This volume describes the formative years of English composition courses in college through a study of the most prominent documents of the time: magazine articles, scholarly reports, early textbooks, teachers' testimonies-and some of the actual student papers that provoked discussion. Includes writings by leading scholars of the era such as Adams Sherman Hill, Gertrude Buck, William Edward Mead, Lane Cooper, William Lyon Phelps, and Fred Newton Scott.
Leading with the provocative observation that writing programs administration lacks “an established set of texts that provides a baseline of shared knowledge... in which to root our ongoing conversations and with which to welcome newcomers,” Landmark Essays on Writing Program Administration focuses on WPA identity to propose one such grouping of texts. This Landmark volume is the cornerstone resource for new Writing Program Administrators and graduate students seeking an ever-important overview of the literature on Writing Program Administration. Drawing broadly across scholarship in writing programs and writing centers, Ritter and Ianetta work to historicize, theorize, and problematize the ever-shifting answers offered to the question: Who—or what—is a WPA?
Textbook for composition pedagogy courses. Focuses on scholarship in rhetoric and composition that has influenced classroom teaching, in order to foster reflection on how theory impacts practice.
Thomas P. Miller defines college English studies as literacy studies and examines how it has evolved in tandem with broader developments in literacy and the literate. He maps out "four corners" of English departments: literature, language studies, teacher education, and writing studies. Miller identifies their development with broader changes in the technologies and economies of literacy that have redefined what students write and read, which careers they enter, and how literature represents their experiences and aspirations. Miller locates the origins of college English studies in the colonial transition from a religious to an oratorical conception of literature. A belletristic model of literature emerged in the nineteenth century in response to the spread of the "penny" press and state-mandated schooling. Since literary studies became a common school subject, professors of literature have distanced themselves from teachers of literacy. In the Progressive era, that distinction came to structure scholarly organizations such as the MLA, while NCTE was established to develop more broadly based teacher coalitions. In the twentieth century New Criticism came to provide the operating assumptions for the rise of English departments, until those assumptions became critically overloaded with the crash of majors and jobs that began in 1970s and continues today. For models that will help the discipline respond to such challenges, Miller looks to comprehensive departments of English that value studies of teaching, writing, and language as well as literature. According to Miller, departments in more broadly based institutions have the potential to redress the historical alienation of English departments from their institutional base in work with literacy. Such departments have a potentially quite expansive articulation apparatus. Many are engaged with writing at work in public life, with schools and public agencies, with access issues, and with media, ethnic, and cultural studies. With the privatization of higher education, such pragmatic engagements become vital to sustaining a civic vision of English studies and the humanities generally.
Intended for teachers of college composition, this history of major and minor developments in the teaching of writing in twentieth-century American colleges employs a taxonomy of theories based on the three epistemological categories (objective, subjective, and transactional) dominating rhetorical theory and practice. The first section of the book provides an overview of the three theories, specifically their assumptions and rhetorics. The main chapters cover the following topics: (1) the nineteenth-century background, on the formation of the English department and the subsequent relationship of rhetoric and poetic; (2) the growth of the discipline (1900-1920), including the formation of the National Council of Teachers of English, the appearance of the major schools of rhetoric, the efficiency movement, graduate education in rhetoric, undergraduate courses and the Great War; (3) the influence of progressive education (1920-1940), including the writing program and current-traditional rhetoric, liberal culture, and expressionistic and social rhetoric; (4) the communication emphasis (1940-1960), including the communications course, the founding of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, literature and composition, linguistics and composition, and the revival of rhetoric; and (5) the renaissance of rhetoric and major rhetorical approaches (1960-1975), including contemporary theories based on the three epistemic categories. A final chapter briefly surveys developments through 1987. (JG)
First published in 1998. In a 1996 review article in College English, Elizabeth Rankin contrasted the method and epistemology of two recent books on writing pedagogy, describing one as "grounded in the experience of student writers and teachers" and the other as "academic." Rankin’s labels highlight one of the leading sources of tension in composition research—the tension between practice and theory—a tension that echoes in writing center research and publications. This collection of chapters seeks to build on the inherent collaborativeness of writing centers, capturing the voices of the student writers and tutors who are at the core of writing center work.
Practicing Writing examines a pivotal era in the history of the most ubiquitous-and possibly most problematic-course in North American colleges and universities: the requireAd first-year writing course generally known as "freshman English." Thomas Masters's focus is the mid-twentieth century, beginning with the returning waves of World War II veterans attending college on the GI Bill. He then traces the education reforms that took place in the late 1950s after the launch of Sputnik and the establishment of composition as a separate discipline in 1963. This study draws upon archives at three midwestern schools that reflect a range of higher education options: Wheaton, a small, sectarian liberal arts college; Northwestern, a large private university; and Illinois, a large public university.Practicing Writing gives voice to those whose work is often taken for granted or forgotten in other studies of the subject: freshman English students and their instructors. Masters examines students' papers, professors' letters, and course descriptions, and draws upon interviews conducted with teachers to present the practitioners' points of view.Unlike other studies of the subject, which have tended to focus more on the philosophy, theory, and ideology of teaching composition and rhetoric, Masters reveals freshman English to be a practice-based phenomenon with a durable ideological apparatus. By reexamining texts that had previously been considered insignificant, he reveals the substance of first-year composition courses and the reasons for their durability.
