Moving Toward a Group Identity: WPA Professionalization from the 1940s to the 1970s

Heckathorn, Amy. "Moving Toward a Group Identity: WPA Professionalization from the 1940s to the 1970s." In Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline (Eds. Barbara L'Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo). West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press. 191-219.

Two eras of WPA History

• Early Era (1940-63): when WPAs began to publicly identify the individual problems confronting professionalization as writing program administration surfaced in relation to discussions of teaching composition
• Transitional Era (1964-79): when WPAs gained more public responsibility and acknowledged and began to form a group identity to address the problems hindering professionalization (192)

Interesting Timeline Stuff (1970s)

• 1972: Freshman English News founded (first journal aimed at WPAs and FYW instructors)
• 1976-77, the majority of ads (sixteen of twenty) specified that WPAs should have composition as a primary area of study. Thus, although still rarely detailing the complexity of administrative duties, the actual job descriptions for WPAs reflected the growing professional identity of composition scholarship and writing program administration. (202)
• 1977/79: Writing Program Administrators Newsletter and then Journal founded
• 1977: The WPA Council founded (see p. 208-09)

Reassessing Janet Emig's The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders: An Historical Perspective (Nelms)

Nelms, Gerald. "Reassessing Janet Emig's The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders: An Historical Perspective. Rhetoric Review 13.1 (1994): 108-130.

It’s interesting to note that the initial exigence driving Donald Murray away from his intended focus on journalism teaching and towards an interest in composition pedagogy is similar to that of another one of the field’s founders, Janet Emig. Recalling her early years at Harvard under the direction of the linguist Priscilla Tyler, Emig remembers a course she took on composing processes in which she first encountered a sense of cognitive dissonance between her own experiences as a writer and the writing process as it was being presented to her by others (in this case, textbooks). Emig recalls the experience in this way:

I was looking at primary sources, a focus of work Priscilla Tyler was doing at Harvard; and I was struck by the inconsistencies in the statements about rhetoric and the actual writing of a given period. But I was more struck by the difference even then between the way I write and statements in the texts. The initial impulse, one that I think also informed The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders later, was the dissonance or discrepancy between major rhetoric texts of the time and my own experience. (Web of Meaning 1) (also see Nelms, p. 110)

Murray describes his own experience similarly...

There are other similarities between Emig’s early experiences and Murray’s. After matriculating in the Master of Arts in Teaching program at Harvard in the early 1960s, Emig soon found herself, unexpectedly, without faculty mentors to guide or teach her (Tyler left, a second faculty member was fired). As such, Emig had to “invent the program,” which, while having some burdens also offered certain advantages (i.e. she was able to devise an interdisciplinary curriculum for herself that she found purposeful and meaningful). Similarly, at UNH, Murray, when confronted with the expository writing course…

Unlike Emig, Murray, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer with two novels under his belt, brought a different kind of status to his early work in writing pedagogy.

Unlike Murray, Emig was pursuing scholarly research and had the imprimatur of Harvard behind her. I think there is something to this. Emig gets more credit perhaps because of her research chops

Yet before receiving her PhD, she had given at least eight talks on issues in composition studies to various groups, including CCCC and NCTE, and she had published four papers including "We Are Trying Conferences," "The Uses of the Unconscious in Composing," "On Teaching Composition: Some Hypotheses as Definitions," and "Language Learning and the Teaching Process."

Murray’s theoretical thinking about composing began around the same time as Emig… Once she moved to Harvard, they were only about an hour away from one another working on the same problem and question!

Her theoretical thinking about composing began as early as her 1963 qualifying paper (Nelms, 112).

She write "But I was more struck by the difference even then between the way I write and statements in the texts." Okay, what was the difference?

1. Writing as meaning-making (or, language generates and does not follow thought)

Emig finds this thought-language "theory" most accessible in nineteenth-century textbook views on "pre-writing," which she defines as "acts leading to writing, especially planning as exemplified by outlining," and in their views on metaphor. For the textbook writers she studied (and for many of the more modem textbook writers), language is subordinated to thought. In many cases these writers view metaphor as ornamentation, although Emig does note some exceptions. Planning, according to these writers, involves developing a clear conception of the topic before beginning to write. The only "writing" that goes on during this "pre-writing" stage is outlining; the rest of the time the writer is meditating and contemplating. Writing, then, according to these texts, equals "a swift, full ordered recording" of the plan (9-10). (112-13)

2. Outlining is a waste of time

A major source informing her thinking about teaching at the time was her dissatisfaction with her own composition instruction as a student. Emig recalls that the only part of the composing process she was ever taught was the formal sentence outline, which she and her friends always produced after their papers were finished. She remembers being "indignant" about it, finding it "absolute, total nonsense . . . , a pretty silly waste of time" (Interview, May 1990)

Emig's early interest in prewriting is important, since this paper was composed prior to Rohman and Wlecke's federally funded research study, Pre-Writing: The Construction and Application of Models for Concept Formation in Writing, which appeared in 1964 and is frequently identified as the "origin" of the "process approach. (113)

Emig is someone who is trying to investigate a phenomena and report to others (researchers) on her findings. Murray is someone who wants to talk directly to teachers of English about what needs to change, based on his personal and professional experiences. 

Boy does this sound a lot like Murray!

In "On Teaching Composition," Emig defines good teaching as "the intervention ... into a process . . . to improve that process or the product of that process" (128). For her the teaching "process" is as problematic as that of composing. (116)

Emig admits now that she was "terribly teacher-centered" at that time, and this teacher-centeredness limited her conception of the writing classroom: "I hadn't imagined the possibilities that would come about through the use of peers. I think who changed my point of view was Moffett in Teaching the Universe of Discourse, writing about learning from teachers, learning from others, and about how there is an interplay in the learning of writing. And now I'm utterly persuaded" (Interview, May 1990). (116)

A summary of her intellectual contributions:

Taken together, Emig's works of the 1960s, up through her dissertation and its revision into The Composing Processes, provide us with strikingly complex theoretical inquiries into modem rhetoric and composition that unite theory and practice in ways few were considering at the time.

1. In her qualifying paper, Emig brings into question the traditional thought-language relationship that is the basis for most thinking about rhetoric and composition at least since the eighteenth century. In "The Uses of the Unconscious in Composing" (1964), she suggests that not only are thought and language difficult to separate but much composing activity goes on subconsciously.

2. In this essay and later in "On Teaching Composition: Some Hypotheses as Definitions," she problematizes writing processes, suggesting that composing consists of not one easily generalizable set of stages but is affected by a variety of personal or biographical, rhetorical, and linguistic factors.

3. In "Language Learning and the Teaching Process" and "On Teaching Composition: Some Hypotheses as Definitions," she considers the pedagogical implications of this complexity. (118)

So Emig was taken to task for the implications she drew, too stridently apparently, about teaching (and teachers):

Teachers, she contends, don't read enough and certainly don't write enough themselves; they have little, if any, experience in the process they ought to be teaching. For that reason, they tend to truncate the process, providing no time for planning or revision, with both being defined too narrowly (97-99). (121)

One of the more important contributions that Emig made with The Composing Processes was her introduction of new research methods. Ironically, most of the criticism of The Composing Processes has focused on this methodology, and these discussions, too, have tended to decontextualize Emig's study. (122)

The Tangled Roots Of Literature, Speech Communication, Linguistics, Rhetoric/Composition, And Creative Writing: A Selected Bibliography On The History Of English Studies (Daly Goggin)

Daly Goggin, Maureen. "The Tangled Roots Of Literature, Speech Communication, Linguistics, Rhetoric/Composition, And Creative Writing: A Selected Bibliography On The History Of English Studies." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 29.4 (Autumn, 1999): 63-87.

 As Veysey's history of the rise of the modem university and as the histories of English studies and of the various disciplinary spin-offs demonstrate, no one of the three ideals ever existed in isolation in any one institution or in any one department or even necessarily in any one individual, though one over the others may have dominated. Rather these were invoked, configured and reconfigured in a variety of ways to help construct disciplinary, institutional and departmental identities. This tripartite construct of ends provides a useful lens for reading the histories of any disciplinary endeavor. Histories of literary studies, for example, make it clear that both research and liberal culture ideals were privileged while the utility ideal was disdainfully rejected. Early arguments to establish speech communication as a legitimate field centered on constructing an identity based on research and utility ideals. As Arthur Bochner and Eric Eisenberg point out, speech defined itself through a "combination of a utilitarian function and a scientific perspective" to break its bonds with English departments (and with a field increasingly turning to literature for its self-definition) (303-304). Linguistics from the beginning defined itself almost solely in terms of the research ideal. By contrast, both rhetoric and creative writing were marked as "art," that is, as praxis rather than as science, and thus, had the greatest difficulty in claiming legitimate space. Composition was further marginalized by being constructed early on as a space in which students were to demonstrate their ability to produce clear and correct prose. (65)

Edwin Hopkins and the Costly Labor of Composition Teaching (Randall Popken)

Popken, Randall. "Edwin Hopkins and the Costly Labor of Composition Teaching." CCC

Vol. 55, No. 4 (Jun., 2004), pp. 618-641.

Still, our histories of the profession come up short in identifying the real engagement of writing faculty with their material work. That is, we need more "inside" profiles of early composition professionals---teachers such as William Lyon Phelps, who "read and marked over seven hunddred themes a week" one year at Harvard (288); Fred Newton Scott who read 3,000 student essays in 1895 (121); and Barrett Wendell, who typically read more than 24,000 papers per year (Connors, "Overwork" 111). Such profiles can tell us how labor conditions of 100 years ago framed the teaching, curricular thinking, and even the personal lives of composition faculty. (619)

Notes on "A History of Writing Program Administration"

From Writing Program Administration (Works Cited)

First year composition was born under the shadow of remediation and a focus on correctness (29) Hill’s influential text, Principles of Rhetoric (1878), took the stance that rhetoric was an art, not a science (Hill 321). Brereton argues that this was to be a devastating stance in an institution increasingly de- voted to the scientific paradigm of research: “To argue that rhetoric was not a science, not a way of knowing, was to consign it to training, to an introductory level of college, to pedagogy. If it was an art, its instruction depended on the skill of the teacher, not on a knowledge base build up by concentrated study, by research” (Origins 10). Harvard’s composition program depended on teachers, not scholars; it never developed a graduate program, after the fashion of other disciplines in the newly created research institutions, and did not develop the research that might have grounded the undergraduate program theoretically. (30)

The English department developed a system which prevails today: “professors teaching advanced literature courses, and instructors, part timers, and graduate students teaching composition. By 1910, composition had become almost totally apprentice work, and responsibility for its oversight became the province not of a scholar or curriculum expert but an administrator” (21), a bureaucratic functionary. (31)

Because of the fact that composition was “apprentice work,” the pedagogy developed accordingly into a formulaic approach that untrained (and usually unmotivated) teachers could take on immediately. (33)

the task of writing error-free prose (34)

The composition course that focuses on literature as a basis for writing actually predated the Harvard approach, invented and popularized by Thomas Lounsbury at Yale—an elective course in literature that had a heavy writing requirement (16). This sort of course became extremely popular, given the fact that English department faculty could draw upon their own expertise in literature. There were many variations of the course, all of which involved “some elements of the old rhetoric course’s emphasis on belles lettres, style, and examples drawn from English literature. (37)

A sort of canon of essays developed for the class, embodied in a rhetoric/reader textbook, sometimes accompanied by a handbook; this approach became identified with what has become known as “current-traditional rhetoric.” (38)

The term to describe this approach, “current-traditional rhetoric,” was first proposed by Richard Young in his 1978 essay, “Paradigms and Problems: Needed Research in Rhetorical Invention,” borrowing the term from Daniel Fogerty’s Roots for a New Rhetoric (and adding a hyphen). As Young describes it, the features of this approach are familiar: “The emphasis on the composed product rather than the composing process; the analysis of discourse into description, narration, exposition, and argument; the strong concern with usage (syntax, spelling, punctuation) and with style (economy, clarity, emphasis); the preoccupation with the informal essay and the research paper; and so on” (31). (38-39)

Our discipline has been long in knuckling from its eyes the sleep of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the real lesson of the modes is that we need always to be on guard against systems that seem convenient to teachers but that ignore the way writing is actually done. (“Rise” 455) (Connors cited in McLeod p. 40)

Both Charles Pain (The Resistant Writer: Rhetoric as Immunity, 1850 to the Present) and Randall Popkin (“Edwin Hopkins and the Costly Labor of Composition Teaching”) argue for a biographical approach to the early history of composition, stating that broad ideological studies have limited usefulness; we should also be looking at the relationship between a person’s life and his or her pedagogy and professional contributions. Such an “historical case study” approach seems particularly useful in considering the early history of writing program administration. (45-46)

Scott took a different approach. He tried to reduce the gap between the high school teacher and the college teacher, to show that both had essentially the same problems. For years he labored to bring about cooperation and understanding for the benefit of both groups. (Kitzhaber qtd. in McLeod p. 47-48)

According to Campbell, by “incorporating a romantic belief in the organic nature of language, Buck hoped to make composition useful and vital to a changing student population” (xxxvi).

Bordelon points out that Buck was profoundly influenced by John Dewey... (53) -- Who was Murray influenced by? No one? Experience...?

The most complete history to date of writing program administration during the period after World War II may be found in Amy Heckathorn’s doctoral dissertation, “The Struggle Toward Professionalization: The Historical Evolution of Writing Program Administrators” (1999) and her subsequent essay, “Moving Toward a Group Identity: WPA Professionalism from the 1940s to the 1970s” (2004). Heckathorn outlines how early WPAs “began to come together to create a group identity, an evolution glimpsed through primary research in journals, books, and direct interviews which demonstrate that WPAs have struggled to transform themselves, and others’ impressions of them, from bureaucratic managers of an undervalued discipline to dynamic administrators and theorists of their work and of their field” (“Moving” 191–92). She argues that although there were certainly writing program administrators before the Second World War, there was not yet a group identity. She points to the 1940s as the starting point for the formation of this professional group identity, dividing the period before the formation of the Council of Writing Program Administrators (1979) into what she terms the early era (1940–1963) and the transitional era (1964–1979); this latter category coinciding with what Robert Connors refers to as the “era of disciplinarity” in composition studies (“Composition History and Disciplinarity” 4). (59)


Thomas Masters provides a general history of composition in the period just after World War II in Practicing Writing: The Postwar Discourse of Freshman English, based primarily on archival evidence from three institutions in Illinois (The University of Illinois in Urbana and what was then its branch campus in Chicago, Northwestern University, and Wheaton College). Masters found that the first priority at all three institutions was “the attempt to instill in students a code of correctness and style,” that weekly papers were required in all three, and that the papers “were read not as attempts to convey or construct knowledge, but as proof that they had internalized the code” (136). (60)



Lloyd-Jones, himself (like Edward Corbett) a returning veteran, (61) -- These are Murray's contemporaries, but we don't think of it like that...

But evidence from the early years of the journal [i.e. 1950s shows that much of a freshman English director’s time was taken up not only with administrative issues but also with designing entirely new curricula to meet the needs of a new group of students, (65)

The 1960s and 1970s were revolutionary decades in academe for more reasons than sheer numbers, including, among other changes, the paradigm shift in composition studies from a current-traditional focus on the finished product to a focus on students’ writing processes; Donald Murray’s “Teach Writing as Process Not Product” (1972) became a ral- lying cry for WPAs who were involved in staff development and/or TA training programs. (67)

This period also marks the beginning of composition as a discipline in its own right. A number of markers may be used to demonstrate this fact. Most often quoted is the 1963 publication of Research in Written Composition (Braddock et al.), which was both a summary of research so far and a call for a research agenda in the field. At the same time, the Commission on English of the College Entrance Examination Board was holding a series of institutes to improve the academic preparation and pedagogy of English teachers in the schools, a format followed by subsequent institutes for teachers established by the National Defense Education Act in 1964; Richard Lloyd-Jones documents these institutes and also the rise of the National Writing Project in “On Institutes and Projects.” These institutes, Lloyd-Jones argues, helped to establish composition as scholarly and professional work at the uni- versity level. One can also point to the rise of professional journals in the field, as documented by Maureen Goggin (Authoring a Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition), the increasing numbers of doctoral programs emphasiz- ing rhetoric and composition (as documented in periodic surveys in Rhetoric Review), and in the case of WPAs, the increasingly sophis- ticated job descriptions appearing in the MLA’s Job Information List (as documented in Heckathorn’s dissertation). Specialized professional organizations, often off-shoots of the larger ones, were beginning to form as well among people with common concerns and issues, not all of them having to do with research and teaching; the Associations of Departments of English, an organization for English department chairs, was formed in 1962, and The Council of Writing Program Administrators was born in the late 1970s. (67-68)

Community colleges, which had existed in small numbers since the turn of the century, became the new growth industry in higher education, in part to deal with the sheer numbers of students but also in part because of the growing democratization of higher education, a sense that everyone, not just the elite few, had a right to attend college. [...] In the 1960s, 457 new community colleges opened their doors, and the American Association of Community Colleges was formed during that same de- cade. (Today, according to the website for the Association, community colleges educate more than half of college graduates in the nation.) Responding to this growth, NCTE and CCCC began in 1965 to sup- port the development of two-year college regional conferences, an ar- rangement that eventually resulted in the formation of the Two-Year College English Association. (69)

Just after World War II, when the rapid growth of universities demanded more formal administrative structures, various existing members of the English Department were asked to take on the task of administration, but were called “freshman composition coordinators” or “directors of composition.” As Richard Bullock states, it was “a shared burden rotated, as are many chairmanships, among all faculty” (14); medievalists, specialists in nineteenth century romantic litera- ture, Shakespeareans, Melville scholars, or the faculty members who taught the secondary education methods classes were put in charge of designing a curriculum and training the rapidly growing numbers of teaching assistants. Writing in 1958, John P. Noonan noted that these faculty were chosen on the basis of their administrative ability and personality rather than any particular special background or training they might possess. It was not considered a professional task, but was considered university service. (73)

Notes on the 1960s

Important Dates/Events

• 1955: Willard Thorpe delivers "The Well of English, Now Defiled; or Why Johnny Can't Write" (lecture given at banquet at FSU)
• 1958: NDEA Act (w/out English)
• 1958: Ford Foundation "Basic Issues" Conferences (see Berlin)
• 1959/60: CCC Committee on Future Directions report (i.e. Gerber report) (355666.pdf)
• 1959: Commission on English founded by College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB)
• 1961: Congress authorizes first flow of federal funds to be used for English and Project English is born (see Applebee, p. 201), focus of which is composition, reading, and language skills
• 1961: The National Interest and the Teaching of English (NCTE publication)
• 1961: Planning Institute for CEEB 1962 held in summer at Michigan; Kitzhaber heads up planning for composition course for CEEB (CE0248Summer.pdf); contexts for CEEB's establishment (355433.pdf)
• 1962: CEEB summer institutes reach 868 English teachers at 20 cites, including UNH (CE0248Summer.pdf)
• 1964: The National Interest and the Continuing Education of Teachers of English
• 1964: NDEA extended to English

Berlin: see p. 120-21. "The most crucial events for the fate of writing instruction during the sixties and seventies were the intensification of the Cold War and changes in economic, social, and political arrangements that resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of students attending college. (120)

THREAD: Evolution of CCCC as an Organization

Report of The Committee on Future Direction (Feb 1960, Chairmen, Gerber)

• CCCC wishes to expand its prerogative beyond Freshman English to all writing courses in college (but Freshman English should retain a significant focus)
• This document seeks to expand CCCC's influence into new areas, under "Projects for the Future." These are Articulation of High School and College Programs" and "The College Freshman Course," "Advanced Courses in Language, Composition, and Creative Writing," "Writing Assignments Outside the Composition Class," "The Testing of Skill in Writing," "The Teaching of Composition," "The Training of Those Who Are To Teach Composition," and "The Professional Welfare of Those Who Teach Composition."
• It seems like this report seeks to expand the reach of CCCC beyond it's initial prerogatives

I am looking at issues of CCCC for 1960 and seeing that there is discussion of high school English teaching and the high school/college concern...

Much follow-up to the Gerber report, above, comes in the 12.1 (Feb 1961) issue of the journal.

THREAD: Reform In the Teaching of English

The National Interest and the Teaching of English (NCTE, 1961)

The exigence for this publication was the feeling, on the part of NCTE, that the 1958 NDEA act needed to be extended to English and that there were many problems in the teaching of English that could be addressed in doing so (see resolution p. 18 of PDF pagination)

Section I outlined a series of recommendations.
Section II explains why the need is national.
Section III presents a comprehensive picture of the status of English teaching today.

• improving the education of teachers
• articulating the study of English at all levels

Helpful Chart: Increase in School Enrollment (p. 25 of PDF pagination). Also see number projects under #5 p. 26.
Interesting section on "Written Composition--The English Teacher's Special Task" p. 91-100 (or so)
Research directions: p. 137 of PDF)

"A national reawakening of interest and activity in English is long overdue." (140)

"National interest demands vigorous leadership to improve all educational programs." (140)--the argument is framed as being in the NATIONAL interest...

THREAD: Basic Issues Conferences (1958)

• The first important manifestation of renewed scholarly interest in secondary school English was a series of "Basic Issues" conferences held during 1958 with funds from the Ford Foundation. (Applebee 193)
• Sponsored by MLA, NCTE, College English Association (CLE), American Studies Association (ASA)
• Two reports: "The Basic Issues in the Teaching of English" (1959) & "An Articulated English Program: An Hypothesis to Test" (1959) (Applebee p. 193)

THREAD: CEEB Institutes

• Kitzhaber heads up composition planning section for CEEB (CE0248Summer.pdf)
• kitzhaber.pdf is about the CEEB summer curriculum "...the surprising fervor which has distinguished our enterprise must be attributed to the skill and energy of the executive officers of the Commission and to the leaders of the three sections: Albert Kitzhaber, composition; W. Nelson Francis, language; and Helen C. White, literature. Their combined reports,"New Perspectives on English" (College English, March 1962) summarized the curricula in detail. But more was created than the three syllabi." (CE0248Summer.pdf)

A History of Professional Writing Instruction in American Colleges (Adams)

Although advanced writing courses are now separated into different divisions and departments, they were begun between 1880 and 1910 by a small group of English teachers, many of whom worked with more than one course. (ix)

In 1800 as in 1750, at the 25 or so colleges situated along America's east coast, students learned rhetorical principles and made oral presentations during four years of a fairly uniform liberal arts curriculum. Additional career training, usually for law or the church, came through apprenticeship. By 1900, at the more then 750 universities, colleges, and technical institutes across the country, students generally took liberal arts courses in their first two years and then chose among tracks in engineering, agriculture, education, library science, business, home economics, the humanities, and other fields for their course work of the last two years. This revolution in higher education triggered a revolution in the teaching of writing. As more students entered college, as specialties grew in number, and as students began to perceive college as a direct route toward various careers, the four years of required work in rhetoric that had been a key part of the earlier classical curriculum dwindled down to two semesters of basic or remedial composition for freshman. The history of advanced composition instruction, then, begins with higher education's abandonment of traditional rhetorical training--at a time when business, scientific, and news writing were becoming crucial to an expanding nation. (1)

By the turn of the century, as literary and linguistic offerings increased, extended rhetorical training was no longer even an elective option. The written notes and oral performances necessitated by the older system of class recitation were also gone. (11)

Note on content of freshman English around 1900 (p. 13)

Professional writers needed section (p. 14-15)--charts the rise of the demand for professional writers in journalism, business, civil service, etc.

In the classrooms of Hill, Wendell, Copeland, Briggs, Gardiner, Gates, and others, Harvard provided a model for a workshop approach to advanced composition. At other colleges, especially Amherst, Colgate, Columbia, Hamilton, and the University of Pennsylvania, English departments began to offer advanced classes that involved daily themes and longer assignments, individual attention, and a chance to experiment with a verity of genres. From 1880 to 1890, only seven eastern colleges had this type of elective. By 1920, however, 29 of 37 eastern colleges offered these advanced courses. Although some schools like Columbia, Dartmouth, and Harvard introduced an array of choices, many had only one course above the freshman level, but the trend was toward two or more by 1920 (Wozniak 129-32). (55)

On conference teaching: "For most men, the essence of the course was concentrated in the conferences, which, though some magic, the Dean [LeBaron Russell) always found time for. Slipped down in one of the chairs by the long table in his office, he went casually through the themes a man had written, and talked with intimate earnestness about structure and good taste and stylistic detail. (45)

Historians on 1963-1970

Crowley

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

"Around 1971, the story goes, composition teachers stopped relying on the correction of finished essays as their primary means of instruction--the product--and instead began to offer assistance to students while they actually composed, thus intervening in the process" (187). In this chapter, I'd like to take a look at what Donald Murray, whose article "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product" Crowley draws on to contextualize her work, had already accomplished before 1971 or 1972, when Murray, a savvy rhetorician, grafted his existing project onto the newfound language of process.

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

Relevant to Freshman English at UNH in the 1950s:

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

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

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

Crowley’s Review of pre-1971 Figures

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

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

Emig’s most important contribution to composition theory may have been this habit of treating her own composing process--as well as those articulated by professional writers--as exemplary sources of insight into composing in general. Her innovation was to assume that all human beings face the same problems and issues when they compose; students were no different from professional writers in this regard. While this does not seem like an earth shaking discovery of the face of it, in the context of current-traditional instruction Emig’s insight was revolutionary. [...] In the new dispensation ushered in by Emig’s work, poets, novelists, teachers, and students alike struggled while composing. Furthermore, composing processes were as varied and as idiosyncratic as the people who deployed them and the occasions on which they were used. (202)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas P. Miller

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

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

Berlin

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

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

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

See full passage p 152-53.

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

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

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

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

Connors

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

Fleming

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

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

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

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

A more accurate account, I believe, would treat the late 1960s, at least in terms of freshman composition, as sui generis, its own cultural moment unassimilable to other periods, a time of radical rupture in the incipient discipline as well as higher education itself, when one era literally and figuratively came to an end and another, haltingly, incoherently, began. The late 1960s, from this point of view, was when current-traditionalism finally came up against a wall it could not surmount. Unfortunately, when that paradigm collapsed, there was nothing waiting in the wings powerful and attractive enough to take its place; at UW, for example, there was no discipline of composition that could supervise a new kind of course, no rhetoric revival in the English Department, no incipient process movement. At other schools, freshman composition might have limped on for a few more years, intellectually orphaned, until the process revolution reinvented it, emerging at the end of the 1970s as the central project of a new, bona fide academic discipline, with full-fledged research programs, graduate degrees, and tenure-track faculty lines. (197)

Composition's Roots in English Education

Foreward (Yancey)

If history is lived by a group of people, it's a good question as to why they shouldn't at least help compose this history. (xiii)

it's a mantra in the field that composition is unique in its attention to students; here we see how that played out, from the very beginning, with a foundational assumption that students aren't merely the beneficiaries of our intellectual and pedagogical largesse, but rather that they are participants with much to share with us, not least of which is what they already know about composing. (xiii)

Five is the provocative nature of the volume, and by provocative, I don't mean unpleasant or agonistic, but rather thought-provoking and surprising: here, some of our cherished beliefs are called into question... Other questions are more future-oriented and inferential. Are there certain sites, physical sites like the state of Michigan and organizational sites like the National Council of Teachers of English itself, that were especially hospitable for the development of composition, why, and what does that mean for us today? (xiv)

our dual commitment to students and to social justice. (xv)

Introduction: The Intertwined Roots of English Education and Composition Studies (Stock)

Just as histories of composition studies have almost completely overlooked that field's roots in English education, histories of English education have almost completely overlooked that field's roots in composition studies. (1)

This case study is one of many that might be offered to demonstrate how English education and composition studies developed interdependently in America. (2)

The founding of the NCTE in December 1911... (2)--same year that Richards arrived at UNH
the publication of English Journal (EJ), beginning in January 1912... (2)--same year that Scudder arrived back at UNH

Although the term English education has come--over the years--to denote particularly the work of English teacher educators, I am using the term in this essay to refer to the work of teacher-scholars who formed themselves into a professional community for the purpose of shaping curriculum and instruction in subject English and for the preparation of those who would teach it. (2)--this accurately describes Murray and everyone at UNH

As it happens, the story of composition's roots in English education in the University of Michigan is the story of scholars, themes, and projects that figure significantly in the history of the field of composition studies' roots in the field of English education. (7)

Second, I tell the story to enliven--to dramatize with individuals and efforts--one case of the work of English educators, across the twentieth century, that took place in a number of universities in the United States, to realize a community of scholars and a body of knowledge about the teaching of writing. (8)

Having thought for some time about the claim I will make now, I make it fully convinced of its accuracy: The discipline--composition studies--would not have come to be and come to be recognized had it not been for the scholars in English education about whom you will read here. Neither would the field have steadfastly focused on student writers and the teaching of writing had it not been for remarkable teacher scholars like the authors who have written the essay sin this book, all of whom entered the field in the 1960s, 1970s, and the 1980s, an era about which they write here, a time when work in English education flourished, when the Conference on English Education (1964)--following the model of the CCCC (1949)--was established and developed in NCTE to promote the scholarship of the teachers of teachers of subject English. (18)

The Spaciousness of Rhetoric (Lauer)

Pedagogy of Taste (Crowley)

During the early years of the nineteenth century, American rhetoricians such as John Witherspoon and John Quincy Adams taught civic virtue to their students, just as Quintilian had done. By the midpoint of the nineteenth century, however, American rhetoric teachers had developed another pedagogical goal, one that eventually supplanted the older focus on public, civic, discourse. Relying on Blair and on texts redacted from Blair, nineteenth-century rhetoric teachers began the business of developing taste in their students. This shift in the focus of rhetorical education--away from civic virtue and toward the bourgeois projects of self-improvement--coincided with the demise of rhetoric as a field of study. That is, when students and teachers became more interested in accruing the cultural and social capital associated with the cultivation of an educated taste than they were in preparing for the pulpit or for politics, the doctrines and principles of rhetoric--classical and modern--began to disappear from the American college curriculum. Late in the century, the study of English-language literature took over the task of disciplining bourgeois subjectivity, a task it still fulfills. Today, outside of speech departments, rhetorical education remains unthought: neither English-language literary study nor English composition have ever included systematic attention to public discourse within their purview. (34)

revision of rhetorical pedagogy in the late nineteenth century (35)

These historians bemoan the departure of rhetoric from American college curricula because they assume that ethical instruction--instruction in the development of character--disappeared with it. However, this assessment overlooks the fact that such instruction changed its guise and its habitation during the middle years of the nineteenth century. In a new aesthetic guise, ethical instruction was conducted under the pedagogical heading of taste, at first by rhetoric teachers, and later, during the last three decades of the century, by teachers of English-language literature. In other words, American colleges did not abandon ethical instruction when they abandoned rhetorical education; rather, they transformed instruction in the development of character to the study of English-language literary texts. What they did abandon was the ethical subjectivity that was maintained and disciplined within classical rhetorical study: the vir bonus [i.e. "the good man speaking well]. In his place appeared the genteel man of taste. (35-36)

pedagogy of taste

The pedagogy of taste that developed within early nineteenth-century rhetoric textbooks was explicitly designed to help students discriminate between the tastes of the educated and the uneducated classes. (36)

The belles lettres tradition can be opposed to the scientific-empirical tradition of American school rhetoric, a tradition carried forward by writers like Alexander Bain and Henry Noble Day, who were inspired by George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) rather more than Blair. It was this tradition that spawned current-traditional rhetoric. (footnote 6, p. 269)

It was Kant who posited the existence of a "pure" taste, a taste that appreciated works of art and natural beauty as things in themselves. By positing this notion, Kant rationalized the familiar distinction now made between "high" and "low" tastes. (36)

In the Scottish tradition...theorists defined taste as that capacity, or faculty, which permits  persons to discriminate the good front eh bad in works of art as well as the virtuous from the vicious in the realm of morality. In this tradition, which probably stems from the work of Frances Hutcheson, the exercise of taste was directly connected to the exercise of public responsibility... (36-37)

Blair's firm connection of taste to civic virtue (37)

In other words, the person of taste is equipped with several faculties--imagination, method, perception, sympathy, and judgment--all of which, when working together in harmony, allow him to perceive and evaluate the aesthetic and moral worth of scenes or objects surely and quickly, if not instantaneously. (38)

Newman and company advised their students that taste, the ability to discriminate the bad from the good, the beautiful from the ugly, is a sign of excellence that allows discrimination among people, as well. Someone who receives no pleasure from nature or art, according to Boyd, "is said to be a man of no taste" (43). On the other hand, "he who is gratified with that which is faculty in works of art is a man of bad taste; and he who is pleased or displeased, according to the degree of excellence or faultiness, is a man of good taste." Since taste is natural, all men display it in some degree (39). [...] Obviously, though, this natural capacity does not manifest itself in the same way or to the same degree in all people or peoples. Newman generously reads this difference as a difference in education and class privilege: persons who have leisure and occasion to exercise their emotional responses to beautiful scenes or objects will be able to strengthen that response, whereas the ability to respond emotionally will be stunted in persons who not enjoy such opportunities. (39)

Coppee and Quackenbos, on the other hand, locate the standard in "the concurrence of the right judgment of many well ordered and duly cultivated minds," [...] in other words, the standard is set by the preferences of those persons whose tastes are widely acknowledged to be accurate and penetrating. (41)

"the concurrent opinions of refined men in civilized nations, by whom the arts are cultivated, works of genius are freely discussed, and Taste is improved by science and philosophy" (Quackenbos, p. 41)

And so we see that the universal standard is actually set by quite a small group, and a familiar group it is, too: "men" living in "civilized nations" who cultivate the arts and who read science and philosophy. In other words, people just like the people who wrote these textbooks. (41)

The pedagogy of taste, I would argue, is such a policing mechanism. It is the means through which young men were taught to internalize the marks and limits of bourgeois subjectivity (read "white, straight, male, comfortable, Christian" subjectivity). The ability to discriminate the bad from the good, in concert with his fellows, marks the bourgeois subject for membership in the community. Just as surely, this mark distinguishes him from those others who are not so disciplined, those who are so roughened by toil and hard cirumstances that they ignore beauty altogether, like Newman's laborer, of those, like Quakenbos's savages, who revel in the coarse or bizarre.

Like all ideologies, the ideology of taste works to naturalize that which is culturally instituted. [...] The ideology of taste assigns socially constructed differences to nature, thus rendering its judgments true, right, and inevitable; at the same time it covers over the real social work it performs, which is to maintain and harden class distinctions. Early nineteenth-century school rhetoric texts teach not so much what, but who, to avoid. The pedagogy of taste helps students to internalize a set of rules that mark their inclusion in bourgeois subjectivity at the same time as it sets them off from members of other classes. (43)

Rhetoric at The Margins (Gold)

CH. 1

FRAMING: 

• Creating exigence, 
• articulating how he will work
• explaining what his history does
• articulating why we should care

Although a number of scholars, such as...have called our attention to rich African American rhetorical practices outside of formal educational settings, the wide-ranging diversity of practices within diverse institutional settings of higher learning has only just begun to be explored. (15)

Moreover, an examination of historically black colleges and universities, such as Wiley, reveals a fascinating counterstory to received rhetoric and composition histories. At many private black liberal arts colleges, the classical liberal arts tradition persisted well into the 1920s, with Latin and Greek retained as requirements long after such courses had become electives at elite white schools. Oratory, moved to the periphery of the curriculum elsewhere, continued to play an important role; speechwriting was frequently incorporated into freshman composition courses, and debate and drama were enormously popular campus activities. (15)

In this chapter, I examine the pedagogical practices of perhaps Wiley's most famous professor, Melvin Tolson, through the lens of both African American educational history and Wiley's own unique institutional circumstances. Tolson's style of instruction, which integrated wide-ranging rhetorical traditions, challenges and enriches our understanding of the development of English studies and offers lessons for developing rich responsive classroom practices of our own. I hope not only to recover and describe the pedagogy of this important figure in American letters but to explain why it succeeded--and what that suggest for the contemporary composition classroom. (16)

Toulon's teaching speaks to several concerns of central importance to contemporary rhetoric and composition scholars. First, it demonstrates the limitations of traditional taxonomies in describing rhetorical instruction. While James Berlin's descriptions of epistemological differences have been immensely useful to our understanding of the development of rhetorical instruction in American colleges, his categories have sometimes been treated as mutually exclusive and discreet--one is either epistemic or current-traditional in pedagogical practice and never the twain shall meet. Melvin Tolson's rhetorical practices, however, fit into no simple category; rather, he combined elements of classical, current-traditional, liberal, social-epistemic, and African American rhetoric as he saw fit. [...] His teaching also calls into question our understanding of the functions and effects of current-traditional rhetoric. By classifying current-traditional rhetoric and its attendant pedagogical techniques as both positivist and hegemonic, we have allowed ourselves to ignore the potential value of disciplinary, prescriptivist, or agonistic language instruction... we have paid too little attention to how students in other environments might have welcomed instruction in speaking and writing that gave them access to the language of power (17)

---

On Oratorical Education

At literally hundreds of sites of instruction throughout the country, students were being taught that writing and speaking were fundamental to public and professional life. Oratory and public speaking, discontinued or truncated elsewhere, were often integrated into the curriculum... (Gold 4).

The role of oratory at private black colleges also differs from that at many white liberal arts colleges. Scholars of rhetoric generally concur that by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, written composition had replaced oratory as the center of rhetorical instruction. (20)

The role of oratory at private black colleges also differs from that at many white liberal arts colleges. Scholars of rhetoric generally concur that by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, written composition had replaced oratory as the center of rhetorical instruction... While black colleges established courses in written composition that mirrored those offered at white institutions, oratory remained an integral part of rhetorical instruction and campus activity through the 1930s, long after it had moved to the periphery of instruction elsewhere or had become the province of departments of speech. (20)

Note that at NHC, as of 1902, there was a requirement for continued work in oratory:

Looks like rhetoric first year, theme writing the second, and three declamations (one per term) during the final two years.

On Hybrid Pedagogies

...blending of teacher- and student-centered pedagogies (10)

...integrated pedagogy (31)

I hope to show the diversity and complexity of rhetorical practices in American colleges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While each site in this study displays elements of what Kates has called activist rhetorics—instruction that encouraged students to interrogate their social and political roles through writing and speaking—I am less interested in demonstrating the presence of specifically activist rhetorics than in locating the broad confluences of competing and complimentary rhetorical traditions within individual sites. Indeed, I argue that the epistemological schema that we have long applied to pedagogical practices may actually limit our understanding of those practices. What we have dismissed as current-traditional rhetoric often represents a complex of interwoven practices, both conservative and radical, liberatory and disciplining, and subject to wide-ranging local and institutional variations. (5)

Educators of this era (1873-1947) were faced with many of the same challenges as those of today, including increasingly diverse student bodies and ranges of academic preparation, cultural pressures at odds with institutional goals, the desire to teach practical literacy skills without forsaking a humanistic education, and a conscious awareness of the need to address students in their own language while acknowledging the language of power (10)

Tolson demonstrates that it is possible to join both conservative and radical practices into a pedagogy that serves both students and society. (17)

As was common with English teachers at small black colleges, Tolson taught a wide number of subjects, including composition, literature, debate, and drama. Toulon's rhetorical instruction was grounded in two distinct traditions: the classical liberal arts tradition...and African American oratory. Both of these mixed with a homespun, muck-raking, democratic populism... The key to his approach was an unabashed integration of traditions and embracing of contradictions. And was his favorite conjunction (31)

On the Extracurriculum

When we examine the history of college English studies, we must look beyond the boundaries of departments of English in order to gain a fuller understanding of institutional practices; if we cannot find evidence of certain kinds of practices in departments of English, we should not automatically assume that such practices did not exist" (Alison Elizabeth Regan, qtd in Gold, p. 11)