Teaching Subject, A: Composition Since 1966, New Edition

by Joseph Harris

Overview

In this classic text, Joseph Harris traces the evolution of college writing instruction since the Dartmouth Seminar of 1966. A Teaching Subject offers a brilliant interpretive history of the first decades during which writing studies came to be imagined as a discipline separable from its partners in English studies. Postscripts to each chapter in this new edition bring the history of composition up to the present.

Reviewing the development of the field through five key ideas, Harris unfolds a set of issues and tensions that continue to shape the teaching of writing today. Ultimately, he builds a case, now deeply influential in its own right, that composition defines itself through its interest and investment in the literacy work that students and teachers do together. Unique among English studies fields, composition is, Harris contends, a teaching subject.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780874218664
Publisher:	Utah State University Press
Publication date:	01/01/2012
Edition description:	New edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

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A TEACHING SUBJECT

Composition Since 1966

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By JOSEPH HARRIS

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-866-4

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Chapter One

GROWTH

In the late summer of 1966, some fifty American and British teachers met at the three-week Seminar on the Teaching and Learning of English at Dart mouth College (the Dartmouth Seminar). The seminar was organized by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the British National Association of Teachers of English (NATE), and funded by the Carnegie Corporation; its aim was to define English as a school subject and to outline the ways it might be best taught. The participants at Dartmouth proved in fact unable to agree on much in either theory or practice, but this lack of consensus did not limit their impact on the work of many teachers then and since—for whom Dart mouth has symbolized a kind of Copernican shift from a view of English as something you learn about to a sense of it as something you do. After Dartmouth, that is, you could think of English as not simply a patchwork of literary texts, figures, and periods (The Fairie Queen, Swinburne, the eighteenth century) but as the study of how language in all its forms is put into use—from gossip to tragedies to advertising to the talk and writings of schoolchildren. An old model of teaching centered on the transmission of skills (composition) and knowledge (literature) gave way to a growth model focusing on the experiences of students and how these are shaped by their uses of language.

Or that at least is the heroic view of Dartmouth—one that can be traced in large part to John Dixon's eloquent, influential, and highly skewed report on the seminar, Growth through English, published in 1967 and reprinted twice afterward. Dixon was himself a leading British growth theorist, and his report offered less an account of what was argued at Dartmouth than a brief for a particular view of teaching. His aim was to draw from the seminar "such ideas as are directly relevant to my own work in class" (xi), and so he made little attempt to account for the subject-centered views held by many Americans at the seminar, except to suggest that they were perhaps a necessary step toward his own position. The result was an articulate and con tentious book, but one that tended to report Dixon's own views as the find ings of the seminar—and thus in its pages Dartmouth began to seem less a debate than the starting point of a new consensus about the aims and methods of English teaching.

A number of other international conferences on English teaching followed Dartmouth—at York in 1970, Sydney in 1980, Ottawa in 1986, Auckland in 1990, and New York in 1995—but none have yet had its impact. Several of the leading speakers at these conferences had been among the participants at Dartmouth, and so many of the themes and ideas of these meetings often seemed reworkings of those first articulated there. The 1987 English Coalition Conference at Wye billed itself as a kind of all-American successor to Dartmouth, and its report shows that most thinking about teaching has changed little since 1966. As Wayne Booth, a participant at both Dartmouth and Wye, remarks in an otherwise enthusiastic foreword to the Coalition Report: "There was nothing radically new in this enterprise" (1989, x).

But although they continue to shape the kinds of talk about teaching that go on at conferences and in journals, the Dartmouth ideas have probably had less impact than might be hoped on what actually goes on in many classrooms. Rather, the day-to-day work of most teachers, in both America and Britain, from preschool to the university, seems only too often to have continued on after Dartmouth much as it had before—marching lockstep to the demands of fixed school curricula standardized tests, and calls for improved skills and increased cultural unity. And, in any case, most of the actual recommendations of the Dartmouth Seminar were remarkably vague—statements it is hard to imagine anyone disagreeing with and thus equally hard to imagine anyone acting on: "The wisdom of providing young people at all ages with significant opportunities for the creative uses of language.... The significance of rich literary experiences in the educative process." And so on. The few recommendations that were more pointed—like those against tracking and standardized testing—have been for the most part ignored.

Even still, most comments about Dartmouth have been nostalgic. Despite its lack of practical effect on teaching, Dartmouth has often been invoked as showing what, in a better time and world, work in English could be. An antinomian streak colors this talk, as institutional politics and academic vanity are cast as the real blocks to reform in teaching. By 1974, for instance, James Squire and James Britton were to remark that "the impact of the Dartmouth ideas—perhaps the Dartmouth ideal" was to be found not in programs but "in the enterprise of individuals, in the new insights of young teachers" (x). Similarly, in his 1974 Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English, Arthur Applebee described the growth model as the "better alternative" among current approaches to teaching, yet admitted that most American teachers stuck to traditional, subject- centered views of their work (228–32). A few years later, in 1979, Robert Parker argued that the reforms suggested at Dartmouth never stood a chance of competing against the federally funded programs of the 1960s Project English. Writing in the same issue of English Journal, Ken Kantor suggested more simply that the ideas of Dart mouth were too "romantic" and "revolutionary" to be widely accepted. And in 1988, Sharon Hamilton-Wieler worried that we seem left now with only "empty echoes of Dartmouth" as students and teachers once again bow to the pressures of uniform tests and curricula.

There is truth in all these comments, and I don't mean in any way to defend the dreariness of much schooling from its critics. But I do think that such views make the lessons of Dartmouth seem a little too simple. Many seminar participants were unconvinced by the arguments for the growth model, fearing that a kind of loose talk about feelings and responses would displace the serious study of language and literature—a view argued by Wayne O'Neil in his acerbic 1969 conference report in the Harvard Educational Review, in which he concluded that the seminar "misconceived what it is that needs doing and along the way wasted a good deal of public (Carnegie) money" (365). And since then the growth model has drawn critics from both the left and right. For instance, by as early as 1971, Ann Berthoff was to accuse the growth theorists of neglecting the social uses of language in favor of an almost total (and in the end trivializing) interest in personal expression. Many others have followed Berthoff in making this charge—most recently James Berlin in 1982 and Peter Griffith in 1988. Whereas in 1980, working from a very different set of concerns, David Allen anticipated more recent conservative attacks on schooling when he argued that the emphasis on personal growth at Dartmouth had led to a devaluing of the claims of the larger culture.

This ongoing debate echoes tensions present at Dartmouth itself. For what one finds in the papers and books that came out of the seminar is not a unified sense of what English is and how it should be taught but a series of conflicts and tensions much like those that divide us now. So rather than reading Dartmouth as the scene of a heroic shift in the theory and practice of teaching, I want to look at it as a moment when many of the conflicts that drive work in English—and particularly those having to do with the relations between teaching and research—were dramatized with unusual clarity.

The plan of the seminar was to begin by bringing all the participants together to address the question, "What is English?" Once having defined their subject, they were then to split into separate study groups and working parties that would take on particular issues in teaching—questions of tracking, testing, curriculum, and the like. The hope seems to have been to give some clear shape to what many thought an almost formless subject of instruction. This did not occur. In the first paper given at the seminar, Albert Kitzhaber invoked the familiar triad of language, literature, and composition in order to define the subject matter of English. The problem, as Kitzhaber saw it, was how to join these three concerns. His aim was to form a view of English as "an organized body of knowledge with an integrity of its own" (1966, 12). What was needed, he argued, was a definition that did not "[turn] out to be but the lengthened shadow of a specialist's personal interest," but that instead collected the various facets of English into a single coherent subject of study (16).

Speaking in response to Kitzhaber, James Britton next argued that one cannot define English by determining its proper subject matter. Rather, you must first ask what the function of English is in the curriculum and in the lives of students. For Britton the key question was not "What is the subject matter of English?"—but rather "What do we want students and teachers to be doing?" His answer was to define English as that space in the curriculum where students are encouraged to use language in more complex and expressive ways. They were to learn to do so through reading, writing, and talking about issues related to their own personal experiences, making the English lesson

the area in which ... all knowledge must come together for the individual. It is, in fact, the integrating area for all public knowledge. My mother used to make jam tarts and she used to roll out the pastry and I remember this very well—I can still feel what it is like to do it, although I have never done it since. She used to roll out the pastry and then she took a glass and cut out a jam tart, then cut out another jam tart. Well we have cut out geography, and we have cut out history, and we have cut out science. What do we cut out for English? I suggest that we don't. I suggest that is what is left. That is the rest of it. (1966, 12)

This opening exchange between Kitzhaber and Britton set up a conflict between what came to be known as the American and British positions at Dartmouth, although in fact there were strong differences of view among the participants from each country. Kitzhaber and the Americans were concerned with defining English as an academic discipline, a body of knowledge. Such an approach, as Britton noted, suggests that the real focus of work in English is something "out there," some kind of information to be gained or set of skills to be mastered (1966, 5-6). But if the American hero was the scholar, then the British hero was the teacher.

The conflict between the American and British positions was shown clearly in the ways they chose to describe their work. The actual jobs held by most of the participants at Dartmouth seem to have had very much in common. Most worked in university departments of English or education and were in some way involved with planning school curricula or training teachers. Yet by and large the Americans identified themselves as scholars and the British as classroom teachers. John Dixon was to state this opposition quite bluntly in his 1969 "Conference Report," arguing that while there "will be a tendency for the university professor to dominate the work of the schools ... where there is any strength in the school tradition of English teaching, that tendency can be overcome" (367).

The two positions can be seen as differing responses to what Jurgen Habermas (1975) has called a legitimation crisis. Habermas argues that a profession needs to justify its work to both an audience of experts and to the public at large. Since these groups have differing needs and interests, the work of professionals will often seem to be pulled in two directions at once. And so, on the one hand, there is a continuing need to legitimize English as an academic field with its own specialized subject and methods of study. On the other hand, English has long been valued precisely because it seems more than just another specialized area of study, because it offers a place where different kinds of knowledge can be brought together and related to personal experience. Britton's jam tart metaphor puts the problem well. The importance of English lies in its ability to connect separate kinds of learning and experience, but in doing this it can seem stretched thin, with little substance of its own. One can view the American position at Dartmouth, then, as an attempt to justify the study of English to other university experts, and the British position as trying to place such work in relation to the needs and concerns of students. I have already suggested another way of defining this tension in terms of the troubled relations between research and teaching. My point here is that this conflict cannot be resolved simply through admonitions to do both well or to have one inform the other, since scholars and teachers address competing needs and audiences.

For the Americans at Dartmouth, the task at hand thus seemed one of defining and consolidating the subject matter of English. As a former presi dent of NCTE and chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), Kitzhaber had long argued for the need to ground classroom practices in formal research on writing and learning, and his 1963 Themes, Theories, and Therapy was a groundbreaking study of composition teaching in American colleges. In his opening talk at Dartmouth, Kitzhaber derided what he called "progressive" attempts to turn the English classroom into a "catch-all" space for discussing whatever happened to be on the minds of teachers or students. Citing Northrop Frye in Design for Learning, he argued against confusing "educational and social functions," and insisted that our "subject matter must be defined more clearly than it has in the past" so we can then "[bring] forward a 'New English' to take its place along side the 'New Mathematics' and the 'New Science' now being taught in many United States schools" (1963, 12–13).

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments....................ix
Preface to New Edition....................xi
Foreword(s): Research and Teaching....................xv
1 Growth....................1
Postscript, 2012: Students as Writers....................21
Interchapter....................27
2 Voice....................32
Postscript, 2012: Intensive Academic Writing....................59
Interchapter....................65
3 Process....................72
Postscript, 2012: Track Changes....................91
Interchapter....................95
4 Error....................102
Postscript, 2012: Difference as a Resource....................121
Interchapter....................126
5 Community....................132
Postscript, 2012: From the Social to the Material....................155
Afterword(s): Contact and Negotiation....................161
References....................175
Index....................185
About the Author....................192