Writing, Programs, and Administration at Arizona State University: The First Hundred Years (Ryan Skinnell) -- 2011

INTRODUCTION

a historical case study of writing instruction (1)

...this dissertation considers changes in the place of writing instruction in the institution's curriculum in relation to four major movements in American higher education during the period under consideration:

• the normal school movement, 
• the standardization and accreditation movement, 
• the "university-status movement," 
• the research and tenure movement (1)

This study looks at writing instruction at a single institution over an extended period of time and attempts to place the conversation taking place in a broad historical context. (2)

...this study argues that the place of writing instruction in ASU's curriculum has, at various times and for various reasons, been shaped as much by national movements in higher education--and administrators' responses to those movements--as other factors, such as rhetorical theory and English department politics. (2)

...I argue that the influences I describe as affecting writing instruction at ASU actually had important affects at post-secondary institutions across the country and markedly shaped many writing programs and classes that currently exist. (5)

I am interested in understanding the intellectual and administrative structures that sustained writing instruction at ASU over time and shaped how it was manifested. Additionally, I consider how the structures that shaped and sustained writing at ASU might be understood in relation to conditions and developments at other institutions, in the discipline of rhetoric and composition, and in American culture beyond the academy. (13)

I ask the following questions:

1. In what ways did local, regional, and national developments in higher education impact writing instruction at different times in Arizona State University's history? 
2. In what ways did the development of Arizona State University from normal school to teachers' college to regional college to nationally-ranked research university impact theories and practices of writing instruction and program administration at the school? 
3. And how has the place of writing, programs, and administration at Arizona State University shaped and been shaped by the field of rhetoric and composition? 

CHAPTER 2: LOCAL HISTORIES: METHODS AND MADNESS

I rely heavily on archival and oral historiographical methods...in an attempt to understand and describe some of the important ways in which writing instruction at ASU has been similar to and different from composition instruction at other schools in other places across the country. (19)

Specifically, I adopt a local history lens and an administrative focus to look at the relationship of institutional conditions at ASU, as shaped and affected by developments in higher education more generally. (19)

Composition historians recognize that diverse factors, including geography, size, institutional mission, student body, funding, and local politics have historically affected how writing was taught at a given school (21).

Great FRAMING Quote:

Running through virtually all local histories is a common assumption--one that informs this study--that a complex, nuanced history which includes and values multiple sites of composition history is a positive goal. (22)

...the more nuanced the history of composition is, the more valuable it becomes to modern composition scholars hoping to better understand the historical circumstances which have conditioned how composition historians, writing teachers, writing program administrators, and composition students function within the academy. (22)

Three kinds of histories (from Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration):

1. inquires into the ideological/pedagogical theories and practices of composition
2. more localized inquiries into the classroom practices of individual teachers
3. administrative histories "locates the writing program within the larger institutional context that so often explains their formation" (xix)

Because of the focus on larger institutional contexts, an administrative lens is well-suited to looking at the local history of a given institution, adding contextual breadth to geographic depth. It enables researchers to consider important contextual influences, such as local and national politics or intercollegiate antagonisms, which are often overlooked in other types of histories. (23)

The challenge of an administrative history, then, is to attempt to do justice to individuals, groups, local conditions, institutions, theoretical developments, national and international movements, and a host of other factors. (23-24)

An administrative lens enables shifts of focus in ways that pedagogically or theoretically focused lenses do not. Hence, an administrative lens entails studying writing programs, and administration in broader terms than prior histories have sometimes done. (24)

In the context of composition histories, an administrative focus offers a further advantage by enabling researchers to consider the institutional structures that shaped the conditions of writing instruction. (24)

Local Histories: Reading the Archives of Composition (Donahue & Flesher Moon)

Ch. 1: Locating Composition History

When one works in the archives, one finds not only the official records of enrollment, curriculum, and achievement, but also--often uncatalogued, undigested, uninterpreted--personal copies of books, notes, and papers that mattered to those who read and wrote that place, at particular moments, on unique rhetorical occasions. Such items may be--most often, in fact, surely are--collected intermittently and without the kind of annotation that would help the researcher in the archives to assess confidently how typical--or not--were those moments and occasions at that place. Similarly, one cannot always trace the provenance of archival materials. (2)

...drawing on a wide range of archival documents, including, but not limited to: faculty meeting minutes, personal letters, student literary magazines, alumni magazines, yearbooks, course catalogues, reports to the trustees, class notebooks, student essays, unpublished lectures, and mission statements. (2)

This book's contributors attempt to reconstruct how students--variously inflected by class, race, and gender--have learned to write at different times, in different places, with different teachers, textbooks, curricula, and how teachers, also at different times, in different places, have developed pedagogies, built curriculum and programs, and contributed to the emergence of a discipline. (2-3)

We necessarily read the past from where we stand now. (11)

Local histories of composition test our theories about the influence of popular textbooks, innovative teachers, dominant pedagogies, and landmark curricular reforms. (12)

We hope that this book will inspire our colleagues to find their ways into and around their own institution's archives and to produce many more local histories... (12)

...explicitly reflective critical practice (12)

"Thinking Like That: The Ideal Nineteenth-Century Student Writer" (Welsch)

Through a close reading of five of Mahala's essays, I explore how Mahala's historical, social, and cultural influences converged with academic expectations and the rules of rhetoric outlined in Whately's Elements of Rhetoric--the "most widely used rhetoric text in American colleges between 1835--1865"--and Samuel Newman's A Practical System of Rhetoric (1839). The college bulletins of both Oberlin (beginning in 1838) and Antioch (beginning in 1866) list Whately's text as the primary text for the course in rhetoric; therefore, Mahala's writing at both institutions was guided by Whatelian principles. I am invested in a reading of these materials that works to understand them rather than evaluate them as wrong-headed. Although Mahala's essays may not reflex the type of student writing we value today, her attention to writing as a serious mental activity rather than mere preoccupation with correctness represents the kind of student writer nineteenth-century textbooks frequently describe. Her work presents us with the occasion to reconsider what we have come to expect of nineteenth-century student writing as either unengaged (Connors, "Personal") or resistant (J. Campbell "Controlling"; "Real")--and to read it as the work of a writer in context. (16-17)

Moves to establish significance (from last section):

• Mahala's essays offer us the opportunity to...
• Her work illustrates the way in which...
• She teaches us to...

(The Teaching of) Reading and Writing at Lafayette College (Donahue & Falbo)

...our project focuses on a widely celebrated figure about whom a great deal has already been written. (39)

But a considerable body of lore has accumulated around March, transforming him into one o the most resilient of pedagogical stereotypes, the "great teacher." (39)

The Trope of the Great Teacher (44)

Moves to establish significance (from last section):

• The inclusion of a figure like March...enlarges the parameters of the history of composition.
• Finally, the presence of March at Lafayette College in the nineteenth century underscores the fact that significant curricular and pedagogical innovation in composition can occur anywhere reading and writing are taught and practiced, but only if our assumptions about what constitutes proper evidence for such innovation are reexamined.
• ...he provides an early example of the use of writing to teach reading.
• ...we hope to complicate the notion that he saw himself as only a teacher of literature. Rather, March reminds us that any claims about the origin of literature as distinct from composition are suspect, and that the history of English is, indeed, a story of reading and writing.

And a final (interesting) concluding move: a call for more research:

In our effort to reestablish still another point of provisional beginning, our work on March has led us to ask what happened in composition pedagogy to make it posit reading and writing as in any way separable. (53)

A Chair "Perpetually Filled By A Female Professor" (Weidner)

Moves to establish significance:

• Butler University's composition history complicates these stipulations and argues for a reevaluation of scope and method when writing the history of composition. (58)
• Butler University compellingly shows that... (58)
• contextualized searches create histories that at times reflect, at times supplement, and at times complicate established historical narratives. (59)

Types of sources:

...composition narratives must be based on a broad inquiry, one that includes archival sources that represent the perspectives of the official college, of instructors, and of students: presidents' reports, board and faculty minutes, university catalogues, instructors' lecture notes and diaries, faculty publications, student themes and journals, student magazines and alumni memoirs. (59)

Disciplinary Histories: A Meditation on Beginnings (Patricia Donahue)

Revisiting the Current-Traditional Era: Innovations in Writing Instruction at the University of New Hampshire, 1940-1949 (Tirbassi)

Abstract

This institutional historical study highlights how the archival records of even one institutions's writing culture can complicate the field's current views of the current-traditional period and issues a challenge to some of the assumptions in composition studies about 1940s writing instruction. I argue that organizing writing theory and pedagogy in terms of periods can limit ways that we conceive of, study, and write about historical and current shifts in writing theory. (xv)

The findings from my study illustrate that institutional writing cultures emerge from reciprocal relationships between the formal writing curriculum and the writing initiatives in the extracurriculum. (xv)

Overall, this dissertation demonstrates that the study of institutional writing cultures is a productive means of understanding and analyzing contradictions, connections, and intersections among various sites of writing in localized contexts... (xv)

Chapter 1

Overall, my dissertation project explores innovations in writing instruction during the 1940s, using as its focal point a historical institutional case study of the University of New Hampshire (UNH) writing culture during this decade. (12)

However, we could also consider the possibility that the first-year course might be representative of traditional values of writing instruction--one of the last elements of the curriculum to change, rather than one of the first. Because all students entering the university must take the first-year composition course, and because faculty across the curriculum have opinions about the teaching of writing, the stakes are high in undertaking curricular change for this course and these changes must be vetted through a hierarchical series of institutional approvals (both official and unofficial). It seems that focusing our attention on the first-year course does not give us a complete understanding of the conversations shaping beliefs about writing and writing instruction--rather, this course provides us, in many cases, with existent, traditional or institutionally-approved views, rather than emerging views. (30)

One of my primary questions throughout this study has been how a focus on first-year composition histories can cause us to miss "writing instruction" in the periphery of the university setting. (31)

It is true, for example, that the University of New Hampshire first-year course looks much like the so-called current-traditional courses described by many composition scholars. However, we have the benefit of looking backward, of knowing what innovations in writing instruction came, in part, through scholars from this university just twenty years later, in the 1960s. Some of these scholars were students at UNH during the 1940s and were ostensibly influenced by the writing culture at UNH at the time, raising questions about what other aspects of the institution's writing culture we need to know more about. If we think of the first-year course as part of a larger writing culture, including creative writing or, under the larger umbrella of English Studies (since, at that time, the distinctions were not as solidified as they are now), then the field of composition might gain a more complete understanding of writing instruction before the field came into being...and perhaps how more current pedagogies, influenced by an institution's or region's writing culture, came into being. (32)

In this dissertation, I reconsider writing instruction in the 1940s and argue that innovations in writing instruction emerged in the 1940s in part due to the strictures of the formal curriculum, the diverse interests of the faculty, and extracurricular initiatives. I also discuss how external factors such as World War II, the GI Bill, and the interest in developing a nationalistic identity in the development of an American literary identity contributed to curricular shifts in formal and informal writing instruction. As part of this discussion, I do, naturally, include the first-year composition course at UNH, but I also look to innovations in the institutional periphery to gain a better understanding of how the extra curriculum and the formal curriculum shape one another (33).

Rather than focusing on extracurricular learning alone, I consider intersections between extracurricular and curricular approaches to writing instruction--how each arena influenced each other, and what influences contributed to a writing culture at the University of New Hampshire during the 1940s. I argue that the extra curriculum and formal curriculum blended, in a sense, to form that writing culture. (34)

Ch. 3: Considering the State of a University and of 1940s Writing Instruction

What is English Studies?: Establishing a Disciplinary/Departmental Culture (p. 89-102)

Throughout the 1940s (and even today), the faculty at UNH was comprised of primarily literature professors, yet there were many non-literature specialists in the department whose areas of concentration were quite varied: advanced composition (Carroll Towle), freshman composition (Lucinda P. Smith), reading (Robert G. Webster), speech and communications (Edmund Cortez, head, Ray Keesey, instructor), theatre/drama (William Hennessy), and journalism (Harold Scudder). In the mid-1940s, Professor Gwynne Dagger also added a Humanities course of study to the English Department curriculum. Though the interdisciplinary--as we might term it now--of the English Department was celebrated publicly by the faculty and by English majors, several of these specialized areas of study eventually separated from the English department. During the 1940s and even through the majority of the 1950s, however, these areas remained firmly seated in the English Department. While sub-fields in the department often struggled for legitimacy in proposing courses beyond the lower level, since upper level courses were reserved for the English major; upper level speech or writing courses were seen as additional or supplemental advanced electives that students could take if they had the time in their schedule. Although the literary emphasis of the department was well-established by the 1940s, the existence of sub-fields within--not yet splintered from--the English department and significant changes in the university culture that I have described above ensured that debates would continue about the nature of English studies as well as the types of training English majors should receive to be adequately educated in the field of English (90-91).

Such debates were also quite prevalent at the University of New Hampshire, especially after World War II. From 1945-1949, multiple departmental meetings were spent discussing the types of courses that English majors needed to take and the ways to measure whether an English major had gathered the knowledge the faculty had tried to impart. The discussion about which courses to take represented a theoretical tug-of-war regarding which subjects should be taught in English studies. Whether the discussion was about how to restructure the English Education track or whether to reduce course offerings, referred to in the minutes as "contracting courses," the core of the discussion always focussed on literary studies. (92)

A second example of the literature-centeredness of the department arose in the Fall of 1945, when the faculty considered "restructuring" the English major. (93)

(regarding fall 1945) What I want to highlight here is that while some advanced courses were offered in dramatics, speech and composition, almost all of the courses required for the English major were literature courses. (93)

Here are three specific examples of these views from an English Departmental meeting on October 24, 1945:

Mr. Bingham thought that the emphasis should be "on literature or reading" (94)

In practice, however, the Department Chair's literary focus seems to have had the most sway with the rest of the department. (94)

The primary nature of the senior examination at UNH was performance-based; the English faculty wanted to test students' knowledge of the literary canon. (96)

Each of these smaller departmental discussions as well as Young's letter highlights the fact that the UNH English Department, like many departments across the country, was engaged in a moment of disciplinary definition. These endeavors to articulate the types of courses English majors should take and to assess the knowledge of English majors represent incremental steps toward the creation of a particular vision (or version) of English Studies, one that, while consonant with the national trend, grew and developed in the local context of the UNH English department. For UNH English faculty of the 1940s, these attempts to define their daily work was both pragmatic and philosophical in the sense that as they were shaping and revising the curriculum, they were describing "what they do" and "why" to themselves and to other faculty, students, and administrators. The examples I have presented here, the course requirements and the comprehensive exam for the English major, suggest that on the macro level, the UNH department's theoretical leanings were towards literature as the "most" legitimate course of study for English. While some members of the UNH English Department faculty held wider interests than just literary pursuits, a point I will explore in the following section and in subsequent chapters, this structuring of the English major around literature courses privileged this pursuit of literary study in particular. That faculty took a more conservative approach toward designing the major provides some insight into the development of the English Studies department at UNH but it also raises questions about whether this design was motivated by personal philosophies or by other external influences such as institutional or administrative pressures. (100)

Practicing Writing: The Postwar Discourse of Freshman English (Masters)

Chapter 1: Instrumentality

I use the term "instrumentality" to name the set of practices, common in American colleges and universities in the postwar era, by which academic literacy was inescapably reduced to a set of skills that students were expected to acquire by taking a particular course. (30)

Given the nature of the course in which they found themselves caught up, both the students and teachers assumed instrumental functions within the academy. (30)

The course is accepted and required with the hopes that it will work not one but a series of major miracles: that it will change the language habits of many students so that they will become adept in the dialect of standard ENglish, that it will produce students who have ideas, can find facts to develop them, and can organize and present material clearly and persuasively, that it will train students to read expository prose rapidly and accurately and also appreciate and interpret literature, that it will make students think clearly and logically, and so on. (Robert Gorrell, qtr on p. 31).

Unlike other courses in other disciplines, freshman English existed to satisfy the demands of the student's real reasons for attending the university. Freshman English was a means to what students themselves and the faculty acknowledged as more important ends. (31)

...it looked to remake persons in an academic image and likeness. (31)

Even though they had no control over students who had completed the course, teachers found themselves responsible for writing performed across the entire range of the university's offerings, and for the progress of students as they advanced towards graduation. (36)

Confronted with the limits of their power as instruments of literacy, those responsible for freshman English did not absolve themselves of responsibility for students no longer under their control. (39)

In the marginal space occupied by freshman English, teachers assumed the roles of police or physicians. (40)

One of the new approaches the committee enacted was the demise of English A10. (41)

The firm but friendly talk in textbooks and course materials about future academic, social, and financial benefits of having taken freshman English masks what students became within it. (46)

Chapter 2: Priority

Freshman English, the instrument of training in literacy within the academy, occupied a problematic position during the postwar era. It was the prerequisite that every student had to fulfill, yet it stood at the margin of all academic discourses. Virtually every discipline had to surrender its students to freshman English for a semester or two, but this universally required course had no power to generate its own disciplinary status. It included everyone, but by that very function could not contain anything. (50)

During the postwar era, one of the foundational tenets of freshman English reveals itself through the ongoing attempt to identify these "priorities," in the sense of determining that which must come before all other discourse, as well as in reference to establishing the major goals of the course. Once they had identified such "priorities," postwar teachers and administrators believed that they could then invent pedagogies to transmit specific values and develop them within their students (52)

What metaphor surfaces again and again in documents that relate to the practice of freshman English in the postwar era--the writer as a "craftsman." ... "The Writer as Craftsman" provides examples of the priorities of the course. ... Writing, then, for the author of "The Writer as Craftsman" consists in idealized steps or functions that can be learned in the abstract within the classroom, to be deployed later in the specific instances students will face throughout their academic careers and later in life. The steps--thinking, acquiring tools and style, planning, and polishing--constitute the content of freshman English (52-54).

These four basic objectives--writing, reading, listening, and speaking--are typical of the many postwar courses organized according to communications theory (58).

In freshman English, literacy acts of all types became the sum total of a sequence of more and more finely defined skills that had to be learned prior to the students' participation in specific disciplines and discourses during their academic and postacademic careers. These "basic skills," although generally perceived as specific identifiable actions, recede one behind the other until ultimately they assume the status of ideal essences, more real than the actual practices in which they are embodied... The history of freshman English reveals a continuous search for better ways to achieve these "basic skills." (58)

There can be no panacea for the problem of freshman English, because it occupies a paradoxically problemmatic position. The course is given priority by the rest of the academy because of the belief that literacy is an a priori need for all academic discourses, yet by virtue of such priority both literacy and the course--its instrument--are also inescapably marginalized. (59-60)

Confined to the margins of the acknowledged discourses of the academy and unable to establish itself as a discipline by excluding any knowledge as not-freshman English, the course was trapped in a paradoxical position. Like any other course, freshman English needed a proper content, but the search for its proper content became an endless pursuit of anything that might be considered logically anterior to itself. In freshman English, students were to become academically literate, but "literacy" could not be achieved without mastering certain skills, especially grammar. (60)

Freshman English comprised a collection of such imperatives: students must learn to write, the academy must be responsible for literacy, democracy must have literate citizens. (61)

The problem of freshman English lay not in its failure to achieve its goals, but in its inescapable marginality. (61)

Chapter 3: Efficiency

Two surveys of freshman English appeared at the end of the postwar era: Albert Kitzhaber's Themes, Theories, and Therapy (1963); and Robert Gorrell's chapter, "Freshman Composition," in The College Teaching of English (1965), published by the National Council of Teachers of English. (62)

The practice of freshman English during the postwar ear was permeated with a belief that the course needed to be modified, and that those modifications would allow it to operate in ways closer to its true purpose. (63)

Those engaged in freshman English at Wheaton, Northwestern, and Illinois believed that by fine-tuning their curricula more students would achieve the standards of literacy expected at their particular institutions, and the course would become what it was destined to be. (64)

...a course based upon a theory of literacy as adherence to a set of rules... (66)

Those in charge of freshman English considered the course to have an ideal form and innate potential. They assumed that academic literacy would come about if only its agent, the freshman course, were allowed to operate according to its true design, free of the modifications imposed by myopic administrators. Often, the changes brought about to increase efficiency involved adding or deleting noncredit or remedial courses for students who performed poorly on placement tests or in Rhetoric classes. (67)

Despite their faith that students would attain greater competence in academic literacy if the courses were improved, teachers of freshman English continued to encounter the same or worse problems. In the face of adversity, however, those involved with freshman English never seemed to lose faith in the possibilities for the course. (71)

The experience with freshman English at Wheaton, Northwestern, and Illinois during the postwar era suggests that the problem does not lie in certain flawed components of the course. So long as it has been considered an instrument of academic literacy, it has been found wanting--and so, ironically, open to further attempts to make it more efficient and effective. (72)

Chapter 4: Individuality

[Crowley] explains how such school rhetoric includes Romantic notions of an individual author: "The allegiance of eighteenth-century discourse theory to psychology and logic permitted two relatively new features to emerge within rhetorical theory: the privileging of a single authorial mind, rather than community wisdom, as the source of invention and the concomitant privileging of texts as reflections of the workings of this sovereign authorial mind" (qtd in Masters p. 74).

What I call "individuality," then names this problematic position that an individual must assume as a student (or teacher) of freshman English. The student is expected to display an original, honest self, yet at the same time conform to rigid (and usually tacit) notions of the qualities that an original honest self must display in academic discourse. (74)

The unacknowledged ubiquity of individuality in freshman English emerges in particular practices, as well as in the wider discussion of the course, evidenced in the proceedings of professional conferences and articles in journals. (75)

It was impossible to escape a tension between the rhetoric of individuality and the stated purposes and conscious practices of freshman English, as well as between the rhetoric of individuality and the subtle conformity that freshman English imposed. (75)

Freshman English embraces a paradox. Students were expected to display themselves as individuals--persons who have discovered their own uniqueness and are capable of evaluating and judging according to their singular points of view. Those responsible for the design and deployment of freshman English assumed that their course fostered this individuality. Nevertheless, the individuality that students were expected to contain and that their teachers expected them to display was limited within boundaries that were definite yet never explicitly described. (76)

The paradoxical function of individuality within the discursive practice of freshman English, which calls simultaneously for recognition of each person as a unique individual and for conformity to a particular social and political role, offers an answer to Faigley's question. In American higher education, freshman English 9and perhaps the rest of the mandatory educational apparatus) has been invented to contain these contradictory desires. (77)

...to eliminate error and to express themselves within acceptable norms of style. (79)

Writing assignments and instructors' responses to them reveal the pervasive importance--and conflict--that "express yourself" has imposed upon freshman English. (80)

The instructor in freshman English had to encourage the deepest, most powerful self-expression, yet also require that the self be expressed in officially sanctioned words. The student somehow had to infer that what was wanted was not just self-revelation, but revelation according to a tacit formula. (80)

But the design of the examination makes it a test not only of correctness and style, but of a student's ability to invent a self that can simultaneously confess intimate thoughts, actions, feelings, and values yet remain within the boundaries of academic discourse. Students must find themselves sufficiently "loaded," as well as able to discharge that load in a predictable, formulaic pattern in order to impress the examiners sufficiently and so earn certification of competence. (82)

One essay...illustrates how a student could be caught between his notions of how to express his individuality and the tacit expectations of his examiners. (83)

It would seem that some evaluators responded negatively not because he failed to meet the stated criteria, but because he violated the implicit requirement that he adopt the kind of individuality freshman English instructors expected but did not articulate. (85)

These topics reveal how what was done under the rubric "freshman English" was bound up completely with the belief that the student enters into academic discourse via "expression of personal experience," by revealing "all that can be known," by "committing one's innermost self to paper," but only so far as this kind of self-revelation conforms to unstated but ubiquitous expectations. (88)

The self to be expressed had to conform to a certain academic model. Those responsible for the course were convinced that they empowered students to bring their uniqueness to bear upon the world about them. But the mandatory nature of freshman English ensured, paradoxically, that students had to invent their own uniqueness within the bounds of a particular ethical and political model. Not only did the stated goals of correctness and style mask the unstated goal of personal expression, but the goal of personal expression concealed still another--that of constructing a rhetorical self according to the ideology of the academy. (91)

A last and most revealing trace of individuality can be found in the statements and practices having to do with evaluation from the post-war era. These practices, as did course design and writing assignments, operated in an obscure way. Students were told how to succeed in freshman English largely by being told what to avoid. First and foremost, students were told to avoid plagiarism. (93)

A true expression of one's innermost self on paper, with all its randomness and disconnectedness, would never be accepted into the discourse of freshman English. To accommodate one's self to that discourse is to become the correct, coherent, clear self desired by the academy and by democracy. (95)

Less heinous, but also a sin against individuality, was the simple lack of originality. (97)

Instructors and textbook authors may have stated their belief that originality derived from independence, from an honest correspondence between a student's inner self and outer expression, but they expected writers to limit themselves to carefully constructed self-expression....Originality, like individuality, requires writers to infer the tacit ideology within which they may operate; it is a confirmation not of the uniqueness of the individual, but of conformity to the desired type of discourse. Moreover, it is an explicit marker of what is included in the center of academic discourse, and what is marginal. Lack of originality indicates not worthlessness, but marginality and ineptitude. Therefore, students who lack "originality of thought" will not merit distinction, but neither will they incur the violent sanctions invoked against plagiarism. (97-98)

In other words, an "original" writer must construct an expected, prescribed version of "self." (99)

Chapter 5: Transmission

"Transmit" suggests the communication of a power or quality from one source to another by unseen yet effective means...Freshman English was thought to convey the humane value system via such "transmission."...Not only were students to repeat what they had read, they were to be changed, converted by the power of the text. (101)

liberal culture

"The role of English has long been taken up, to a far greater extent than teachers of other subjects we might imagine, with the 'character building' elements of the curriculum" (John Heyda, qtd in Masters, p. 103)

Freshman English, as the agent of academic literacy, was believed not only to confer the "skills" of reading, writing, speaking, and listening, but also to confirm students' personal integrity and validate their status as humanists. To have succeeded in freshman English, then, indicates the achievement not only of higher moral status, but higher status in academic society as well. (103-04)

During the postwar era, freshman English retained this valuation of canonical over noncanonical literature. (104)

Arnoldian ideology suffuses the commentary on freshman English from professional journals during the postwar era. (106)

All speak, however, of a belief in the power of English as a school subject (in particular, literature) to raise up the students. Teachers of English function as agents of the uplifting that occurs via contact with the material in the English course. The transfer itself, the "mission" of the English course, is something ineffable, something beyond mere technique or rules. (107)

It is not enough to view freshman English as a mere service that renders students competent in speaking and writing the language of academia. Transmission makes the course into the point of contact between the beginning university student and the realm of the liberal arts, a place of higher knowledge, greater values, even psychological equilibrium. (107)

Transmission appears as part of the paradoxical or problematic nature of freshman English when these ethical claims are measured against the actual conduct of the course. Producing liberally educated persons by means of one or two semesters' worth of study constitutes one of what Robert Gorrell has called the "major miracles" expected of freshman English. (107)

....unable to comprehend that writing instruction might involve anything other than literary study, on the one hand, and drill in grammar, usage, and formal fluency, on the other. (Crowley qtd. in Masters p 108)

A significant aspect of how the presumption of transmission works is the hiddenness of what is supposed to happen as a result of the course. (109)

Transmission, then, means more than the use of belletristic literature in the attempt to teach reading adn writing on a college level. Rather, this term names the tacit belief that the encounter between students and selected texts--whether excerpts in handbooks and anthologies or complete novels, plays, or poems--would produce transformations in the students' attitudes and values....Transmission is problematic in that it is implicit and unstated... transmission names the supposedly automatic and natural production of humanistic values associated with instruction in literacy. (109)

---Look at Connors, "Shaping Tools: Textbooks and the Development of Composition-Rhetoric", and his analysis of McCrimmon's Writing with a  Purpose.

Reading (and writing in response, as this textbook and all other "readers" required) became the vehicle for learning how to live a thoughtful, responsive, morally responsible life. (110)

Reading produced automatic transmission. Any reader (who read properly) received humanistic beliefs, values, and abilities by means of his or her contact with the source materials. To become literate meant to be able to produce texts of one's own that reflected the same sensibilities, ethical choices, and stylistic niceties as exhibited by the selections in the textbook. (111)

Gerard Thorson (1956): "As teachers of English we are concerned not only with the teaching of skills; we are also interested in the transmission of values" (Composition in the University, p. 105-106; qtd in Masters, p. 111-112)

Grammar handbooks also reflect an ideology of transmission...Just as passages in the reading textbooks reputedly contain the qualities that would be transmitted to students, so handbook rules, examples, and exercises offer the correctness and style students needed to succeed as writers. To teach, then, was to put students in proximity to the sources of academic literacy; to learn was to allow the desireable qualities of the sources to penetrate oneself. (112)

Under this guise, the course served as an instrument of academic literacy, but literacy for a particular purpose--to allow students to absorb the humane qualities that were supposed to inhere in belletristic literature, whether established works from the literary canon or essays produced by accomplished students. They very acts of reading and writing--at a level presumed to be qualitatively better than theat of mass culture--were presumed to cause the readers or writers to be "infected," in Guth's words, with the qualities, beliefs, and values of humanistic culture such as reason, order, a certain type of aesthetics, and the innate superior value and beauty of the human spirit. (115)

Both assumed an Arnoldian perspective, that the discipline of English has the power to enlighten, to raise students from a lesser to a higher mode of existence. From some historical distance, however, we can see that "enlightenment" came at the price of teaching students to devalue the culture that they had brought to the university, and to adapt themselves to another preferred by the academy. (116)

Chapter 6: Correspondence

Of these changes, none had a greater impact on the practices of freshman English classrooms than did New Criticism. (118)

One of the constituent forces within freshman English during the postwar era was a marked correspondence between the tenets of New Criticism, including its notions of the self, and of what constituted the teaching and learning of academic literacy. (119)

"'New Critics valued unconventional or novel insights; rich verbal texture of organic interrelationships among structure and meaning; the concrete, presentational over the abstract; and metaphor as the fundamental language principle' (Aycock 35)" (119).

Just as students were expected to display not their own version of their individuality, but one constructed to fit the model sanctioned by the academy, so they were expected to become readers and writers corresponding to the model presumed by New Critical theory. (120)

Freshman English writers were not required to convey any particular body or category of knowledge, but to express their own experiences and insights, carefully chosen and arranged. 'Reading' and 'writing' exist as a priori skills; developed from within the individual. (122-23)

...the injunction that students construct their inner selves according to a model provided by critical theory. (124)

If Guth's manual reflects the pedagogy of freshman English--an enlightened pedagogy, at that--what it reveals is a classroom devoted mostely to the discussion of reading assignments. Some class time may have been applied to brief inventional strategies or discussion of the students' own texts, but clearly the students were expected, from their close reading adn discussion of literature, to assimilate what constituted an acceptable text and what their roles were as writers. (127-28)

The lesson of New Criticism, with its influence on freshman English in the postwar era, is not one of having followed a true path or a false one. It is that acts of literacy are not absolute; they are constructed so as to correspond to a system of beliefs and values. Pedagogy, then, is not so much influenced by critical theory as it constitutes critical theory in action. (128)

Chapter 7: The Course

...freshman English served as the instrument of literacy for the entire academy. (131)

Success in freshman English did not indicate mastery of a particular body of knowledge, but the attainment of a readiness to assume a productive and respectable position within the academy. (134)

Students succeeded when they showed that they had realized their unique individuality by expressing it in their writing; however, this uniqueness came not from some previously untapped inner source, but from conformity with the tenets of freshman English. Lester Faigley has described what was expected of students as the construction of "a unified, reflective, rational self that can interpret past experience in relation to the present self" ("Study of Writing" 253). (134)

At all three schools, the skill considered prerequisite to all others was the ability to compose correct prose in a suitable style. (135)

Correctness was the fundamental quality of acceptable writing, the basis upon which more sophisticated structures could be built. (135)

The first priority of freshman English at all three schools, therefore, was the attempt to instill in students a code of correctness and style, adherence to which would ensure minimal competence in all areas of academic and nonacademic discourse. (136)

Part of the content of freshman English, then, was the production of texts that would demonstrate the degree to which students had learned standards of correctness and rudiments of academic style. A second part of the content of freshman English was the reading and discussion of literature. (136)

Teachers presumed that freshman English would liberate its students from the banality and mindlessness of the world outside academia; however, the kinds of reading and writing commonly done served not to liberate, but to elicit conformity. The claim that reading literature would open students to a world of thought and feeling that they had never before experienced masked a subtle yet powerful enforcement of an elitism that professed its values to be different than those of the mass culture, and better. (139)

In freshman English, the subject of a composition exists independently of language, waiting to be expressed via one of the modes of discourse. A writer's task is to find a way to fit whatever personal information he or she may have accumulated into a particular "mode" so as to demonstrate mastery of that particular form, and mastery of the standards of correctness. (141)

They wrote to demonstrate how well they had accommodated themselves to the unacknowledged ideology of freshman English, an accommodation demonstrated by their display of academic values: correctness, rationality, orderliness, subtlety, and dispassionate evenhandedness as reflected in their ability to use prescribed methods of organization and development. (141-42)

Within the discursive practice of freshman English, these diverse topics can be considered equal because their purpose is not to give students the occasion to enter into social or political discourse, but to give them as much latitude as possible in choosing familiar ground upon which to demonstrate how well they had mastered the prescribed patterns of cause and effect, classification, or description. (143)

The stated purpose of the course was to raise students from all backgrounds and disciplines to a level of literacy that would enable them to succeed in higher education; however, in practice it served as a scapegoat for the sins of illiteracy. When the inevitable differences appeared between academic or public expectations and the perceived performance of students in their reading, writing, speaking or thinking, freshman English provided the place at which the problems could be localized. (150)

...freshman English was thought to develop and strengthen democratic society. (151)

More than naming a specific course, "Freshman English" names a system of beliefs and values--a discursive practice. So long as the presumptions upon which it is constituted remain unquestioned, a discursive practice has the power to continue unchanged, despite the diverse settings in which it may be located. (163)

Chapter 8: The Student

...the implicit subjectivity in freshman English. (166)

Sites of potential controversy were offered to students not to provoke their thinking, but to allow them to discover many published opinions without strenuous research. In the 1950s they would have had to conduct their searches using fairly cumbersome tools such as general reference books, card catalogues, and various periodical indexes. As beginners, they had to be given a hidden treasure that was not too hard to find. Students were expected to sift nuggets of information from the arguments of experts taht they then could organize into attractive displays. Writing a research paper meant applying the current-traditional model of invention to a topic outside one's personal experience, as well as revealing mastery of technical skills such as composing footnotes or compiling a bibliography. (172)

Freshman English required its students to adopt what they believed were unique and independent identities, but their uniqueness and independence, as Kerwick suggests, were superimposed on them. (173)

Within freshman English, to be an individual meant to present oneself as rational, orderly, skeptical, and subtly complex. Moreover, to be a student meant to present oneself as fundamentally flawed, capable of improvement but not perfection. (174)

Above all, students were considered faulty. Freshman English made them acknowledge their shortcomings and accept whatever remedies the course offered. As flawed beings, however, students--and their instructors--always had to be wary of backsliding. The course could show them the way, but it could not guarantee that they would achieve or maintain perfection. (175)

Medical terminology of the type Rose describes figured prominently in the postwar classroom (176).

All three flaws [that students evidenced]--lack of health, physical and moral weakness, lack of polish--are suggested... (178-79)

The freshman English student was like a patient under the firm but compassionate hand of a doctor who could diagnose hidden weaknesses and prescribe remedies. Students lack the integrity and composure to endure the diagnosis at first and may respond with childish sensitivity. They have not yet developed a sufficient sense of value to recognize real quality in themselves or in their work. But with time and the endurance of some pain, they not only would recognize and remedy their weaknesses, but also achieve enough maturity and sophistication to gain some recognition within the adult world. (179)

To write well, students had to mend defects in themselves; persons who did not eliminate the unhealthily unfocused, uncommitted, bland selves they brought to freshman English were deemed incapable of joining the exchange of spoken and written words in the academy. (179)

Students, as students, were presumed to have an inescapably flawed nature. (180)

Like children, students lack the maturity to realize the full consequences of their carelessness; like parents, the faculty must watch them carefully, to keep their youthful indiscretions from causing them permanent harm. (181)

Freshman English, then, cannot effect a permanent change in the students; it can only temporarily block their flawed literacy. Students will write well only if compelled by outside forces, exercised by persons who appreciate, as the students cannot, the full consequences of one's actions. (181)

Chapter 9: The Teacher

To enter into freshman English required students, as well as their teachers, to assume a distinct, inescapable, but unacknowledged function. (185)

The most pervasive was the belief...that freshman English existed to supply the necessary basis for all other disciplines. This belief enmeshed the faculty in a paradoxical web. They attempted to identify the linguistic, semantic, or psychological precursors to academic literacy and to invent effective pedagogies for them. The more they did so, however, the more they reinforced the tyranny of the "current-traditional" curriculum that they hoped to escape. (199)

No matter which content or pedagogy was inserted into the discursive practice, the results were the same. (200)

Literary values also pervaded freshman English. Virtually all instructors of freshman English--both graduate students and regular faculty--had devoted themselves to studying literature and had received what little pedagogical training they had in a literary context. (200)

Teachers of freshman English conducted their classes with an Arnoldian sense of high moral purpose. At the very least, their belief in the innate value and positive moral influence of literature determined the kinds of materials they assigned and the responses they expected. Yet, far more pervasive was the emphasis on what John Heyda has called "character building" aspects of the course. Despite the arbitrariness of its content and their lack of preparation and motivation to teach it, the instructors at Wheaton, Northwestern, and Illinois took freshman English very seriously. (201)

Another aspect of the literary values that permeated freshman English originated in the pervasive influence of New Critical theory during the postwar era....nearly everyone who began teaching English after World War II accepted close reading as the technique by which they and their students could deal with texts...At all three schools, a successful writer in freshman English was expected not only to produce error-free texts, but also to exhibit a style that lent itself to close reading. (201)

Instructors at these three schools based their teaching on assigning personal essays that they scrutinized for errors. (201)

For Hayford, as for most freshman English instructors of the era, "honesty" consisted of a writer's arranging carefully selected details so as to convey a subtle, ironic, variegated yet orderly self. The expectation of this "honesty," as well as the texts that would be able to reveal it, originates in the common background of New Criticism Hayford and many of his colleagues shared. (203)

Freshman English, however, effected a great deal of attention not because it was central to the effort of the departments of English and to the university, but precisely because it was marginal. (203)

Conclusion

The archival evidence from Northwestern, Wheaton, and Illinois has revealed a discursive practice that operates through a (mainly) tacit system of interrelated presumptions. I have inferred these presumptions--instrumentality, priority, efficiency, individuality, transmission, and correspondence--from the documented words and actions of administrators, teachers, and students involved in freshman English from 1947 to 1963. (208)

I begin with the assumption, as does Robert Connors, that freshman English did not emerge from theory, but from practice. (210)

The conclusions I draw from both, however, suggest that in the years since the birth of Composition, capital C, the practical experience of teachers and students in "the first-year course" (no longer "freshman English") is not all that different, for all the fine talk, from that of the 1950s. (215)

Participants in the discursive practice adhere--usually tacitly--to presumptions that take on the quality of articles of faith: (see list of 6). (215)

Practicing Writing documents overt connections between freshman English and the promotion of democratic ideals in the postwar era, but the course seems to reflect in a deeper way the individuality and egalitarianism that typify life in the United States. (217)

To my way of thinking, however, no one who operates within a discursive practice (such as composition teachers) can "escape the panoptic gaze of the disciplines." Rather than being under the surveillance of a disciplinary gaze that can be evaded by shutting the door, I would say that we are "written" by the discursive practice in which we are participating. We do not "use" the discipline so much as the practices of the discipline use us. This does not mean, however, that our words and actions in the classroom have no value. On the contrary, I maintain that the discursive practice of freshman English consists in what we say and do. (220)

How the Writing Process Came to UMass/Amherst (Charles Moran)

Though Moran claims to be telling the story of just one institution, he describes a series of changes that occurred in almost every university in the country. (Tobin, 12)

There are many things to like about this chapter, which is also a history and a kind of reflection/personal meditation.

Rather than focus on a crisis moment as others have done (although there is a sort of a crisis or at least moment of transition woven in), Moran frames his article as a kind of evolution. He begins:

In 1981 the University of Massachussetts had what Richard Young and Maxine Hairston then would have termed a "current traditional" freshmen writing program: some subject-matter (literature, film), interspersed with writing assignments that were completed, then graded, then returned. In 1982, one year later, the university had a radically different writing program, one based on the work of Janet Emig, Peter Elbow, Roger Garrison, Donald Murray, and the other pioneers of what was then known as a "process" approach to writing... How did such a radical change come to pass? (133)

So, on the one hand, this is a history. How did the program at UMass transition from "current-traditional" to "process" in the course of just one year (but what was that current-traditional approach previously in place, exactly)? What were the "complex processes of institutional change" around freshmen English and writing instruction at UMass? (answer:

There is also, though, a really excellent assessment of Garrison and Murray and Moran, in several places, attempts to describe the ways in which Murray's thinking about the teaching of writing changed over the years. This chapter gives me something to work with (and against). So, let's get to it. First, the program itself. What happened?

Early on in the chapter Moran concedes that he will tell an "extraordinary" story in the pages ahead. The story is extraordinary, unique and, I would add, significant, in three ways, according to Moran:

• an English Department at a Ph.D.-granting research university was instrumental in undergraduate curricular change;
• an English Department served as a locus for curricular change in a field it apparently did not value, the teaching of writing;
• and an English Department at a Ph.D.-granting research university was influenced by texts from two communities it did not often encounter, the community of professional writers and the community of two-year teachers. (134)

Here are the basic details of the timeline

• 1967: Walker Gibson arrives (from Amherst?)
• 1970: Gibson establishes the Rhetoric Program, a separate unit from the English Department (thus English is separated from Freshmen English). English subsequently suffers as the number of majors drops and it no longer has the responsibility to teach Freshmen English or a two-semester lit sequence.
• 1971: UMass English faculty, at the urging of the chair, begin outreach beyond university (lasts into the early 1980s). Connections forged with community colleges (Springfield Technical Community College) and public schools (Springfield Public Schools).
• 1973: initial exposure to work of Murray and Garrison
• 1973-77: With Tom Carnicelli and Lester Fisher, Garrison runs the "UNH-Westbrook College Summer Institute for Two-Year College Writing Teachers"
• 1973: Leheny and Moran begin to experiment with the Garrison/Moran model in collaboration between MAT program and Jim Collins at Springfield Technical High School.
• 1978 & 1980: Collins and Moran host NEH-sponsored institute on the teaching of writing for MA secondary English teachers
• 1981: Rhetoric Program at UMass collapses after a decade of underfunding by college and avoidance by English faculty. Moran (and Lehany?) create a new first-year writing course for UMass (which includes a junior-year WAC program)

On Murray

Though Garrison and Murray promulgated remarkably similar pedagogies, though both were New Englanders, and though Garrison taught at Murray's home institution during the summers of 1973-77, the two men hardly knew one another. (136)

The reasons for the difference have to do with character and situation. Garrison was a self-styled outsider and iconoclast, a person who deliberately remained outside the growing community of scholars in the field; Murray was, and is, a generous and sociable man who moves comfortably in the world of professional conferences. (137)

Murray's book came to us, as had Garrison's monograph, through channels outside those normally open to professors of English Literature at research universities. Indeed, as Tom Newkirk has recently suggested, Murray's approach "was defined as in opposition to writing practices of the university" (6). As its title suggests, Murray's work drew on a non-academic, "writerly" tradition--he himself a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a novelist, and essayist. (138)

Moran has a section called "The Newsroom" in which he organizes a discussion of how the Garrison and Murray approach worked under the model of the newsroom that both men brought with them to higher education. He opens this section with an interesting line: "Both what now seem to us the good and the bad in Garrison's and Murray's work inhere in the analogy they drew between the freshmen writing classroom and a journalist's newsroom. (141)

Garrison and Murray bring the newsroom--a writer's workplace--into the regular freshmen writing classroom, and it is accepted, despite what might seem to be a bit of a problem--there's no newspaper. (142).

For both Garrison and Murray the teacher is an editor, the students are cub reporters, and there are facts to be collected, column inches to be written, deadlines to be met. (142)--the passage on p. 142 where Moran works this metaphor seems a bit forced in Murray's case...?

Murray's anti-intellectualism: "Less the pugilist and more the man of letters, Don Murray quoted Frost--in support of his victim, "be specific; don't generalize;" "Intellectuals deal in abstraction. It's much safer that way" (1968, 5). (145)

We guess that Garrison's and Murray's a-rhetorical view of writing was the result of three factors:

• the a-rhetorical stance of most English departments, then and now;
• our continuing reluctance to look at the rhetorical situation of the student in what we call "academic writing";
• the fact that both Garrison and Murray were journalists (he then goes on to expand on the third point (...the journalist's audience is an audience that one "learns" on the job and which, once learned, disappears from the writer's consciousness). (146)

On pre-writing: "For Don Murray in 1968 and again in 1978, pre-writing was chiefly done off paper. You'd think, and maybe sketch an outline, and then write. For all the "process" that there is in the first edition of A Writer Teaches Writing, it still foregrounds a think-then-write model" (147). See rest of paragraph for further elaboration and also how Murray reconsidered this as time went on.

UMass Program

Since its inception in 1982, the University Writing Program has evolved, with the field of composition studies, away from models we first found in 1973 in Garrison's and in Murray's work. So, too, has Don Murray. While Garrison remained outside the culture of composition studies to the end of his life (he died in 1984), Murray has evolved with the field and has lived long, holding fast to his base but acknowledging and incorporating the theory and practice of his colleagues in the profession. James Berlin notes a post-1975 "tendency of certain rhetorics within the subjective and transactional categories to move in the direction of the epistemic" (183); Murray, and we, have participated in this move. Indeed, Murray's entirely rewritten second edition of A Writer Teaches Writing (1985) is one of the three books that our Writing Program gives today, in 1994, to each of its new teachers. (143)

We can't say that we have improved, though we may think we have, but we can say with assurance that we have evolved. It is my belief that the model that Garrison and Murray provided in 1973--the one-to-one editorial conference--has made this evolution possible. (143)

The Garrison/Murray writing classroom format made it possible--not inevitable, but possible--that we would see and understand our student writers, modifying our pedagogy to suit particular students and particular times. (143)

Moran then sets up a what-have-we-kept/what-have-we-ditched explanation of the current program at UMass, circa 1994:

Kept:

• conferencing
• activity is what happens in the classroom
• students publish their work
• prompts are preferred over assignments
• grades are delayed
• content of the course is student's writing

Ditched:

• We've left behind, too, Garrison and Murray's early-1970s belief that there is a single-style, a single "good." Both men were essentialists and positivists. Beneath all that fat there was bone. (145) and These assumptions--that there is a single good style, that this "good style" is a superior communicative instrument, one with special access to our "common core"--sit nicely with New Criticism, still in the 1970s the dominant school in literary studies, and with our colonial past, but not so well with post-structuralist criticism and a post-colonial, emerging cultural democracy. Moreover, our move since 1980 into "Writing Across the Curriculum" is founded upon the belief that differences among worlds of discourse are an appropriate focus for our pedagogy. (146)
• In addition, we've left behind the early-70's assumption, found in both the Garrison and Murray texts that came our way in 1973, that writing is at its most important level a-social, a transaction between writer, teacher/editor/diagnostician, and text. (146)
• In addition, we've complicated our sense of what pre-writing might be, including in our pedagogy Peter Elbow's work on free writing. (147)
• We have also left behind Garrison's reliance on the "modes of discourse" as a framework for a semester's work. (147)
• We've also modified our vision of the writer as an autonomous unit. (148)

Some Questions:

• Woven into the texture of this narrative is the assumption that student writing is really "endless stacks of mediocre papers."... Murray, too, despite his evident faith in the latent skill and competence of student writers, occasionally engaged in some genial student-bashing. "No teacher," Murray wrote, "will convert all the hard-core anti-writers" (1968, 160). 
• Murray on free-writing...how else did this evolve?
• How else did Murray's thinking evolve between 1968 and 1986 or so?

I love this line:

I need to say that the Garrison/early-Murray model still lives deep in me, accounting for much that I consider good in my teaching and much that I now consider less-than-good. (149)

It captures in a concise way a good deal of what I, myself, have felt as of late and a good deal of what I think I am trying to work through with this project. 

From Form To Meaning (Fleming)

From Form to Meaning: Freshmen Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957-1974 (David Fleming)

Another book in a series which attempt to investigate specific sites of composition during the 1960s/1970s.

Preface

They represent for me the best of composition-rhetoric: its unusual humility in a world not always known for such, its abiding commitment to social justice in an environment where such devotion ebbs and flows, its deep humanity in a profession that can be cold and aloof. (x)

Introduction: Freshmen Composition in the United States, 1885-Present

One hotbed for tension at UW was the huge English Department, and many of its deepest conflicts swirled around the two-semester Freshman English course, English 101 and 102. The course was required of every undergraduate on campus, a group clamoring (if inchoately) for relevance and freedom in their studies; it was taught by a cadre of politically active, newly unionized graduate teaching assistants (TAs), anxious about their future in a society they now saw as morally bankrupt and an academy whose decade-long spending (and hiring) spree was clearly coming to an send; and it was directed by an English faculty who affiliated not with first-year writing but with the advanced study of British and American literature and who, given the disaffection of the two groups mentioned above, felt themselves under siege by the late 1960s. (15)

It was also clearly now about more than just that one course. Having read widely in the story of my own field, I knew that what had happened at UW was not entirely out of sync with the broader story of freshmen composition in this country. Add to that my own complicated relationship with composition, my sensitivity to its role in contemporary English departments and university general education programs, and my scholarly background in the history and theory of rhetoric, and I was printed to see in the story of this specific course broader lessons about freshmen composition and higher education in general. (21)

I thus follow here a long tradition in historical research of trying to tell a general story by focusing on a particular one. This is, in other words, a case study, which involves gathering and analyzing data about an individual example as a way of studying a broader phenomenon. It is done on the assumption that the example (the "case") is in some way typical of the broader phenomenon. The case may be an individual, a city, an event, a society, or any other possible object of analysis. The advantage of the case study method is that it allows more intensive analysis of specific empirical details. The disadvantage is that it is sometimes hard to use the results to generalize to other cases. (21)

Why does your study matter?

1. First, 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)
2. The second main contribution of this project, I hope, is the illumination it provides on the 1960s in general, especially the momentous changes in higher education that took place during that decade. In fact, as I argue here, the most important influence on writing instruction at UW during this time was not any new theory or pedagogy of composition, but the massive cultural, demographic, political, economic, and institutional changes that were taking place in the country at large, changes felt especially acutely on college and university campuses and affecting general education courses, like first-year composition, more than any others. The story of English 101 and 102 at UW in the late 1960s, in other words, needs to be told in the context of the changing material conditions of U.S. higher education and North American society during those years, when a rapidly expanding and increasingly diverse student population, mounting federal support for education and research, and a relative liberation of both politics and culture came up against massive civil unrest, foreign war, and the growing anxiety, disillusionment, and alienation of young people. (25)
3. And that brings us to the third, and I believe the most important, lesson of this book, which concerns freshmen composition itself...I offer the following narrative, then, not only to help correct local misrepresentations of the history of Freshmen English at the University of Wisconsin but also to help compositionists at large better appreciate the role of "the long sixties" in the story of their discipline and to help everyone involved in higher education make better sense, even today, of "freshmen comp," a course that is, at once, inherently unstable and enormously resilient, constantly at risk of marginalization and yet surprisingly central, even inescapable, at key moments in our nation's cultural, intellectual, and material history. (26-27)

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)

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)

Chapter 2: A Prehistory: 1848-1948

Focused on UW.

Chapter 3: The Postwar Regime: 1948-1968

Focuses on stability of current traditional model at UW until transitional period, near 1968.

Chapter 5: TA Experimentation: 1966-1969

But if the TAs cared deeply about the content of Freshmen English--about what their students were reading, writing, talking, and thinking about--they also paid close attention to pedagogical structure: where authority resided in the classroom, how goals were established and students evaluated, and so on. In fact, the TAs' experiments in educational process and procedure at UW in the late 1960s may be even more interesting, far-reaching, than their search for "relevant" content. I examine three such innovations below. (108)

1. First, the evidence indicates that many of the more radical English TAs at UW in 1968 and 1969 were trying to develop what one might call a teacherless writing class, in which authority is dramatically decentered and the student's responsibility for his or her reading, writing, and thinking--his or her own education and life--radically heightened. The idea is simple but, in the context of the old Lacy-Thomas course, revolutionary: in learning to write, students need to be personally engaged in what and how they are writing, to care enough as writers (as human beings, the TAs might have said) to truly reflect on and improve the ideas and language they are creating...Learning to write, in other words, could not be motivated from outside and above; it had to be a self-initiated and self-controlled process in which students themselves were empowered to take responsibility for their own education and allowed to discover meaning through their own language. (108-109)

"decentered authority"

2. This idea of adopting maximum flexibility toward the syllabus brings us to the second structural feature of the alternative freshman composition course English TAs at UW in the late 1960s seemed to be working toward. They were interested not just in the collaborative planning of the course with their students but in a new kind of planning altogether, not just a democratic writing class but an emergent one as well, involving a curriculum less prepackaged and more sensitive to the life taking place outside the classroom, the personal and intellectual growth of each student and the unfolding of the group's joint experience across the semester. If the idea discussed above concerns the teacherless classroom, where authority was radically decentered, this one concerns the syllabusless classroom, where the curriculum is every day an open narrative, changing according to the path that the participants, individually and together, pursue. We're talking, in other words, about taking the idea of contentlessness seriously, imagining a curriculum driven not by some prior and externally imposed syllabus, but by the constantly evolving desires of its actual participants, reflecting day-to-day on the meanings they wished to explore and construct, in dialogue with one another and the surrounding world (113)

3. Hand in hand with the teacher less, syllabus less curriculum was an insistence among English TAs at UW in the late 1960s that Freshman English move away from its obsession with the formal evaluation of student writing by teachers and toward informal evaluation by the students themselves, who would thus--it was hoped--be internally motivated to write and improve their writing, rather than be driven to do so by external compulsion and fear... This antipathy toward grades was tied in the 1960s, at least among radical and leftist educators, to a deeply felt neoromanticism regarding human growth and personal development, itself part of a wider antiauthoritarian, antibureacratic movement during the times. (116-17)

..."de-grading" the classroom was, along with proposals for alternative course readings, one of the two most frequently discussed and adopted pedagogical innovations among English TAs at UW in the late 1960s. (118)

Pedagogical innovations of English TAs at UW in the late 1960s:

• Employing relevant materials and topics
• Decentering classroom authority away from the teacher
• Opening syllabi to emergent needs and desires
• De-grading teacher-student communication (Figure 5.2, p. 123)

Reading, writing, and talking are always key in such projects because, according to radical teachers, it is only through the personal discovery, criticism, and cultivation of meaning that true growth can occur and freedom be attained. And this meaning must be radically substantive, that is, something completely different from the mere form that had previously characterized literacy education and language theory. (126)

The search for meaning in post-1960s discourse studies split between 1970s expressionism and cognitive rhetoric, both of which located meaning in the writer, and 1980s social constructionism, which located meaning in the reader, or rather, in society itself. The research reported here suggests that that split did not yet exist in TAs' pedagogical work or self-consciousness--to their and their students' credit. (127)

...one focused on meaning rather than form, dedicated to the pursuit of personal and social freedom, and requiring therefore a relevant, decentered, emergent, and non evaluative pedagogy... (128)

What I hope to have shown in this chapter is that for about two years, from the publication of the Mulvihill Report in early 1968 to the abolition of English 102 in late 1969, English TAs at UW engaged in a burst of classroom innovation, pedagogical reflection, and teacher organizing that may well be unique in the history of postsecondary education in this country. They experimented with new materials and techniques, organized and attended their own symposia, read extensively in educational theory, created study groups meant to develop alternative syllabi, conducted research on other writing programs, and reflected thoughtfully and honestly about their own teaching. (130)

Conclusion: Freshmen Composition at the Turn of the New Century

Or we could see it as part of the collision of incompatible institutional impulses that characterized higher education during the 1960s: the desire to meet the general education needs of the increasing number and diversity of entering students, on the one hand, and the growing pressure on faculty to produce specialized research, on the other. (195)

...I have tried to situate this story as much as possible within its particular historical context and to embed what happened in English 101 and 102 at UW in 1968 and '69 within a larger narrative about postsecondary education in th eland-grant public universities of the United States during "the long sixties" (196).

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 an dog 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 generic, 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, freshmen 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)

----

What has been useful about this book?

1. It's a history of an institution, as will be mine...
2. It's a history of a particular moment, a moment that I, too, am interested in...
3. There connections to be made between the "radical" and "leftist" pedagogies of the UW TAs and what the folks at UNH were up to...even though they, and especially Murray, did not frame what they were doing in these terms (I don't think).
4. The description of the program at UW gives me something to talk in response to or up against or in comparison to. It gives me a place to build from, and that is useful. Many times while I was reading, I wondered how I might use the UW story to help set up and contrast the story that I think I am starting to tell about UNH (both public, land-grant institutions, but UNH didn't even have it's Ph.D. program until around the time when the split at UW was happening).
5. Fleming provides a way of framing his project and argument that are helpful to me--just to see how the moves are made.

1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition

Preface

...each of us wanted to know--indeed felt ethically obligated to take up the opportunity to know--the historical conditions that influenced the composition program in which we were participating as teachers and administrators (vii)

...to understand the complex and conflicted foundation upon which the current writing program at Penn State was built. (vii)

On sources:

"Official documents, such as departmental reports, program memos, syllabi, and catalogues, were perhaps the most obvious choices for study, yet we needed the memories of colleagues to flesh out our work. (ix)

...we ran advertisements in the alumni magazine...

sample undergraduate papers and course syllabi

This part kind of jives with the turn my own project is taking: "...to tell a recent history of writing program development" (v)

...each of us wanted to know...the historical conditions that influenced the composition program in which we were participating as teachers and administrators. (vii)

...the complex and conflicted foundation upon which the current writing program at Penn State was built. (vii)

Many of the struggles we recount here have been enacted at many other sites: budgetary constraints, institutional pressure, and personality conflicts are common sources of distress and motivators of change in almost every English department. We therefore offer this study as a point of comparison and contrast for those who are working at other institutions to historicize the development of their local writing programs. (vii)

Rather than tidying these disparate, filtered, and embedded traces or the past into a unified story of progress that would make Penn State's current program seem like the culmination of a steady, always admirable, and self reflective path of progress, we have tried to retain the messy traces of these conflicts within our narrative and to highlight how very unpredictable and contingent writing program development can be. (viii)

Introduction

Why do people teach composition as they do at any given moment? What determines their choices of textbooks, assignments, and daily classroom activities? Of all the possible approaches to the teaching of writing, why do teachers settle on particular ones? What accounts for the shape of composition programs--sequences of courses, testing and placement procedures, staffing and administrative practices? Individual preferences and personal styles are certainly involved; so, of course, are institutional values and constraints. But even more certainly, the teaching of composition is shaped by the available means of persuasion that are presented to us by intellectual and professional communities (broadly considered)--communities shaped, inevitably, by culture, circumstance, and history. (3)

History--that aggregate of options and identities offered to us by the material, intellectual, and cultural circumstances of the past--is centrally involved in choices about pedagogy. (3)

Sources to Consult:

Fragments of Rationality ("Lester Faigley's Fragments of Rationality provides three chapters of a broad history of composition from 1960 to 1990")

Framing Quotes:

...the 1970s--that formative decade in the development of composition studies that is just now "entering history," as it were (4)

on the 1970s: "...the rich, sometimes conflicting, sometimes even random intellectual and material hurly-burly of the period. Consequently, our field has been left without a sense of how all those individual moments were collectively influencing and impeding composition practices in the 1970s or how they generated competing, conflicting, and cooperating discourses at given moments that continue to resonate today. (4)

...but they are somewhat less serviceable for preserving the astonishing range of practices, personalities, and messy particulars that strove for a hearing, however temporarily, within the mixed aggregate that has been known as composition. (4)

...it nevertheless seems fair to say that, within composition studies, understanding of the era is incomplete, lacking in the rich, competing particulars that defined the period. (5)

Framing Moves (they've got me thinking, in particular, about what conversations my project speaks to or participates in)

1977 also contributes to the growing body of scholarship on writing program administration... (5)

This book consequently addresses this gap by... (6)

...we have maintained a continuing dialogue between the local and particular, on the one hand, and the broad and general, on the other: we consistently poise an account of developments at Penn State against national and disciplinary developments (7)

---

...we addressed several key questions, questions that both rely upon and extend the work of previous composition histories:

How are curricular designs in composition at specific institutions influenced by the assumptions and beliefs of particular faculty members and administrators? (6)

Ch. 2 Background I: The Cultural Scene in 1977

Colleges and universities sought to manage budget problems not only by reducing their faculties but also by increasing part-time positions and graduate assistantships. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, the five-year period from 1972-1977 saw a dramatic increase in the number of part-time faculty in higher-education: in 1972, colleges and universities employed 3.17 full timers for every part-time faculty member; in 1977, the numbers had fallen to 1.26 full timers for every part-timer (Leslie, Kellams, and Gunne 23).

Ch. 3 Background II: English Studies in 1977

Enrollments in English in the 1970s plummeted almost everywhere. Nationally the number of English undergraduate degrees awarded plunged from an all-time high of 63,976 in academic year 1971-72 to 35,328 in 1977-78--the lowest figure in many years (National Center, tables 229 and 230). Of all bachelor's degrees granted in 1978, fewer than four percent were now in English (Neel and Nelson 51-53) as compared to 7.59 percent in 1968 (Franklin 6). (19)

During the 1960s, the number of English graduate programs had increased over 50 percent, from 81 to 124 (Geckle 43) and new PhD programs continued to appear on campuses during the 1970s. (19)

Ch. 4 Composition in 1977: The National Conversation

Timeline of significant publications:

Donald Murray, A Writer Teaches Writing (1968)
Ken Macrorie, Telling Writing (1970)
James Britton, Language and Learning (1970)
Janet Emig, Composing Process of 12th Graders (1971)
James Kinneavy, A Theory of Discourse (1971)
Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers (1973)
Britton, et al, The Development of Writing Abilities (1975)
Coles, The Plural I (1978)

Indeed, at many colleges and universities during the 1970s the composition class comfortably doubled as an introduction to Great Ideas or to canonical literary texts that were part of an established literary canon that provided "content" for students to write about. (30)

Process Pedagogies: Expressivists and Cognitivists

There is a really interesting discussion of Process Pedagogies on p. 31. The authors identify two kinds of process pedagogies: expressionist and cognitivist, both of which they refer to as "student centered pedagogies" (31).

Besides being mutually convinced of the relative autonomy of writers from social circumstances (still something of a given in the 1970s), both expressionists and cognitivists claimed to be fundamentally concerned with the "composing process" of writers: they therefore promoted what we now know as "process pedagogies." But the two groups treated the composing process somewhat differently and expected different behaviors from student writers. Though there was actually considerable common ground between the two camps, in 1977 expressionist and cognitivist advocates of process were in fact competing for priority in the field and promoting different basic principles and pedagogical strategies. (31)

Expressivists

As the title Writing Without Teachers implies, expressionists fundamentally held that formal instruction was more or less incidental to a writer's growth. Students were regarded as independent agents--even teachers and textbooks were irrelevant--who could intuit principles of effective writing through trial and error... a writing course was thus a matter of a teacher's nurturing student self-discovery and self-expression. All of these values were already guiding the pedagogy of Donald Murray, who would nurture expressionism into the 1980s: in 1977 Murray was developing an expressivist-process synthesis that was beholden to creative writing workshops and that would find its most mature expression first in his 1978 publication "Writing Before Writing" and then in his 1980 "Writing as Process: How Writing Finds Its Own Meaning." (33)

In their concern for self-discovery rather than communicative effectiveness, however, expressionists clashed with those in the new cognitivist school, which, by 1970, was beginning to compete with the expressionist school as the dominant process approach to composition. (33)

Cognitivists

By the mid-1970s Linda Flower and John R. Hayes at Carnegie Mellon University were studying through a distinctly cognitive lens the composing processes employed by actual writers, students as well as professionals, in an effort to understand empirically the processes involved in composing. (34)

They rejected the view of writing as the observance of fixed rules and models and instead called for a more strategic, cognitive "problem-solving" approach: since writing consisted, they felt, of a "hierarchical set of subproblems" tackled iteratively, such as planning and organizing, they offered a set of heuristics to "give the writer self-conscious access to some of the thinking techniques" that good writers use to generate ideas in language and [...] construct those ideas into a written structure" suitable for a specific situation [449, 451] (34).

...Flower and Hayes encouraged teachers to understand the writing process as a set of layered cognitive activities involving not just broad activities like "pre-writing" or "revising" but also specific activities practiced by good writers, such as "setting up goals," "finding operators," and "testing your writing against your own editor" ("Problem-Solving" 457-58) (34).

...by 1977 most composition handbooks had come to acknowledge, at least superficially and at most substantially, that writing was a process whose stages out to be considered in some way by writing teachers (35)

I got thinking about the teaching of writing teachers at UNH while I was reading this chapter...

Many English departments, often fitfully and in spite of themselves, coincidentally began to offer extensive teacher-training and graduate-level coursework--and then graduate degrees and emphases--in composition and rhetoric in order to develop a new generation of formally prepared teachers of composition. (78)

So, when was ENGL 810 or these other teaching-writing courses first offered? Early 1970s? I'll need to check catalogues at UNH. Who taught them? Was Murray's tenure of WPA of Freshman English the start of community around ENGL 401 there? What can I learn about the following things as they played out at UNH:

...pre-semester training sessions, required courses on pedagogical methods, weekly or bi-weekly staff meetings, prescribed syllabi, regular workshops, and mentoring programs for new teaching assistants (79).

Chapter 5, Composition in 1977: A Close Look at a Material Site

...we had reason to believe--and our reasons were borne out by our research--that the discussions about composition at Penn State's University Park campus in 1977 did indeed mirror (and complicate) in elaborate, telling, and consequential ways the discussion stat were taking place across the country about composition and did permit us to fill out our account of 1977 in ways that we could not have imagined beforehand. While Penn State's individual case is in some ways perhaps anomalous, it is in other ways highly instructive, for the general sense of crisis that animated the year 1977 as far as composition was concerned also animated the local institution--albeit with local twists. (86)

In the middle years of the 1970s, fissures had been developing in a successful system of writing instruction that had been in place for some years at Penn State. (86)

But as enrollments at Penn State increased, as the university pursued more of a research profile that emphasized faculty with doctorates, and as graduate studies in the English department consequently grew more important (and in keeping with most American universities, graduate studies in English meant literary study, not composition or creative writing), the formal designation "of composition" was phased out for English faculty, and composition instruction was gradually turned over to teaching assistants pursuing literary degrees. (92)

Making literature the focus of the course permitted literary scholars to promote and capitalize on their areas of interest. As Sharon Crowley has noted, "the practice of using literary texts in the required composition course carries enormous weight in the politics of English departments. [...] The presence of literature in that course affirms the status of literary studies as the defining activity of English studies" (Composition 87). The literature included within the composition courses at Penn STate performed such an affirmation, without question. The devotion to literary study kept to a minimum attention to composition and rhetoric. (95)

Chapter 6, Responding to the Crisis: Conversing about Composition at Penn State in 1977

Of what did the crisis consist?

...how to respond to increasing numbers of underprepared students, a statewide and university budgetary crisis, local visions of intellectual chaos and aimlessness in the humanities, and difficulties in English studies and in its composition program (105).

What did Ebbitts offer?

...[a] commitment to rhetorical education and her long-standing belief in the pedagogical seriousness required to teach composition" (106)

English 10: Expository Writing
English 20: Argumentative Writing ("The course aimed at analysis and argumentation for civic and practical purposes: to teach students to engage in public debates, to change policies or shape courses of action, to discover the causes of everyday opinions and phenomena" [109].)

The influence of process pedagogy...a four-page section dealing with how to teach "the process of composing in English 10 and 20 (111) and increased amount of prewriting and drafting (113)

In the spring of 1977, the Freshmen English Committee established as the first two goals of English 10 "to develop awareness of the nature of the composing process and help student improve their own procedures for composing, [...and] to introduce the art of invention--techniques for helping students discover what they know and have to say, want to say, need to say" (English 10 4). (113)

By 1977, instructors were expected to participate in students' writing processes by providing considerable feedback on student work-in-progress. (114)

Research in composition influenced English 20 in other ways... (115)

With the 1977 syllabus, then, English 20 had fully become the course in argument that Ebbitt and her associates had only begun to envision in 1975. The sequence of assignments reflected the composition programs' argument-centered, rhetorical-based, process-oriented philosophy of composition, responding directly to several currents of theoretical inquiry that had begun making their way into the program in the mid-1970s. (117)

Penn tate also began encouraging specific coursework in composition for graduate students to further ground them in the fundamentals of the subject...the department in 1977 began to require teaching assistants to take specific graduate coursework in composition theory: English 502, The Theory and Teaching of Composition, a three-credit seminar that some saw as a foundation course that would run parallel to the required introductory seminar in research methods, English 501. (it later became an elective and English 602 was created). (128)

They close with two conclusions...their's and one of the losers'. Here is theirs:

...traditionalists resisted the reforms of the mid-1970s, as best they could, for some years after. But in many ways, the opposition had lost. Though many faculty at University Park and the Commonwealth campuses for the next decade resisted to varying degrees the reforms of the mid1970s, over the long term what the winners called "reform" carried the day. By the end of 1977, Penn Staters had devised, out of a rather grand debate about a local crisis, a rather different composition program, one that amounted to a sustained professional response to a challenging set of new circumstances--circumstances nonetheless comparable to those in many other places and influenced by developments, intellectual and otherwise, around the country. (134)

By the fall of 1978, however, Frank, Ebbitt, and Park had arranged for four new tenure-line faculty to work on the problems. (134)

And so the reforms remained in place--a foundation to maintain and build on. By the spring of 1978, matters had been resolved at Penn State, for better or for worse, in a way that would last for five years until a change [in the academic calendar] prompted additional revisions. Those revisions, governed by insights gained by the invention of the Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition in 1981... (135)

The story of composition at Penn State in the 1970s can be read as a story of progress, a story of barriers overcome, improvements instituted, changes successfully negotiated. But there is another way of interpreting the events we have recounted, one that is not so happy... (135)