Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration

Description

Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline collects essays that shine new light on the early history of writing program administration. Broad in scope, the book illuminates the development of the profession in the narratives of the individuals who helped form the discipline prior to the emergence of the Council of Writing Program Administrators in 1976, including those narratives of Gertrude Buck and Laura J. Wylie, Edwin Hopkins, Regina Crandall, Rose Colby, George Jardine, Clara Stevens, Stith Thompson, and George Wykoff. Drawing from deep archival work, these narratives offer rare glimpses into writing program administration and the development of composition as a college requirement.

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 14 mars 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781932559255
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition
Series Editors, Catherine Hobbs and Patricia Sullivan
The Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition honors the contributions Janice Lauer Hutton has made to the emergence of Rhetoric and Composition as a disciplinary study. It publishes scholarship that carries on Professor Lauer’s varied work in the history of written rhetoric, disciplinarity in composition studies, contemporary pedagogical theory, and written literacy theory and research.
Books in the Series
Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies (Expanded Edition) by James A. Berlin (2003)


Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration
Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline
Editors
Barbara L’Eplattenier
Lisa Mastrangelo
Parlor Press
Anderson , South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621
© 2004 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
Acknowledgments are listed on page 283.
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2004103502
Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration : Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline / edited by Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo
p.cm.– (Lauer series in rhetoric and composition)
Includes introduction, notes, illustrations, bibliographical references, and index.
1. English language – Rhetoric –Study and teaching. 2. English language – Rhetoric – Study and teaching – History. 3. English language – Rhetoric – Study and teaching – 19th century. 4. English language – Rhetoric – Study and teaching – 20th century. 5. Report writing – Study and teaching (Higher)
I. Title. II. Series.
ISBN 1-932559-22-1 (Paper)
ISBN 1-932559-23- X (Cloth)
ISBN 1-932559-24-8 (Adobe eBook)
ISBN 978-1-93255-925-5
Printed on acid-free paper.
Cover photographs key (starting top right, moving left to right and down): Laura J. Wylie, Gertrude Buck and Laura J. Wylie, Edwin Hopkins, Regina Crandall, Clara Frances Stevens, Rose Colby.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is also available in printed paper, as well as in Adobe eBook and Night Kitchen (TK3) formats, from Parlor Press on the WWW at http://www.parlorpress.com. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 816 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [e-mail].


We would like to dedicate this book to all of those administrators whose stories remain untold; those who supported us in this endeavor; and Betty and Janet, who were there when we weren’t.
—Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo

Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Preface
Edward M. White
Acknowledgments
Why Administrative Histories?
Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo
Part I: Individuals
1 The WPA as Publishing Scholar: Edwin Hopkins and The Labor and Cost of the Teaching of English
Randall Popken
2 “Replacing Nice, Thin Bryn Mawr Miss Crandall with Fat, Harvard Savage”: WPAs at Bryn Mawr College, 1902 to 1923
D’Ann George
3 Cooperative Writing “Program” Administration at Illinois State Normal University: The Committee on English of 1904-05 and the Influence of Professor J. Rose Colby
Kenneth Lindblom and Patricia A. Dunn
4 Building a Career by Directing Composition: Harvard, Professionalism, and Stith Thompson at Indiana University
Jill Terry Rudy
Part II: Communities
5 The “Advance” Toward Democratic Administration: Laura Johnson Wylie and Gertrude Buck of Vassar College
Suzanne Bordelon
6 “Is It the Pleasure of This Conference to Have Another?”: Women’s Colleges Meeting and Talking about Writing in the Progressive Era
Lisa Mastrangelo and Barbara L’Eplattenier
7 Sifting Through Fifty Years of Change: Writing Program Administration at an Historically Black University
Deany M. Cheramie
Part III: Discipline
8 A Genesis of Writing Program Administration: George Jardine at the University of Glasgow
Lynée Lewis Gaillet
9 Moving Toward a Group Identity: WPA Professionalization from the 1940s to the 1970s
Amy Heckathorn
10 Representing the Intellectual Work of Writing Program Administration: Professional Narratives of George Wykoff at Purdue, 1933-1967
Shirley K Rose
11 Industrial-Strength Composition and the Impact of Load on Teaching
John Heyda
12 Doomed to Repeat It?: A Needed Space for Critique in Historical Recovery
Jeanne Gunner
Contributing Authors
Acknowledgments and Illustration Credits
Index to the Print Edition

Contents



List of Figures and Tables
Table 1: List of 1919 Conference Participants
Figure 1. Wykoff’s c.v. card page 1
Figure 2. Wykoff’s c.v. card page 2
Figure 3. Wykoff’s c.v. card page 3
Figure 4. Wykoff’s Personnel Record page 1
Figure 5. Wykoff’s Personnel Record page 2
Figure 6. Wykoff’s Personnel Record page 3


Preface
Edward M. White
Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay “The Tradition of Kafka,” argues that a tradition can be a kind of back-formation: Kafka, he asserts, created his own tradition. That is, a series of forebears of Kafka have written throughout the ages in ways anticipating Kafka’s style, but nobody actually thought of linking them until scholars began to study the work of Kafka and look for antecedents. At that point, the tradition gained shape and numbers of writers from the past seemed to fit together in a group: now, centuries after they first wrote, we can speak of the Kafka tradition.
And so it is here. Most of the beleaguered professionals we meet in this unusual work of history would be astonished to find themselves in the same book, or even considered as Writing Program Administrators. The modern concept of the WPA—with wide-ranging responsibilities for writing assessment, the writing curriculum, course staffing and standards, writing across the curriculum, and in some cases the literacy standard for graduates—is barely three generations old. Edward P. J. Corbett dates the first American WPA at 1946. The National Council of WPAs was formed in 1970, followed shortly afterwards by the journal WPA: Writing Program Administration . The first book on the subject was Albert Kitzhaber’s Themes, Theories, and Therapy: The Teaching of Writing in College (1963) . And yet, WPA work needed to be done as writing programs developed at least 200 years ago and a number of heroic individuals wound up doing it, with little reward or compensation. The essays collected here represent the first effort to document and shape the WPA tradition, to provide a professional genealogy for present-day WPAs, often struggling with the same problems that beset those doing the same job without the name many years earlier.
The accounts of early faculty serving the WPA function before the title was even thought of are oddly familiar. My favorite is Professor Edwin Hopkins, desperately trying to find time and clerical help for his major work on the teaching loads of writing teachers. Randall Popken’s essay on Hopkins includes a letter to a key administrator of the University of Kansas in 1917 in which Hopkins asserts that he has spent ten percent of his yearly salary of $3,000 on providing his own (and the department’s) clerical help. His pleas for enough funds to do his job well and for enough assigned time to get his book completed will remind many modern WPAs of their own memos—assuming they can find the time to read this ample volume.
Many university and college writing programs remain rudimentary even now, with little sense of the history of the field or of those who have led it through the centuries. Although 65 doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition are in place at the turn of the twenty-first century, professional leadership of writing programs remains relatively unusual in American colleges and universities and almost unknown in other countries. But modern programs are slowly gaining the kind of history that leads to status. By combining rhetoric with composition, the field gained the prestige of an ancient study whose power dominated the curriculum for over a thousand years. Historians of writing programs, such as James Berlin and Thomas Miller, have provided grounds for an elaborated tradition of teaching and scholarship. Now Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo come forward with this rich compilation of essays, detailing the evolution of the modern WPA in a remarkable book with unforgettable characters. They have now created the tradition of the WPA in the university and the history of English studies will never again be quite the same.
—Edward M. White
Flagstaff, Arizona
December, 2003


Acknowledgments
We would like to thank those who helped make this book possible: the people at Parlor Press—David Blakesley for his encouragement, editorial assistance and willingness to work with novice editors; Patricia A. Sullivan, Catherine Hobbs, and Ed White for their editorial help. We also wish to acknowledge and thank Janice M. Lauer for her continual support