"Our Mornings with Murray" Writing on the Edge 19.1 (2008) -- Bruce Ballenger

MM: In this piece, Ballenger digs back through the weekly writings Murray produced while he (Ballenger) was in a seminar with him in 1985 and he works through Murray's various pieces and reflects on them in the context of Murray's larger work and contributions.

There is much I might say--much that has been said--about Donald Murray's contributions to how we think about composing, but I think this idea, that language, like the violin, takes on a life of its own from a single note, is central to his work as a writer and teacher. In a sense, Don argued that words have a singular agency, one that behaves much like an unruly character in the first draft of a novel or short story, bossing the writer around, surprising her, and most of all, defying her intentions. (42)

One of those experiences, of course, is pleasure. Don believed that if his students experience these pleasures their relationship to writing will be changed forever. (44)

Critique of Murray

There are problems with Don's methodology. One is the understandable suspicion that he attempted to generalize from the peculiarities of his writing experiences and offered prescriptive insights that should apply to everyone. (44-45)

(p. 45)

"Dancing with Don: Or, Waltzing With ‘Expressivism’" Enculturation (Fall 2011) -- Bronwyn Williams

Relationship to Don

I began teaching at the University of New Hampshire in the late 80s, the year after Donald Murray retired. (1)

Although I knew Don, I did not have the close relationship to him that many had. (Footnote 1)

Murray at UNH

Yet even to a new Master’s student TA such as myself, Don-—everybody referred to him as Don-—continued to cast a large shadow over all of our teaching. He was quoted, referenced, alluded to, and the first book I used in my first writing course was his Write to Learn. And Don seemed always to be around, at staff meetings or having lunch with graduate students. [...] Though Don had retired and it had been even longer since he had directed the Composition Program, there was no doubt that the pedagogical approaches that dominated the department had his fingerprints all over them.(1)

On Freshman English and Teaching at UNH

We did a lot of personal writing in those courses. We did a lot of research writing in those courses. We did a lot of writing about readings too. What we did most of all was to ask students to write about the things that mattered to them. We asked students to reflect on their experiences, to make meaning from events and ideas for the reader. We asked them to approach writing as a process and to have the courage to have their work critiqued and to engage in thoughtful and decisive revision. We had individual conferences with students every week to talk about their writing. We had frequent workshops, lots of in-class writing, lessons on craft, discussions of readings. (1)

There was also a culture of teaching writing at UNH that valued the authority of the student writer. We believed that we should be teaching students to write well so they could communicate the things that mattered to them, and that they would do their best work about the subjects that engaged their passions. We wanted them to feel passionate about their work and find joy in their writing. It was a place where we felt like teaching mattered and where we felt we were teaching students more than simply how to write better essays for their next college course. We weren’t only teaching students to become better academic writers; we were teaching people to become better writers. (2)

Though not universally the case, many of us teaching at UNH, particularly among the instructors and other non-tenure-track faculty, thought of ourselves as part of a community of writers teaching others what we loved to do, rather than scholars consigned to a job that others didn’t want. We wrote fiction and poetry and essays and talked about our own writing as well as our students’. I wager that many of the people I taught with during those years—Sue Wheeler, Becky Rule, Bruce Ballenger, Brock Dethier, Lad Tobin, Ann Williams—still think of themselves as writers as much as teachers or scholars. And those composition scholars in charge of the program at UNH at that time—Tom Newkirk, Pat Sullivan, Cindy Gannet, even the skeptical Bob Connors—were graceful and committed writers who valued craft in their work and the work of their students. (2) [...] And certainly not everyone thought of themselves as writers, or thought that students should be taught anything but “academic” writing, or saw Don’s ongoing influence on the program as positive (for there was always Bob Connors to go harrumphing down the hallway bemoaning the lack of training in classical rhetorical strategies). [3]

The Misreading Trope

This evolution of my writing pedagogies, along with my own writing practices, also illustrates the problematic nature of the term “expressivism,” and how ill-suited it is for the kinds of pedagogies Murray actually advocated. Unfortunately this has left Murray unread or misread over the years as solipsistic, naïve, and un-theoretical. The wide-spread use of the term “expressivism” as a pejorative has distorted important conversations that should be taking place about the personal position in writing, including questions about the value of individual experience in intellectual work, the purposes of writing beyond the composition classroom, and the ways in which experience and writing combine to help writers compose their identities in print. What’s more, such distortions have obscured the most radical and, to my mind, most important ideas Murray has about teaching writing, ideas that deserve renewed attention today. (1)

When I began to reread his work about the teaching of writing I was struck by two things. Far from being solipsistic and a-theoretical, he was a pragmatic and often subtle theorist whose critics had misread him, willfully or not. Also, such misreadings had obscured some of what was most radical about Murray, both then and today. (4)

Murray's Contributions

The concept of “experience” and how we make sense of our experiences through language, to ourselves and to others, is a dominant and fundamental part of Murray’s work. He is continually interested in experience and epistemology. How do we create knowledge, create significance for ourselves, out of the events that happen to us? How do we make meaning from experimentation, mistakes, testing, and revision? What are often considered mistakes in writing courses should instead be seen as “evidence of language being used to lead the mind to meaning. Therefore they are not mistakes in the conventional sense but merely experiments that didn’t work, but which may have beneficial side-products” (13). That he does not cite theorists and write at impenetrable length about his debt to theories such as phenomenology does not mean such work is not theoretically informed or serious. (5)

What is true is that Don’s work is consistently and deeply humanistic. He clearly believes that each person has distinctive ideas that are worth hearing. His writing is infused with a respect for the ideas and integrity of individuals and the absolute belief that their lives will be fuller if they engage in writing to make meaning from their experiences. (5)

what may be the most radical position in his writing is given little attention. For what is most radical in the work of Murray, Elbow and others is not the idea of writing from experience, but turning the focus of the writing classroom toward student knowledge and writing. [...] Students were encouraged to see their ideas and experiences as valuable and to see their writing as connected to themselves, their identities, as opposed to something that was detached and impervious to personal responses or experiences. There was a shift in the perception of student identity: Rather than regard them as students to be filled with the teacher’s forms of writing, we were encouraged to regard them as writers first, and to engage them with their struggles to communicate their experiences, and by extension their identities, on the page. (5)

Throughout Don’s work there is the consistent belief that writing should be concerned with the exploration of ideas and meaning. (6)

Perhaps Murray does not get read or discussed today because there is the sense that he is old news. We all respect students now, right? We all believe in student-centered classrooms, right? We all understand that individual experiences vary by race, gender, culture, class and that that we need to allow people to make meaning from their experiences, right? When I read current scholarship on literacy narratives or creative nonfiction or personal writing or teaching ESL or any number of issues I often can trace the echoes of Murray’s work, even though few writers have bothered to read or cite him. But I think there is the sense that whatever he had to say has been long since settled, one way or another, so he is not relevant to read except for historical purposes. (7)

The other possibility is that Murray doesn’t get read anymore because what he advocates, particularly in terms of who generates knowledge in the writing classroom, remains too radical for rhetoric and composition. With so many first-year composition programs still focused on “academic writing” and the teaching of argument, often through themed courses or standardized syllabi in which students have limited choice about what they write, there is little sense of classrooms that are truly “student-centered.” More than a few composition teachers talk in the hallways about the need for student-centered classrooms, but run courses in which there is no doubt that authority and expertise remain with the instructor. (7)

Again, it is not that I want to somehow glue on to Don Murray’s work currently fashionable ideas and theories that don’t really fit. Instead I see his work connected into more recent scholarship in ways that helps both illuminate and challenge all sides in intriguing and useful ways. (7)

Legacy and Contributions

His legacy in his writing and in his work at UNH has been to challenge and inspire teachers there and others across the country to respect student knowledge, to respect students as writers. (8)

What Don Murray’s work does is remind me that writing can be transformative. It can transform our sense of self. It can transform our sense of the world. And it certainly can transform our sense of identity when it conflicts with dominant cultural forces. (8)

"Reconsiderations: Donald Murray and the Pedagogy of Surprise." CE, 70.3 (Jan. 2008): 296-303. -- Bruce Ballenger

Ballenger, Bruce. "RECONSIDERATIONS: Donald Murray and the Pedagogy of Surprise." CE, 70.3 (Jan. 2008): 296-303.

"a discipline that doesn’t quite know what to do with people like Murray, compositionists who are more likely to call themselves writers than scholars" (296).

"...his belief that composition studies should focus on the “act of writing.” In an afterward to a 1977 essay, “Our Students Will Write—If We Let Them,” which was republished by the North Carolina English Teacher in 1993, Don wrote that he hoped that “research into how writers—student and professional—wrote would illuminate our understanding of this vital human act and that our teaching methods and curricula would be based on this new knowledge” (296)

This is not what has happened. Our discipline in the years since 1977 has increased its research into significant but peripheral issues, decreased its efforts to understand through research how writing is made and how writing is taught. We are a profession with a black hole in the center. We do not yet know how effective writing is made, and all theory and practice should grow from that understanding. (88)

...Don’s familiar, writerly moves—the strong personal voice; the autobiographical digression; the mixing of genres with fragments of poetry, fiction and essay; and the practical lists. (297)

While it may not be “quaint,” this idea is hardly revolutionary, but, when Don and a few others urged writing teachers to reimagine their classrooms as places where authority is dispersed, they were doing it against the orthodoxy of current-traditional pedagogies, which emphasize the more formal qualities of composition that the teachers know and the students must learn. For Murray, writers always learn from each other.This idea was most powerfully expressed in Don’s 1972 essay, “Teach Writing as a Process, Not Product,” first presented as a talk to the New England Association of Teachers of English. (299)

Here, i am struck by the invocation of current-traditionalism. We stand it up to make room for Don and his work. Another passage:

Murray’s insistence that composition students should enjoy the pleasures of writing that seem reserved for published authors was extraordinary at a time when most first-year writing classes were concerned with teaching the modes of discourse—narration, description, exposition, and argument—and focusing attention on correctness.

I am struck by how easily the straw-man of current-traditionalism is constructed so it can be broken down (by Murray).

This brief essay ["Teach Writing as a Process, Not Product"] provided the writing process movement its manifesto. (emphasis added, 299)

Manifesto is a good term to think through a good deal of Don's writing. He writes manifestos--that is his mode. Imperative, insistent, demanding writing. Do this, do that, don't do this. It might be interesting to look into the genre of the manifesto (I'm thinking here of a recent piece in CE...

The manifesto, Janet Lyon reminded us in her seminal work on the form, is the ur-genre to critique modernity. It enacts this critique through sheer force of exhortation, by embodying, rhetorically, "nascent fury" and "fervid, even violent rage" (14). Deriving from the Latin composite of manus and fectus for "hostile hand," the manifesto is "a fist striking through the scrims of order." It is at once "word and deed, both threat and incipient action" (14). The manifesto leaves no room for debate or conciliation in its tight rhetorical structure. It strikes a combative tone and keeps striking. "It conveys resolute oppositionality and indulges no tolerance for the fainthearted" (9). [...] The rhetorical feat that the manifesto accomplishes is in making its threat continual, without resolution. The manifesto spoils for a fight and never ceases. [...] As Lyon pointed out, the manifesto establishes its timelessness by locating its authority in an unspecified "we," thereby both invoking a broader community and inviting participation in it. The power of the manifesto thus comes from the "potentially infinite constituency" it creates (26). [Prendergast, 24-25]

The citation for this passage:

Prendergast, Catherine. "The Fighting Style: Reading the Unabomber's Strunk and White." CE, 72.1 (Sept. 2009): 10-28.

Lyon, Janet. Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.

---

With its focus on students rather than instructors as the agents of their own learning, writing as a “process of discovery” was also a direct challenge to the dominant current-traditional approaches. (emphasis added, 299)

For Donald Murray, “expecting the unexpected” was always the point of writing, and the first question he often asked his students about a draft was a simple one: “What surprised you?”

The problem with this is that all too often, it seems the answer is or was nothing. And so we sat around waiting for the student to get surprised. I've written of this before as the Waiting-for-Godot problem.

Murray believed that “cultivating surprise” was the purpose of the writing process and the motive that kept all writers—students or professionals—returning to the work with eagerness and anticipation. “The writer sits down intending to say one thing, and hears the writing say something more, or less, or completely different,” Don wrote in A Writer Teaches Writing. “The writing surprises, instructs, receives, questions, tells its own story, and the writer becomes the reader wondering what will happen next” (7).

For me, this was a welcome revelation... (300).

Would there still be a role for writers such as Murray whose method of inquiry is to witness themselves and their students in the act of writing and report what they see? Should there be? (301)

In The Making of Knowledge in Composition (1987), Stephen North observed that “practice as inquiry” was an increasingly marginalized form of scholarship in the discipline, and Don seemed to think, particularly after the rejection of his essay “Pushing the Edge,” that his influence was waning. Creative writers in academia always have an alternative to publishing scholarship, and, in the final fifteen years of his life, Murray focused on personal essays, publishing a weekly column in The Boston Globe. He continued to publish new editions of his textbooks, including Write to Learn, The Craft of Revision, and A Writer Teaches Writing, but he rarely attended conferences, and few new essays graced the pages of leading journals in the field. (301)