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I"* COMPOSITION IN THE UNIVERSITY Almost everyone has had occasion to look back upon his school days and wonder what has become of the knowledge he was supposed to have amassed during his years of schooling, and why it is that the technical skills he acquired have to be learned over again in changed form in order to stand him in good stead. -john Dewey, Experience and Education Ever since the late nineteenth century, instruction in composition has been required of all students who enter American higher education. The required, introductory-level course is called "English Composition" or "Freshman English" at most schools. The delivery of required composition instruction is a huge enterprise; at many universities the staff of the composition program outnumbers the staff of the Colleges of Engineering and Business combined. The student body of freshman composition comprises all but the very few members of each year's entering class who manage to test out of the requirement as well as the students at the dozen or so elite private universities that do not impose one. In the academic year 1994-95, there were 12,262,608 undergraduates enrolled in American colleges and universities ("Campuses," 9).' If a quarter of these students were freshmen-which is likely, since freshman classes tend to be larger than more advanced classes-nationally there were at least four million students enrolled in the freshman composition course during that year. This means that some one hundred sixty thousand sections of Freshman Composition were offered, if schools limited enrollments per section to twenty-five students--as they typically do. By any measure, required first-year composition uses enormous resources and takes up large chunks of student and teacher time. Despite this, university faculty do not write or talk much about composition, unless it is to complain about the lack of student literacy. Within English departments, where composition is usually housed, the center of intellectual interest is not com- 2-- 3 are interested in composition to accrue professional rewards and satisfactions that were not readily available to composition teachers before that time. Indeed , such persons are now enjoying a kind of success, at least as success is measured by academic standards. Annual meetings of the professional organization of composition teachers-the Conference on College Composition and Communication-attract thousands of people, and these meetings feature lively debates about theoretical and pedagogical issues. There are more scholarly journals devoted to composition theory and the teaching of writing than have ever existed before, and editors of such journals receive many more submissions than they can publish. A few composition teachers and theorists now hold tenured or tenure-track positions in universities throughout the country. Undergraduate courses in advanced composition and professional writing are thriving. Ph.D. programs in composition are flourishing at dozens of universities, and every year talented students compete to secure spots on their limited admissions rosters. As of this writing, persons who hold Ph.D. degrees in rhetoric and composition are still able to obtain tenure-line positions , although the number of available jobs in the humanities is dwindling. It remains true, however, that such persons are employable primarily because they are needed to supervise massive programs in required first-year composition and not because composition studies is an exciting new field in which new academic priorities are being set. Academics who profess composition studies go about their professional work somewhat differently than do their colleagues in literary studies. Their interest in pedagogy inverts the traditional academic privileging of theory over practice and research over teaching. Composition scholarship typically focuses on the processes of learning rather than on the acquisition of knowledge , and composition pedagogy focuses on change and development in students rather than on transmission of a heritage. Composition studies encourages collaboration. It emphasizes the historical, political, and social contexts and practices associated with composing rather than concentrating on texts as isolated artifacts. Composition studies also acknowledged women's contributions to teaching and scholarship long before other disciplines began to do so. A list of canonical authors in composition scholarship would include at least the names of Ann Berthoff, Lynn Bloom, Vivian Davis, Janet Emig, Maxine Hairston, Winifred Horner, Janice Lauer, Josephine Miles, Mina Shaughnessy, and Geneva Smitherman, all of whom achieved professional prominence prior to the era of affirmative action in a field of study that readily accepted their contributions. 4--7 university. Since the course was not associated with a cadre of professional academics devoted to establishing and maintaining composition as...

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