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Foreword(s): Research and Teaching
- Utah State University Press
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F o r e w o r d ( S ) Research and Teaching This book traces how the teaching of college writing has been theorized and imagined since 1966. I do so by looking closely at how five key words—growth, voice, process, error, and community—have figured in recent talk about writing and teaching. I believe that in tracing their meanings and revisions I can make a case for composition as a teaching subject, as that part of English studies which defines itself through an interest in the work students and teachers do together. I begin with the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar, where the British theorists John Dixon and James Britton invoked the idea of growth as part of an attempt to shift work in English away from the analysis of a fixed set of great books and toward a concern with the uses that students make of language. In chapters 2 and 3, I look at how this interest in the language of students was then taken up by writing teachers in the United States who centered their work around notions of personal voice and the composing process. In chapter 4, I look at how such approaches have tried (most often with little success) to deal with the problem of error, with the nearly unyielding demand that student writings adhere to certain strict standards of usage and decorum. And then, in chapter 5, I show how attempts to rethink error as an index of broader tensions and conflicts in the culture have led to more social views of writing calling on ideas of difference and community. I then close by considering some of the limits of these new and often highly politicized approaches to teaching writing. My aim is not to present a seamless history of composition studies in which one set of terms and interests smoothly gives way to the next—but to get at a set of issues and tensions that continue to shape the teaching of writing. I do this as someone drawn to composition as a place where not only writing but teaching gets talked about in serious and critical ways. At a time in my graduate studies when I was frustrated by what seemed the planned irrelevance of much scholarship, and indeed was thinking of leaving academics altogether, coming across work in composition gave me a way of imagining teaching as an integral part of (and xvi A tEAC h i NG SU BJEC t not just a kind of report on) my work as an intellectual. I had never looked forward very much to a career as a scholar writing to a small clique of other specialists, so I was pleased to find a field where so many people seemed to try to speak to the concerns of experts and students alike. I was especially struck by how the writings of students were made part of many books and articles on teaching. Not only did I like the democratic and practical feel of such work, it also struck me as making good sense. If you really wanted to argue for the advanced study of English as something more than a kind of guild activity, the business concern of critics and professional writers, then you would need to look at the uses ordinary people make of reading and writing, and to show how and why they might be encouraged to change them. This book traces some recent attempts to do just that, to rethink the sorts of work students and teachers might do together in a college writing course. In keeping with these efforts, I try to ground what I have to say in close readings of the work not only of theorists and teachers but of students as well—particularly in a series of interchapters that look at how the issues raised in this book inform (and are informed by) specific teaching aims, practices, and situations. What I have not tried to do is write an account of composition studies as an academic discipline, as a field of inquiry with its own subject matter and methods of investigating it. Others have already done this quite well. James Berlin, for instance, offers a history of composition as a kind of modern offshoot of rhetoric in Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges (1984) and Rhetoric and Reality (1987), while in Textual Carnivals (1991), Susan Miller pays closer attention to the institutional contexts that gave rise to the modern study and teaching of writing. And in...