In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

201 Notes Introduction: In Search of Experimentation in the Teaching of Writing 1. While my reading of this history is that required first-year writing proliferated following Harvard’s lead, the contributors to Donahue and Moon’s Local Histories: Reading the Archives of Composition show that by no means was Harvard the first institution to make composition a first-year required course. 2. For CCCC workshop accounts, see “The Organization and Use of the Writing Laboratory: The Report of Workshop No. 9A” (1950); “Organization and Use of a Writing Laboratory: Report of Workshop No. 9” (1951); “The Writing Laboratory : The Report of Workshop No. 9” (1952); “Clinical Aids to Freshman English: Report of Workshop No. 14” (1953); “Writing Clinics: The Report of Workshop No. 2” (1955); “Skills Laboratories for Any Student” (1956). 3. Two relatively recent exceptions to this absence are Elizabeth Higgins Gladfelter’s Agassiz’s Legacy: Scientists’ Reflections on the Value of Field Experience and Miriam Levin’s Defining Women’s Scientific Enterprise: Mount Holyoke Faculty and the Rise of American Science. . The Secret Origins of Writing Centers 1. Welcome interrogators of this perception of the writing center as a safe haven include Nancy Grimm, who warns of the complicitness of writing center workers in replicating dominant literacy practices, and Jackie Grutsch McKinney , who notes that the idea of a safe haven as signified by coffee pots and worn couches is a particular cultural construct not necessarily shared by nonmainstream students. 2. These publications include Carol Laque and Phyllis Sherwood’s A Laboratory Approach to Writing, Joyce Steward and Mary Croft’s The Writing Laboratory : Organization, Management, and Methods, Thom Hawkins and Phyllis Brooks’s New Directions for College Learning Assistance: Improving Writing Skills, Thom Hawkins’s Group Inquiry Techniques for Teaching Writing, Muriel Harris’ collection Tutoring Writing: A Sourcebook for Writing Labs, and Marian Arkin and Barbara Shollar’s The Writing Tutor. 3. The connecting link between Preston W. Search, Frederic Burk, and Edgar James Swift is that all three had studied with G. Stanley Hall at Clark University in Worcester, MA. Burk and Swift received their PhDs from Clark, and Search dedicated his book, An Ideal School, to Hall, whom he calls “America’s greatest educator” (v), and Hall contributed the introduction to that book, writing that it is “a book I could have written myself” (xvii). 4. Although Search was superintendent of three major schools systems— Pueblo, CO; Holyoke, MA; and Los Angeles, CA—he had essentially retired from active work in schools by 1906, instead opting to become an “educator, author, traveler” according to the brochure advertising one of his 1906–7 lectures. At that point, he had also founded a “travel school for young people.” It is not inconceivable , then, that Parkhurst had no real opportunity to cross his path or to hear about his work. Search died in Carmel, CA, in 1932. 5. Unfortunately, Hopkins himself succumbed to this workload, brought on by his efforts to tend to his duties at Kansas and finish the Cost and Labor report. In 1919, Hopkins needed to take a year’s leave of absence after being hospitalized that summer for “nervous exhaustion and with dental infection added” (Hopkins qtd. in Popken 15). . Writing in the Science Laboratory: Opportunities Lost 1. For more on the theory of mental discipline as a justification for the study of science—as well as the use of grammar/usage worksheets, see chapter 7. 2. In a more recent article, Michael Carter and colleagues express much more enthusiasm for the laboratory report as “a legitimate apprenticeship genre” (“Writing to Learn” 294). In the framework of apprentice/expert teaching and learning that is at the heart of laboratory methods, Carter et al. describe the laboratory report as a key component in this process: “The genre of the lab report encodes a scientific way of knowing in its structure—a structure that defines and is defined by ways of knowing in the community. The lab report shapes the experience of the lab itself as a scientific experience” (295). . The Writing of School Science 1. My choice of these institutions as subjects for archival research is based on several factors: (1) their known strength in undergraduate science teaching during the period I was most interested in, 1890–1930; (2) their forethought to archive student-produced materials; (3) the assistance the archival librarians were able to offer. Mount Holyoke College deserves special notice...

Share