Placing the History of College Writing

Nathan Shepley

Description

Pre-1950s composition history, if analyzed with the right conceptual tools, can pluralize and clarify our understanding of the relationship between the writing of college students and the writing’s physical, social, and discursive surroundings.

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 22 mars 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781602358041
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

PERSPECTIVES ON WRITING
Series Editors, Susan H. McLeod and Rich Rice
The Perspectives on Writing series addresses writing studies in a broad sense. Consistent with the wide ranging approaches characteristic of teaching and scholarship in writing across the curriculum, the series presents works that take divergent perspectives on working as a writer, teaching writing, administering writing programs, and studying writing in its various forms.
The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press are collaborating so that these books will be widely available through free digital distribution and low-cost print editions. The publishers and the Series editor are teachers and researchers of writing, committed to the principle that knowledge should freely circulate. We see the opportunities that new technologies have for further democratizing knowledge. And we see that to share the power of writing is to share the means for all to articulate their needs, interest, and learning into the great experiment of literacy.
Recent Books in the Series
Theresa Lillis, Kathy Harrington, Mary R. Lea, and Sally Mitchell (Eds.), Working with Academic Literacies: Case Studies Towards Transformative Practice (2015)
Asao B. Inoue, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: An Approach to Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future (2015)
Beth L. Hewett and Kevin Eric DePew (Eds.), Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction (2015)
Christy I. Wenger, Yoga Minds, Writing Bodies: Contemplative Writing Pedagogy (2015)
Sarah Allen, Beyond Argument: Essaying as a Practice of (Ex)Change (2015)
Steven J. Corbett, Beyond Dichotomy: Synergizing Writing Center and Classroom Pedagogies (2015)
Tara Roeder and Roseanne Gatto (Eds.), Critical Expressivism: Theory and Practice in the Composition Classroom (2014)
Terry Myers Zawacki and Michelle Cox (Eds), WAC and Second-Language Writers: Research Towards Linguistically and Culturally Inclusive Programs and Practices , (2014)
Charles Bazerman, A Rhetoric of Literate Action: Literate Action Volume 1 (2013)
Charles Bazerman, A Theory of Literate Action: Literate Action Volume 2 (2013)


Placing the History of College Writing: Stories from the Incomplete Archive
Nathan Shepley
The WAC Clearinghouse
wac.colostate.edu
Fort Collins, Colorado
Parlor Press
www.parlorpress.com
Anderson, South Carolina


The WAC Clearinghouse, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523
Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina 29621
© 2016 by Nathan Shepley. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shepley, Nathan, 1981- author.
Title: Placing the history of college writing : stories from the incomplete
archive / Nathan Shepley.
Description: Perspectives on writing. | Anderson, South Carolina ; Fort
Collins, Colorado Parlor Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical
references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016001110| ISBN 9781602358010 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN
9781602358027 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching. | English
language--Grammar, Generative--Study and teaching. | Report writing--Study
and teaching (Higher)
Classification: LCC PE1403 .S56 2016 | DDC 808/.042071173--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016001110
Copyeditor: Julia Smith
Designer: Mike Palmquist
Series Editor: Susan H. McLeod
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
The WAC Clearinghouse supports teachers of writing across the disciplines. Hosted by Colorado State University, it brings together scholarly journals and book series as well as resources for teachers who use writing in their courses. This book is available in digital format for free download at http://wac.colostate.edu.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in print and digital formats from Parlor Press at http://www.parlorpress.com. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina 29621, or email [e-mail].


Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Chapter One Placing History, Historicizing Place
Chapter Two Customizing Composition: Students Broadening Behavioral Codes
Chapter Three Tracking Lines of Communication: Student Writing as a Response to Civic Issues
Chapter Four Composition on Display: Students Performing College Competence
Chapter Five Rethinking Links Between Histories of Composition
Chapter Six Composition as Literacy, Discourse, and Rhetoric
Works Cited
Glossary


List of Illustrations
Figure 1. Ohio University Class of 1873
Figure 2. The Cougar , April 1929
Figure 3. First page of Albert Farias’ “I Live in America,” The Harvest , 1941
Figure 4. English Department of the Ohio University College of Education, Athena , 1923
Figure 5. English Department of the Ohio University College of Liberal Arts, Athena , 1923




Acknowledgments
Many people influenced the writing of this book and deserve my thanks. In Ohio, Sherrie Gradin and Mara Holt, among others, gave thoughtful feedback on a drastically different version of the manuscript. William (Bill) Kimok and the other archivists at Ohio University’s Robert E. and Jean R. Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections guided me toward some of the primary sources that I analyzed for this work and ensured that I had access to needed texts even when I was far away. In Houston, Paul Butler listened patiently to my evolving ideas about this project and gave insightful suggestions, as did Margot Backus regarding one of my middle chapters. Other people, including James Thomas Zebroski, expressed support for my historical research well before it reached a national audience. The staff of the Archives and Special Collections of the University of Houston generously assisted with locating and copying archived sources. Additionally, Susan McLeod provided clear editorial guidance, and the Perspectives on Writing series’ two anonymous outside readers gave recommendations that strengthened my project overall. Last, I am delighted that my grandfather, Joe L. Estes, Jr., is able to see this work in print given that my interest in and esteem of higher education stem partly from his influence.
Another version of the Ohio half of Chapter Two formed one section in my article “When the Margins Move: Lessons from the Writing of One University’s First Female Graduate,” published in Open Words: Access and English Studies (vol. 8, issue 1) , so thanks goes to that journal’s coeditor, John Tassoni, for letting me publish the new version here. The same goes for Byron Hawk, who let me revise substantially and publish, in Chapter Four, my article “Rhetorical-Ecological Links in Composition History,” which originally appeared in Enculturation (vol. 15). Too, I would like to thank Sara Webb-Sunderhaus and Kim Donehower, coeditors of Re-Reading Appalachia: Literacy, Place, and Cultural Resistance , for giving me permission me to publish, in the Ohio half of Chapter Three, reorganized and theoretically reframed research from my chapter “Place-Conscious Literacy Practices in One Ohio College Town” in their book.
A Martha Gano Houstoun Research Grant in Literary Criticism awarded by the University of Houston Department of English provided generous financial support for archival visits and photocopying. Chapter Three in particular benefited from the scrutiny allowed by multiple research trips.


Chapter One Placing History, Historicizing Place
This is a book that asks those of us who teach and study writing, especially college-level writing, to scrutinize how the locations of our work matter. I say locations, plural, to stress that we teach not in an environment that must be understood in a single way, but in environments formed by discursive options and by social, economic, and political negotiations, large and small, to say nothing of material factors bearing on where college student writing occurs. We teach in institutions that are governed in a certain fashion and steered toward certain goals, perhaps aligned with the goals of other institutions, educational or otherwise. We teach in towns or cities, neighborhoods, and political districts whose borders can shift with the will of a populace or a set of leaders. We teach in classrooms and, increasingly, in configurations such as writing studios and online forums. And we teach among colleagues and students who import learned attitudes about writing, education, and the world. Even if we perform our teaching in one campus building or help one group of students over several semesters, we teach in many places.
The same ideas apply to the history of college student writing. Even if traced to actions taken in a given year and at an institutional site, historical student writing need not be understood merely as a product of students’ interactions with one and only one place, a classroom, and with one and only one kind of engagement, an assignment. In the 1800s and 1900s, American cities, towns, institutions, and writing classrooms changed continually in accordance with changes in the teachers and students populating the classes and with the larger societal needs served by the cl