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vii acknowledgments Substantial research projects are rarely solitary aVairs, however much time the researcher spends alone. They are more often the result of collaborations, both shallow and deep, direct and indirect. The research reported here is no exception : many individuals and groups helped me conceive and conduct this research . If there is anything worthwhile in the Wnal product, it is a tribute to them. If there are mistakes, failures, or wrongheadedness, I alone am to blame. First and foremost, I want to thank Rasha Diab and Mira Shimabukuro, graduate research assistants at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during most of 2005 and part of 2006, who helped me locate and analyze primary documents, conduct interviews with study participants, and conceptualize the arguments that eventually comprised this book. They were also copresenters with me at an English Department colloquium in Madison in spring 2006, the Wrst public airing of the research contained here. Their care for the sources used here—documents and interviews alike—was extraordinary, their good sense and good humor a bonus. I am also grateful to the former UW-Madison English Department teaching assistants from the 1960s who agreed to talk with us about the events narrated here; they gave us their time and shared with us their memories and insights. Thank you, Burr Angle, Ginny Davidson, Sue McLeod, Bob Muehlenkamp , Ira Shor, and Jean Turner. We also spoke with Frank Battaglia, a former assistant professor at UW-Madison. UW-Madison professors David Cronon, Nicholas Doane, Standish Henning , and Charles Scott shared memories and insights with us as well. Professor Eric Rothstein showed particular interest in the way former English Department faculty are represented here. Although he objected to some of those representations , I hope he will see that I have weighed his comments carefully and incorporated several of his suggestions for revision. I appreciate the attention he gave to the spring 2006 presentation of this research in Madison and the thoughtfulness with which he read an early draft of this manuscript. I also want to thank former English Department secretary Gini Martens, who helped me access English Department Wles in the years when I was consumed with them. The research of other UW-Madison faculty members and graduate students, current and former, helped inform and inspire this project. I want to recognize viii Acknowledgments Matthew Capdevielle, Mary Anne Fitzpatrick, Bradley Hughes, Susan McLeod, Rebecca Nowacek, Martin Nystrand, David Stock, and Nancy WestphalJohnson , all of whom have done or are doing their own original historical research about the teaching of writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The following graduate students from my spring 2005 research methods course summarized and in some cases transcribed audiotaped interviews from the UW-Madison Oral History Program: Cydney Alexis, Heidi Hallman, Rik Hunter, Adam Koehler, Corey Mead, Eric Pritchard, Terry Rodriguez, Mira Shimabukuro, Christine Stephenson, Annette Vee, and Kate Vieira. Two years earlier, in spring 2003, graduate students from Martin Nystrand’s research methods course, including Sookyung Cho, Rasha Diab, David Grant, Melanie Hoftyzer, Matthew Pearson, and Katy Southern, did preliminary work on the history of writing instruction at UW. In spring 2004, all of those students, with the exception of Sookyung Cho and the addition of Corey Mead, collaborated with me on a panel presentation of original historical research about writing instruction at UW-Madison for the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC); we learned much from the audience at that session. I also learned from audiences at the UW-Madison English Department in 2006, the University of Massachusetts Amherst English Department in 2006, CCCC again in 2007, and the Center for the Study of Writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007, an especially memorable trip. (Thank you, Debra Hawhee, Gail Hawisher, and Catherine Prendergast, among others, for arranging that visit.) The Graduate School at UW-Madison provided funding for research assistance at a crucial moment in this project; I am grateful for that help. More recently, both the English Department and the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst supported me as I tried to Wnish this book. I want to also recognize the role of the UMass Amherst Writing Program, which I direct, in providing an especially conducive environment in which to reXect on postsecondary writing instruction in this country. The main Wrst-year writing course at UMass Amherst—thoroughly process-based, resolutely student-centered, inordinately Xexible—is taken by more than four thousand undergraduate students a year and...

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