive educational tradition, insofar as the humanist impulse is to impart instruction to a select few who are considered able to inhabit a humanist subjectivity...Composition instruction, on the other hand, has or can be configured to have a democratic social agenda. There is nothing inherent in the notion of teaching people to compose that is by definition exclusive.
4. A final problem: humanism--at least in its Arnoldian version--has more in common with metaphysics than it has with rhetoric. Indeed, Arnoldian humanism is hostile to rhetoric, and it is suspicious of composition as well. (14)
During the 1940s, for example, advocates of general education argued that the required course ought to be "modern" and "practical"; they insisted that literary study was neither. Their effort to turn the first-year course toward instruction in what they called "communication skills" enjoyed a heady, if brief success--the communication skills curriculum did not survive the 1950s in most universities. However, its short history demonstrates the tenacity with which humanist assumptions about education cling to first-year pedagogy. (15)
English teachers whose primary intellectual alliance is to humanism have not reacted positively to the occasional association of required composition with non-humanist rationales.
Pragmatism is an action-oriented, forward-looking philosophical orientation that eschews the search for first principles; that is to say, it is more interested in the questions "what shall we do?" and "what are the consequences of our actions?" than it is in metaphysical questions such as "what is true?" Or "what is real?". (16)
However, composition teachers commitment to social reform through education has been somewhat less marked... Efforts to implement pragmatist educational goals and schools eventually succumbed to pressures exerted by powerful ideological and institutional forces, including a romantic notion of individualist Expressionism and humanist respect for traditional learning. (16)
Dewey's work also influenced the development process pedagogy during the 1960s. Janet Emig, the theorist who is ordinarily credited with the invention of the process approach to teaching writing, asserted in 1980 that Dewey is "everywhere in our work" (17)
Pragmatist composition curricula have a distinct advantage over the humanist approach to writing instruction insofar as they're focused on active learning suggests that people who want to learn to do something should actually practice doing it. However, the appropriations of pragmatism that have made their way into composition studies and first-year pedagogy have limitations. Not the least of these, in my opinion, is that most such appropriations have neglected Dewey's insistence that pragmatist educational efforts aren't always to be politically and socially motivated. I argue that with the widespread adoption process pedagogy, the politics of first-year composition altered from conservative to liberal. Unfortunately, the instrumentalist or functionalist character of some strains of pragmatism (and of American liberalism itself) have made it possible for teachers of composition to forget Dewey's commitment to education as a primary means of bringing about social change. (17)
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So, I found this section so interesting because I'm suddenly fascinated by this idea of humanism, so clearly in place at UNH during the time before Murray and under assault in the 1960s, from two quarters: 1) the process folks (or, Murray) who perhaps cared less what the content of a writing course was, but wanted it to focus on writing and, 2) a new group who wanted to find ways to engage students in content which would speak more to them, thus undermining the humanist imperative to pass on "the best that has been thought and said" to the younger generation.
First, to what extent was Murray under the sway of humanism? I think he was to a considerable extent, but I think he had an interesting and complicated relationship with humanism and his humanist fore-fathers at UNH. He came of age during a time when humanism reigned as the rationale for the study of English and yet, my sense is that, when push came to shove, humanism may have made Murray uncomfortable. It's interesting that he went on to become a journalist, a newspaperman, and not...well, something else. And especially not a literary critic. His class was all wrong for humanism--that and his sensibility.
Was Murray a humanist? In some ways, yes. But in important other ways, no. If we look at the four tenets of humanism that Crowley articulates in relation to Murray's teaching, we can make a strong argument for his non-support of humanism. One, "modern humanists privilege reading over writing." Surely, there is little to debate there. As Murray got further and further into the teaching of writing, reading came to play a smaller and smaller place in his thinking about what should happen during the writing process. The reading he was most interested in was the reading of STUDENT writing. Two, "humanism takes a respectful attitude towards already-completed texts, while composition is interested in texts currently in development as well as those that are yet to be written." The second part of this passage speaks directly to Murray--an interest in "texts currently in development." This was what Murray was most interested in and it was his contention that it is our task to intervene in the process of texts as they are being developed by students.
(go to "Teach Writing as Process" as evidence for these assertions...)
Three, "humanism has tended to be an exclusive educational tradition, insofar as the humanist impulse is to impart instruction to a select few who are considered able to inhabit a humanist subjectivity." While Murray's pedagogy was not radically or even overtly liberal or democratic, the spirit underlying it was. Murray had a thing for the daydreamer, the unlikely writer. He had no patience with the cynical games often played by the smartest and most able students who wanted to "ejaculate correct little essays" for the grade. Furthermore, Murray, himself, came from a very non-exclusive place in his own life. While he may have desired, as a young man, to inhabit a humanist subjectivity, I don't think this was ever him. I recall something of his where he says he is concerned that UNH is no longer a school that serves first-generation college students, like he was. Murray was convinced that anyone could write if the (humanist) English teachers would just get the fuck out of the way. His disdain for English professors, likely of the humanist bent, is scattered in asides and bitter comments throughout his writing.
Pete Hamill "Newspapers for Working People." p. 59 Defining Moments in Journalism, Woodhull & Snyder
I am Still a Newspaperman (Jim Romenesko)
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Chapter 2: The Toad in The Garden
She missed teachers advocated the reading of literature, along with practicing composing, as the course of study that would create "self-cultivation self-refinement "in its students. (21)
Where composition must be offered, humanist English teachers have always preferred to turn the course toward literary study. The association of first-year composition literary study is so fundamental to the ideology of English studies conversations about it appear in the professional literature only when the practice is threatened. (22)
But for humanist teachers, their preferred ways of reading seem natural rather than shaped by the store call and institutional circumstances. (24)
... The humanist notion that everyone needs to learn how to read and write about literature "for life." (28)
The notion of research, imported from Germany universities by men like heart, posed a challenge to the American assumption that the point of our education was to inculcate in students the received civic and religious wisdom of the community. Hard put the challenge in this way: by five Wissenschaft the Germans mean knowledge in the most exalted sense of that term, namely, the ardent, methodical, independent search after truth in any and all of its forms, but wholly irrespective of utilitarian application" (1874, 250). This definition of knowledge as a nonutilitarian search for new truths implied a redefinition of the role of teacher. In Germany, Hart wrote, "the professor is not a teacher, in the English sense of the term; he is a specialist. He is not responsible for the success of his hearers. He is responsible only for the quality of his instruction. His dugy begins and ends with himself" (264). Hence, the German attitude toward knowledge devalued pedagogy. (55)
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Interesting side-bar...the German research ideal, very much ascendent at UNH during Murray's era, in its purest form, would have appalled Murray. He was not in for intellectual masturbation. And so I am struck between these forces that Murray was stuck in between: on the one hand, the professionalizing ethos of the period and the focus on research at the obvious expense of teaching, on the other hand, the humanist ideal which emphasized the value of teaching, but a kind of teaching or orientation towards teaching that Murray would likely have been uncomfortable with. I'm struck by his desire to steer a different course. Again, I'm drawn back to pragmatism and the possible argument for Murray's pragmatism.
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...the Arnoldian tradition of liberal humanism, a tradition distinguished from its classical ancestor by its dimunition of the rhetorical impulse and its reverence for the maintenance of the cultural standards exemplified in a textual tradition. (62-63)
And in 1873 there is the "first demand for a theme," as Byron Hurlbut, one of the early teachers of composition at Harvard, notes in his history of the entrance examination (Hill's account in teh same volume dates this demand to 1874) (Hill et al. 46, 8). This first demand for a theme was accompanied by the requirement that students be acquainted with a list of half a dozen literary texts. (66)
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Interesting to think of the very humanist strain of ENGL 401/402 at UNH and their use of the word "theme" in their discussions of student writing. And how this likely changed. And the final exam, which was a version of the kinds of exams given at Harvard.
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Chapter 3: The Bourgeois Subject and The Demise of Rhetorical Education
Chapter 4: The Invention of Freshman English
...the Arnoldian tradition of liberal humanism, a tradition distinguished from its calssical ancestor by its diminution of the rhetorical impulse and its reverence for the maintanence of the cultural standards exemplified in a textual tradition. (63)
Modern composition focused on the Bourgeois project of self-improvement, just as English-language literary study did. (77)
Chapter 5: Literature and Composition: Not Separate But Certainly Unequal
Rather, the ability to express oneself is the sign of hte quality of one's reading, a sort of guarantee that one is acquainted with "the best that has been thought and said," to use Arnold's famous phrase. In this formulation the ability to express oneself is not as important as intellectual cultivation; it is the fact of being well-read that counts. (84)
... the point of humanistic composition is not to create better writers but to display the cultivated character that is the sign of an educated person. In the humanist dispensation, the only way to develop an appropriate character spent a lifetime reading the right texts, guided by the example or supervision of appropriate teachers. (86)
Freshman English has been required at most American universities since about 1900. However, it is difficult to generalize about what was taught when in Freshman English, since massive historical work still remains to be done in university and college archives. (87)
Other historical evidence establishes that literary texts were steadily used in required composition classes from the inception of Freshman English in the 1880s until at least 1970. (87)
The ostensible goals of the required freshman course have remained stable across time as well...Writing in ENglish Journal in 1912, Glenn E. Palmer characterized the available traditions of teaching composition as those of "culture" and "efficiency" (488). The first approach was associated with Yale, the second with Harvard. According to Palmer, the tradition of culture held that "the business of the professor of composition is to produce writers" (that is, people we would now call "creative writers"--authors of fiction, drama, and poetry). Accordingly, advocates of the cultural approach placed "emphasis on the inspiration of literature, recognizing that there can be no literary production without culture." Palmer characterized "the other party" as claiming that "the best we can do for the Freshman student is to cultivate in him good language habits." Thus they laid "stress upon painstaking drill in the writing of short themes, assuming that the average Freshman comes to the university with little knowledge of grammar and less of the organziations of the paragraph and the composition." (88)
The classical approach treated literary texts not as repositories of personal human experience but as a resource for models of stylistic excellence, worthy of imitation by all. In this approach, students read literature, to be sure, but the experience of reading literature was not treated as an end in itself; snippets of literary texts were used, rather, to illustrate principles of composition. This approach was a remnanat of an older, more rhetorical pedagogy, which was grounded in the ntion that clear and elegant expression could be cultivated through principled and explicit study of composing techniques used by admired authors. (89)
The two approaches that Palmer called "culture"and "efficiency," on the other hand, emerged from modern humanism, where the pedagogical goal was the self-improvement of individuals rather than maintenance of community values. In keeping with the aesthetic bias of Arnoldian humanism, advocates of these new approaches to composition rejected the study of rhetoric. Culture advocates regarded rhetoric as an elementary study of rules, on the order of grammar; efficiency advocates regarded rhetoric as a mummified body of theoretical texts whose study interfered with practicing composing. Indeed, advocates of the "culture "approach eschewed direct instruction in composition altogether, preferring instead to immerse students in reading and discussion of literature. Advocates of "efficiency," on the other hand, engaged students solely in writing practice. (89)
... the culture approach at Yale (90).
By 1900, current-traditional pedagogy and swept the field of competitors for the time devoted to non-literary matters in the required composition course. By 1910 standard churros for the course were collection of readings (either expository essays or literary texts), Handbook, the rhetoric expounded supposedly universal current-traditional principles of unity, coherence, and emphasis. (94)
So humanist literary study and current traditional rhetoric were far from hostile to one another. As we shall see, they happily cohabited in the required first-year course through at least the first half of the 20th century. This suggests to me that the current traditional theory of discourse was the perfect vehicle for literary humanists insofar as it allowed them to meet the supposedly necessity of installing the literate correctness and every student who enrolled in university at the same time as it exempted from the responsibility of actually reading students papers. Encourage traditional pedagogy, students papers are not constructivist messages that might command I sent a rejection. Nor do curved traditional teachers constitute an audience in any rhetorical sense of that word, since they read not to learn or be amused persuaded to weigh and measure of papers adherence to formal standards. Hence the current traditional theory of discourse is not a writer but. Graphic display, so it perfectly met humanist requirement that students expression of character be put under constant surveillance so that they could be "improved" by correction. (96-97)
Advocacy for the use of literature in required composition instruction was not a strong team in professional literature published during the 1930s and 1940s. During the 30s, instruction in the required course settled into a comfortable pattern that combined current traditional formalism with more or less literary study, depending upon the history and mission of a given college or university and the intellectual bent of faculty who designed the course. During the 1940s and 50s, however, traditional ways of teaching freshman English we're seriously challenged by the advent of interest and communication skills. (103)
With the notable exception of communication skills, freshman English underwent almost no theoretical development between 1900 and 1970. In the 1950s and 1960s, introductory composition was still being taught according to the dictates of the current traditional theory of discourse it inherited from the people who had given the course its original shape in the late 19th century. (103)
... the staples of the humanist approach to composition: literary study combined with drill in usage, grammar, and mechanics. (113)
Studies of freshman English programs in the 1960s
Kitzhaber, Albert. 1963. Themes, Theories and Therapy: The Teaching of Writing in College.
Hoblitzerlle
Wilcox
Chapter 6: Terms of Employment: Rhetoric Slaves and Lesser Men
Composition was not always staff the way it is now. Until 1940 or so, composition classes were taught by full-time teachers, although they generally were the newest members of the permanent faculty. This changed when disciplinary specialization began to affect staffing in the undergraduate curriculum. With the narrowing the faculty interests that accompanied adoption of the research ideal, it became increasingly difficult to find full-time faculty were willing to teach general or introductory courses, and by 1950, American universities with graduate programs had begun to rely on graduate students to staff the required first-year composition course. It also begun the practice of hiring part-time help to meet staffing demands imposed by the postwar explosion in college enrollments. (118-119)
… humanism's conflicted attitude toward composition instruction. In the humanist worldview, composition must be maintained in order to maintain the class distinction that is captured in the paired but unequal dichotomy literature-composition. The presence of composition establishes the superiority of literature just as the presence of universal requirement establishes a class affiliated boundary at the gate of the university itself. And yet, forcing this point of view, there's nothing to teach composition, because clear and eloquent expression results from the disciplined reading great literature and the concomitant development of character. That essay, on a humanist model, composition has no subject and no substance. Perhaps it's insubstantial nature explains why it's teachers seem to be invisible in the academy. (120)
Here Thomas indulge nostalgia for an older model teacher, the intellectual and cultural polymath whose job was to impart knowledge to his young charges and to instill in them the character appropriate to men of affairs (123).
In 41, Theodore Gates argued that the willingness of senior faculty to turn over "The job of teaching composition too… The generally ill clothed, ill fed, and ill housed "had to drive the freshman course of attention from the professions most respected thinkers. Gates asked, rhetorically: "where will you find a full professor concentrating his best thought and energy, or even a fair portion of it, the problem of teaching adequate control of thought and the clear expression of it? " (69).
Chapter 7: "You Can't Write Writing": Norman Foerster and the Battle Over Basic Skills at Iowa
But it does point out the fact that you're reconcilable differences existed between Forster and advocates of progressive education. Where Progressives begin with students, he would begin with subjects and texts; where progressives idealized individual potential, he vallorized a common cultural heritage. (141)
He subscribed fully to the modern humanist assumption that informed acquaintance with great text was adequate preparation for those who wish to express themselves in writing (143).
The problem was that on the romantic model there is no way to explain the perceived superiority of some literary texts without the notion of individual genius, unless credits are willing to fall back on a more rhetorical critical theory that maintains that standards of taster constructed by the communities that produced consumed part. Romantic critics are ordinarily averse to doing this. (150)
…the humanist desire for a firm and universal center; to accept radical individualism is to accept the principle of difference, and Foerster's tirades against progressivism demonstrate he was not willing to accept such a principal (150).
A humanist theory of composition requires some notion of a superior individual, just as Romanticism does. The difference is that humanists allow for the effects of education; the ability to express oneself is the product of superior breeding, but it may also be cultivated by reading the right books, going to the right schools, and hanging about with the right people. Students, by definition, are still undergoing this process of education, and hence they cannot be thought of as contenders for the status of genius. (150)
Chapter 8: Freshman English and War
Universal requirements prosper in wartime wars cause university teachers and administrators to circle the curricular wagons, to multiply requirements, and clampdown on in electiviy. (155)
The communication skills episode affected the history of freshman English in a number of important ways. For one thing, the development of this new approach to the basic course instigated the establishment of a professional association for its teachers: the Conference on College Composition Communication. The definition of writing as communication rather than expression moved teachers to consider rhetoric as a possible theoretical resource for composition instruction for the first time since the course was invented. (156)
The required course aims at the improvement of students use of language, there's no reason why oral communication should be excluded from its purview. Put this in institutional terms, the programs designed by the Armed Forces made it more difficult for English teachers to argue that materials and skills taught in the basic course were specific to their discipline. The military course presented in the apartments with a part whole problem they have been unable to resolve since, as the Lindemann-Tate discussion demonstrates. Either the basic course "belongs "to English departments, in which case it was teachers are perfectly justified insisting that its content reflect the instructional mission that they take to be primary, that is, I study; or the course "belongs "to the college for the entire university, since all students, regardless of disciplinary affiliation, I required ticket. From this supra-disciplinary point of view it can be argued that basic course curricula should reflect the interests of all students and teachers, and on this view, literary study is as relevant to the course as physics. (160)
The simplest way to account for the rise of interest in general education is to suppose that it was a response to the elective system put in place near the end of the 19th-century once the notion of elective study was adopted by American universities, no theoretical limits could be imposed on the proliferation of courses. In addition, once their adoption of the research ideal released faculty members from the duty of teaching a received common curriculum, they quickly realize the professional advantages and Eric specialization. (161)
Specialization and proliferation flourished virtually unchecked (though not without criticism) during the first three decades of the 20th century. (161)
General education wasn't part, then, an attempt to bring some order into the chaos of courses and specialties that university curricula had become. Most general education programs have three components: one or more basic courses (usually in English, physical education, and perhaps not Madix), required of everyone who could not test out of them; core area requirements for courses in three large categories of knowledge – science, social social science, and humanities; and a major field of study. (161-62)
The general education was also motivated by quite different concerns that were foregrounded by the advent of the second world war once America under the war, educators lost no time arguing that the point of education was the preservation of democracy, and those who talented general education advertised it as a means by which the education of citizens in a democracy should be pursued. In other words, the war and its attendant rhetoric folded to desire for return to be older, more centralized and unified approach to higher education the formerly been designated "liberal". But it is important to remember that general education was not the same as liberal education, although contemporary sources often assumed affinity between the two. (162)
Dewey insisted the point of education was not the accumulation of knowledge but instillation of the desire to grow and become wise (164).
In other words, Dewey's educational philosophy was far from this interested: the point of formal education is to get individuals stake in the outcome, not only of their own lives, but of the affairs of the entire polity. Education is meant to equip individuals to become active members of the group, influencing it and being influenced by it. Gary Miller puts it like this: "Dewey saw inquiry as an instrument of personal and, ultimately, social transformation. His concern was less with the fixing of belief that with the transformation of situations to achieve a more satisfactory environment" (Miller qtd in Crowley, 164).
The influence of progressivism on freshman English was first felt widescale during the 1940s, by which time some of its principles have made their way into talk about general education. It's advocates agree that a primary point of general education was to develop the relationship of the individual to the culture in which she lives. In other words, general education would immerse students in a critical examination of their present circumstances and the relation to those circumstances. This focus on present needs was, of course, anathema to humanists. (164-65)
Is worthy of note that freshman English was the only course the remained as a universal requirement throughout the 50 years (1880 – 1940) during which the American professoriate created a large number of specialized disciplines expanded their curricula accordingly. This loan requirement, although taught by single department, was widely excepted is so necessary for students advancement that it remained inviolate throughout the years of growth, diversity, and specialization. (167)
Perhaps the most important of these potentials was the emphasis on communication rather than expression. To make medication central to a pedagogy suddenly makes audiences, messages, and situations important. In such a milieu humanist focus on self-improvement face from view, and teachers attention is wrenched away from the texts outward, for the world and its problems. (171)
In 1956, near the end of its heyday, Jean Malmstrom proposed a fourfold classification of the kinds of communication skills programs that were that in place in American colleges and universities. (176)
Whatever their motivation, the emphasis on the content of messages, the importance of public opinion, and the attention to citizenship in the Minnesota program mark a radical departure from business as usual in freshman English. (180)
Whether these assessments are fair or not, they do establish the contemporary teachers saw traditional composition instruction is very different from communication skills. They were correct. The goal of freshman English was to create humanist subjectivities. It's pedagogy centered on examination of humanist texts. It's instructional tools – literature, current traditional discourse theory, and traditional grandma – we're treated as exemplars or standards to which students were expected to measure up. Communication skills courses, on the other hand, were grounded in theories of discourse borrowed from the social sciences. There in indebtedness to social science was apparent in their use of the circle testing, in the emphasis on the social uses of language, and their interest in public rather than private uses of this course. Such courses supposedly fitted instruction to students abilities rather than the other way around. (181)
Furthermore, the emphasis on communication open the course outward toward the world rather than inward toward students' expression of their experiences and insights. (181)
Under pressure from students, many universities dropped the universal requirement composition during the early 70s (Smith; Hoover; Connors 1996). However, it was firmly back in place by the late 1970s, thanks note out to the media's fabrication of the literacy crisis and the supposed impact of open admissions on "standards." (185)
William Spannaus argues that calls for more "unified "curricula, such as the general education movement, our responses to humanist realizations – brought on by the internationalist perspective that wartime inevitably imposes – that people living in other parts of the world do not necessarily accept the ideological positions reified within American culture. In the face of ideological threats to humanist concepts such as "freedom "or "man," general education (like liberal education before it) was an attempt to reaffirm the singularity and superiority of American culture. (25)
Chapter 9: Around 1971: The Emergence of Process Pedagogy
A large body of textual evidence attests that a pedagogical turn this sort was widely recommended in professional literature published during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Advocates of this process generally made one of two sorts of recommendations: that teachers pay attention to students' composing before they had actually begun to write, and that teachers adopt a set of so-called "student centered "classroom practices. (187)
Findings of this list, very implied that teachers who used traditional pedagogy focused on text other than those composed by students, ignored the discovery process, insisted that students compose only one draft of each assignment, confined student writing to certain forms or genres of discourse, geek prominent attention to mechanics, did not allow sufficient time for composing to occur, grated every paper, and forced every student to follow the same absolute rules. What he described by omission then, was the pedagogy of current-traditional rhetoric. (188)
With the advent of process pedagogy, the classroom truly was a more interesting place to be, because the burden of filling three class hours a week was now shared by students who are doing your reading group brainstorming. The class was also much more interesting to think about that it had been prior to the advent of process, because composition teachers now give themselves permission to think of their students as writers and themselves as people who had something to teach. Composition teachers, in short, began to think of themselves as professors of a field of study. (190)
Processed pedagogy brought about three rather remarkable changes to composition in the university. Most important, it professionalized the teaching of first-year composition. This was accomplished by means of the theoretical discovery of something on which to do research: students' composing processes. Another way to characterize this contribution is to say that the discovery of the composing process was at the same time the discovery that composition could be theorized. Second, if it ushered in a reconceptualize nation of composition teachers has disciplined professionals, process pedagogy also stimulated a reconceptualize nation of students as people who right rather than as people whose grammar and usage needs to be released. Last, but certainly not least, the advent of process pedagogy made composition a lot more fun to teach. (191)
The veterans who return to school after World War II where the most serious and successful group of students who had ever entered American higher education (192).
He far preferred this individualized, process oriented approach to the "old method of making a scene assignment, letting the student flounder a load through the process of writing it, and then triumphantly pointing out its many weaknesses." (Mills qtd in Crowley, 192)
In 1982, only 10 years after Murray's essay appeared, Maxine Hairston wrote that "the admonition to single 'teach process, not product' is now conventional wisdom" (194).
She put her finger precisely on the real achievement of advocates for process pedagogy: they supplied composition teachers with something to study, something on which a field could be erected and a discipline could subsequently be based (195).
Something else happened to composition when its teachers turned to process pedagogy, something that has not been widely remarked: the profession's politics altered from conservative to liberal. (Footnote 4 page 276).
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. (200)
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 it 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 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. 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 texts they produced, became the locus of instruction. (202)
She [Emig] defined teaching not as analysis and evaluation of completed texts, but as "the intervention, usually by an older person, into a process, usually of a younger person, to improve that process or the product of that process." (128). The freedoms she listed are very like those that Bernie would mention five years later… (202)
Process pedagogy offered teachers are much less radical way to respond to students insistence on "relevance" in their courses. In a recent interview, Gary Tate remarked that in 1971 "there were… experimental courses going on around the country as teachers, under the influence of changing social, political, and educational attitudes, began trying to make the classroom more student centered, more responsive to the rapidly changing world outside the classroom"(McDonald 37). (205)
If nothing else, then, student unrest caused composition teachers to ponder ways in which they might redistribute authority in their classrooms. One way to do this was to reject current traditional rhetoric, which channel authority from institution through teacher to student. (206)
As we have seen, teachers characterized this rejection as a transfer of attention from "a body of arcane knowledge" to the lives and experiences of their students. (206)
Gorrell argued for a more balanced perspective: "the development of the student seems to me infinitely more important than the sanctity of the topic sentence or rules for using a semicolon. But I do not believe concern for the student's growth precludes trying to get him some help, even some information"(266). Gorrell worried that, in their rush to eject current-traditional rhetoric from the introductory course, teachers were in danger of rejecting substance altogether. (206)
But I think that historians should not discount student unrest as well as teachers' weariness with the teacher-centered pedagogy of current-traditional rhetoric, as important stimuli to the adoption of workshop pedagogy. (207)
Even though current-traditional rhetoric had a truncated theory of invention, current-traditional teachers did not pay explicit attention to invention when they made writing assignments. In current-traditional classrooms, students wrote outside of class, except when they were asked to compose an impromptu theme in the space of a class hour. (This exercise was intended to insure teachers that at least some student writing was not plagiarized). Students' work was read and evaluated with an eye toward their mastery of formal correctness rather than the quality or the extent of the material discussed. Hence the notion that teachers or peers might intervene in students' composing was something of a novelty, as was the notion that students might complete more than one draft of an assignment. (208)
Invention was configured as a holy mental activity and Kurt traditional lore, and so the theoretical transfer of invention from mind to pen might be said to be a hallmark gesture of the shift to process pedagogy. The contribution of literate heuristics by number of composition scholars during the 1970s consolidated teachers dawning awareness that invention might take place in writing itself. (208)
The easy accommodation of process-oriented strategies to current-traditionalism suggests that process and product have more in common than is generally acknowledged in professional literature about composition, where the habit of contrasting them conceals the fact of their epistemological consistency. A truly paradigmatic alternative to current-traditionalism would question the modernism in which it is immersed and the institutional structure by means of which 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 on 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. Nor did process pedagogy change the institutional situation of composition: the introductory courses are still required, and composition teachers are still overworked and underpaid, just as they were prior to 1971. The failure of process pedagogy to dislodge the universal requirement is particularly pointed, since its early advocates argued that process-oriented instruction was especially adapted to the composing needs of individuals or small groups of students working in laboratory settings. Its more widespread advocacy during the 1960s and 1970s, then, presented teachers with an opportunity to rethink what Barriss Mills called "mass methods" of instruction (25). Unfortunately, this did not happen. (212 – 213)
Chapter 10: The Politics of Composition
Series of process constructed a self-directed student who would take control of his or her own writing process; this projected student subjectivity was to replace the domicile, rule-bound, grammar-anxious student subjectivity produced by current-traditional instruction. The institutional paradox, of course, is that students are forced to take the class in which they are to be constructed as self-directed writers. (217)
I argue further that the switch to process pedagogy can usefully be described as an ideological alteration of the politics of first year composition instruction from conservatism to liberalism. I will also try to establish that the liberal politics process pedagogy is an insufficient and inappropriate response to the contemporary situation of composition in the University (218)
Current traditional pedagogy is conservative in the ordinary sense of that term in so far as it resists changes in its rules and preserves established verbal traditions and institutional lines of authority. Current traditionalism preserves traditional social and academic hierarchies insofar as students are taught to observe without question rules of discourse that were constructed long before they entered the academy and to submit their native grapholects to grammar and usage rules devised by a would-be elitist class. Current traditional pedagogy is teacher centered: the teacher dispenses information about the rules of discourse and evaluate the students efforts in accordance with those rules. Students themselves are constructed in current traditional rhetoric as potentially unruly novices whose work needs to be continually examined and disciplined (218).
Current traditionalism and the institutional practices associated with it represent an attempt by those in authority to impose order on student discourse (218).
See p. 218-219 for a TERRIFIC overview of liberalism's influence on process pedagogy and also the shortcomings of process pedagogy.
Chapter 11: A Personal Essay on Freshman English
No outcry through most of the 1960s, when current-traditional rhetoric was nearly universally prescribed for writing assignments in Freshman English, no matter who taught it. Though I obviously can't document this claim, I will cheerfully wager that during all those years, most institutions of higher learning in America mandated a textbook, a syllabus, perhaps even assignments and a grading scale for use by teachers of Freshman English (238).
Chapter 12: Composition's Ethic of Service, The Universal Requirement, an the Discourse of Student Need
Composition teachers and theorists did not make serious moves toward achieving disciplinarily until the 1970s--eight to ninety years later than most fields of study in American universities. (253)
Thursday, December 20, 2012
A Teaching Subject (Harris)
Chapter 1: Growth
One thing I'm thinking about here is the confluence of events in composition history and Murray's arrival on the scene at UNH... One thing I'm thinking about is Murray being outsider and insider--this might be a powerful trope to play with. A line I've got in my head: Donald Murray did not attend the Dartmouth Conference in 1966, even though it occurred just one hour from the institution at which he taught (UNH). (And then, a list of other English and English Education related developments of the 1960s of which Murray was also not a part)...
It occurs to me that Murray's formative experiences--those which most shaped his thinking and his work, were his childhood experience of school and his work as a news writer.
I see connections here between Murray and the Brits at Dartmouth, growth theorists (and, interestingly, not the Americans). Worth exploring more: "an approach to teaching that took the work of students as seriously as that of poets or novelists" (7)
Explanation and critique of the "growth theory" (p. 16-17)...
But the growth model suggested that if the impositions of school were lessened, then a student could somehow become more authentically herself--as if that sense of self were not also being contested and determined by countless other voices, institutions, and practices in the culture. Growth theory tended to phrase the issue as a simple opposition: Were students doing their own work or not? But one can view the problem instead in terms of competing influences. One can see the languages of school, that is, not as muting the voice of the individual but as intersecting with the many other languages--of family, religion, class, gender, nation, neighborhood, ethnicity, work, entertainment, and the like--from which she forms her sense of self. (16)
Following this lead, in the twenty years after Dartmouth the study of writing took a strong individualistic turn in the work both of teachers concerned with helping students find their authentic voices and of researchers interested in documenting the mental processes involved in composing texts. (17)
Yet for all this it needs to be said that in many ways the aims of the growth theorists were radical ones. The idea of personal growth proved a powerful if flawed tool in contesting the sort of top-down disciplinary view of teaching found in the spiral curriculums of Project English, and it also helped democratize the view of culture and learning offered by Leavis and Cambridge. Perhaps most importantly, the growth theorists--Dixon, Britton, Moffett--proved that one can do serious work in English not only by studying literature or criticism but also by looking closely at the talk and writing of students. They offered not only a set of ideas about language and learning but a way of linking the concerns of scholars with those of students and teachers--and thus of remaining what work in English might be. (17)
Chapter 2: Voice
So when in the 1960s and 1970s teachers once again began to speak of the centrality of personal and expressive kinds of writing, they had a long tradition of dissent in English to call on. (footnote: Arthur Applebee traces the work of this dissenting tradition in full and sympathetic detail in his Tradition and Reform.) They also had the events of their time to respond to. These were, after all, the 1960s, the years of Kennedy, King, Vietnam, urban riots, student protests and Watergate. (26)
And so while expressionists like Macrorie and Elbow have often been criticized since for their supposed naval-gazing tendencies, there seems no doubt that at this point their aims were aggressively and self-consciously political (26)
...we need to see many 1960s expressionist teachers of writing not as fleeing from politics but as engaged in a political defense of the student in her struggles to assert herself against what was seen as a dehumanizing corporate and university system. (26-27)
As I've argued at a number of points already, a driving impulse behind much work in English has long been the belief that the study of literature and writing offers us a chance to regain some of that sense of wholeness and individuality which otherwise seems to come under such repeated assault by the rest of our culture (41).
For now, though, I simply want to say that what I most admire about both the expressionists and the Amherst school is their continued willingness to take on, in their varied ways, the tangled relationship between the self of a writer and her text. (43)
Chapter 3: Process
The problem with the older current-traditional approach to teaching writing, as has been argued over and over, was its relentless focus on the surface correctness of student texts, so that writing was reduced to an empty tinkering with verbal forms. But the advocates of process did not redirect attention to what students had to say so much as they simply argued for what seems to me a new sort of formalism--one centered no longer on textual structures but instead on various algorithms, heuristics, and guidelines for composing. This new formalism has proven little different from the old, as those version of process teaching that don't work toward a very familiar set of therapeutic and expressionist goals instead work toward an equally familiar set of technocratic ones. Both versions tend to move backward, as it were, from an ideal vision of the composition student: either the mature individual of one kind of humanist teaching or the expert practitioner of another more technical sort. The aim of teaching thus becomes to coach students towards either an emotional and intellectual maturity or an expert-level performance. What gets lost in this concern for development toward a known ideal are the actual concerns and perspectives students bring with them to their writing. In the rest of this chapter I try to show how this happens through looking closely at the work of two of the scholars most associated with the process movement: Janet Emig and Linda Flower. (56)
So my criticisms in this chapter are not aimed against the proposition that writing is a process--which, again, strikes me as a claim that is true, banal, and of a real if limited use--but against a few of teaching that places some vision of the composing process (rather than an interest in the work of students) at the center of a course in writing. (57)
It is in this highly charged and somewhat contradictory context--a new field trying to legitimate itself in the academy; a set of reformers trying to change the schools... (58)
DON: a reformer, a popularizer
Educational reform--what Murray wanted most was to change schools and to change schooling around the teaching of writing. Why? His personal and professional experiences suggested that the way writing was being taught were ineffective and harmful.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Berlin on Post-War & Process Years
"The Renaissance of Rhetoric: 1960-1975"
Jerome Bruner as pre-cursor to Murray: "The product of student writing, moreover, is not as important as the process of writing. (The emphasis in The Process of Education is on intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic rewards--not grass or honors as a motivator, but the sheer joy of discovery.) Writing involves discovery, a process requiring intuition and pursuing hunches--in short, acting in the way that mature writers do. The emphasis in the classroom should be on individuals coming to terms with the nature of composing--its inherent structure--on their own, without regard for social processes (123).
...this emphasis on research in writing instruction, coupled with the great increase in the need for writing teachers due to expanding enrollments, contributed to the renaissance in rhetoric in college English departments. (124)
The status of Freshmen English, circa 1960 or so (see Albert Kitzhaber, 4C, Freshmen English, and the Future, Oct 1963)
What was the status of Freshmen English at UNH in the early 1960s when Don arrived on campus? How did he, if at all, affect that status?
Finally, this overview would not be complete without mention of Frances Lee Utley's 1968 essay "The Boundaries of Language and Rhetoric: The English Curriculum." This article offers the most comprehensive overview of the notions of rhetorical theory and research prevalent at the time, identifying the major forces at work in the discipline. It is the best guide to rhetoric and composition in the mid-sixties, and it has been consulted with care in preparing this chapter and the next. (133)
I would now like to consider the intellectually rich and varied rhetorics that arose during this renaissance period of 1960-1975--a treatment that will celebrate rather than suspect the variety displayed. (138)
Major Rhetorical Approaches: 1960-1975
It is important, however, to distinguish the varieties of expressionistic rhetoric. At one extreme can be found the anarchists, arguing for complete and uninhibited freedom in writing, including the intentional flouting of all convention. At the other extreme, are the few that are close to the transactional category--especially to epistemic rhetoric. (145-46)
From this perspective [expressionistic rhetoric] writing is seen as an art, an art that arises from within the writer. ...an act that authenticates and affirms the self. (147)
...another feature of expressionistic rhetoric: it considers writing to be an art, the original expression of a unique vision. (147)
Lou Kelly, "Toward Competence and Creativity in an Open Class" (1973): "Her objective remained, however, the attempt to provide a free environment in which individuals would creatively discover the self" (148)-- I don't know that the discovery of the self was ever really an explicit goal of Murray's teaching...?
Finally, at the state of this discussion, I said that Elbow's approach is not overtly political. 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 world. (155)
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