1977. Brent Henze

Why do people teach composition as they do at any given moment? What determines their choices of textbooks, assignments, and daily classroom activities? Of all the possible approaches to the teaching of writing, why do teachers settle on particular ones? What accounts for the shape of composition programs—sequences of courses, testing and placement procedures, staffing and administrative practices? Individual preferences and personal styles are certainly involved; so, of course, are institutional values and constraints. But even more certainly, the teaching of composition is shaped by the available means of pedagogical persuasion that are presented to us by intellectual and professional communities (broadly considered)—communities shaped, inevitably, by culture, circumstance, and history.

History—that aggregate of options and identities offered to us by the material, intellectual, and cultural circumstances of the past—is centrally involved in choices about pedagogy. Recognizing this, in the past few years many scholars have turned their attention to the history of composition after World War II, probably because the period was responsible for the formation of composition as a scholarly discipline and because many disciplinary conventions formulated between 1945 and 1980 have persisted into current practice. Joseph Harris, for instance, in A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966, has discussed how five key terms have recently dominated and directed scholarly debates about composition (growth, voice, process, error, community). Robert Connors in Composition-Rhetoric has included within his broad history of writing instruction in America a study of how successive editions of James McCrimmon’s Writing with a Purpose reflect changes in writing instruction that occurred between 1950 and 1980. Lester Faigley’s Fragments of Rationality provides three chapters of a broad history of composition from 1960 to 1990 that is poised against the cultural construct known as postmodernity. Sharon Crowley’s Methodical Memory and Composition in the University detail and critique the development of current-traditional rhetoric and the invention of the universal requirement. And shorter studies of one or another piece of composition history since 1945 have begun to appear as well.1 Together these efforts have filled in many of the details necessarily omitted from broader surveys of the period like James Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985 and Susan Miller’s Textual Carnivals.2 And together they have done a considerable amount to deepen our understanding of the cultural events and intellectual developments that directed the profession in general as well as particular teachers working in the field during the 1970s—that formative decade in the development of composition studies that is just now “entering history,” as it were.

Despite the achievements of these scholarly histories, however, certain problems persist in our collective understanding of composition in the 1970s and in our appreciation of how that period has affected current pedagogical practice. First, the histories have been partial in the sense that they have understandably focused more on one or another particular aspect of composition in the period (e.g., Faigley’s attention to the history of the process movement, for instance, or Harris’s accounting of just five key terms, or David Russell’s history of writing across the curriculum, or Susan Miller’s emphasis on the gendered material conditions of composition teachers in this century) and less on recreating a sense of the rich, sometimes conflicting, sometimes even random intellectual and material hurly-burly of the period. Consequently, our field has been left without a sense of how all those individual movements were collectively influencing and impeding composition practices in the 1970s or how they generated competing, conflicting, and cooperating discourses at given moments that continue to resonate today. In addition, histories of composition since 1945 have sometimes represented themselves as linear Grand Narratives. Such narratives are useful, to be sure, for staking out in broad terms the boundaries of and developments in the field, for defining important trends, and for clarifying those developments that have persisted most stubbornly into current practice, but they are somewhat less serviceable for preserving the astonishing range of practices, personalities, and messy particulars that strove for a hearing, however temporarily, within the mixed aggregate that has been known as composition. While it would be a serious exaggeration to claim that the histories we have named have been insufficiently attentive to the broad cultural frames, intellectual currents, and social developments that directed the culture of composition in the 1970s, or inattentive to the range of significant pedagogical practices and institutional concerns current at the time, it nevertheless seems fair to say that, within composition studies, understanding of the era is incomplete, lacking in the rich, competing particulars that defined the period.

Thomas Miller speaks for many, then, when he notes that “without a greater attention to social and institutional history, we cannot achieve the broader goals that have been set by those who have criticized research that treats writing as a decontextualized process” (“Teaching the Histories” 71). Among those “broader goals” are a richer set of pedagogical practices and a greater sense of how the past has shaped current practice. Consequently, we decided to complement those previous studies by looking carefully at the state of

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