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1 Introduction

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 composition in one particular year—1977—and to ground our observations in a detailed case study of one specific site—Penn State’s University Park campus.3 That decision to study the developing drama of our field by narrowing sharply what Kenneth Burke would call the “circumference” of the scene under scrutiny has enabled us to discover how and why the field of composition was emerging as an intellectual, pedagogical, and professional practice at a particularly crucial moment.4 It also has given us an opportunity to recover in great detail—detail that is simply impossible to offer in a broader study—the conflicting and sometimes ephemeral currents that were part of the conversation about composition at a specific time. And this focus has permitted us to look at a host of related literacy initiatives—first-year composition, to be sure, but also professional and technical communication, writing across the curriculum, writing centers, creative writing—that have too frequently been considered separately.

1977 also contributes to the growing body of scholarship on writing program administration. Studies of composition history are just beginning to pay significant attention to the historical development of particular writing programs and to the myriad administrative, institutional, and intellectual conflicts and decisions that shaped those programs. Study of the material traces and archival documents of writing program development, Shirley K. Rose suggests, is a fundamental part of ongoing scholarly efforts to theorize writing program administration. Rich historical detail—preserved through archival materials and the historical narratives assembled from them—“will be useful for constructing a theoretical model of writing program development” (110). Publishing writing program histories, Barbara L’Eplattenier notes, “is both validation of contemporary scholarship and a logical extension of the contemporary work that has led to the recognition of writing program administration as a scholarly endeavor” (136). At the current moment, however, the historical details necessary for the telling of effective writing program histories are often missing or incomplete: many writing programs (as Rose notes) have no structure for archiving records, and a motive for archiving such materials has been missing because histories of specific programs are not yet recognized in traditional scholarly venues for publication. This book consequently addresses this gap by supplying a close historical examination of a specific writing program and its practices. Further, the book incorporates the kinds of program materials—memos, interviews, textbooks, institutional reports—that Rose identifies as essential to ongoing efforts to document and validate the intellectual work of writing program administration.

To help uncover the conflicting and sometimes ephemeral currents within a particular writing program site, we addressed several key questions, questions that both rely upon and extend the work of previous composition histories:

• How do local cultural, political, and economic conditions affect the ways in which theories of composition are manifested in local classrooms?

• To what degree and to what ends does scholarship in composition influence practices in particular writing programs?

• How do national and international affairs affect writing program development?

• How are curricular designs in composition at specific institutions influenced by the assumptions and beliefs of particular faculty members and administrators?

• How have composition programs in place today developed out of the foundational efforts of critical scholars, administrators, and teachers of the 1970s?

In exploring these questions we focus on a single site and year not because we feel they are the most representative time and topography (though, in retrospect, the year and site now seem to us as representative as anything could be within the diversity of practices known as composition—and seem to offer as well an unusually rich moment and place to reflect upon); nor are we unaware of the limitations of this kind of localized study (our strengths—specificity and depth—are at the expense of breadth). Rather, our concentration on a specific time and topography offers us an opportunity to give an unusually thick, inclusive and instructive description of things in a way that will fill out other histories of the period and that will provide perspective on the present. It also gives us a chance to acknowledge institutional considerations that shape programs and courses, to appreciate the interconnections among instructional efforts like professional writing and composition, and, perhaps most important, to attend to marginal voices and short-lived but instructive developments.

Since we are committed to the complementary propositions that specific circumstances can be explained in part by larger movements and that larger phenomena can be understood through a comprehension of local situations, we have maintained a continuing dialogue between the local and particular, on the one hand, and the broad and general, on the other: we consistently poise an account of developments at Penn State against national and disciplinary developments. Thus, besides offering a perspective on pedagogical practices, past and present, this essay contributes significant, instructive detail to the broad narratives laid out by Berlin, Crowley, Faigley, Harris, Miller, and others even as it offers an additional and telling account of a particular site of composition instruction that is in the tradition of Varnum’s study of Amherst College in Fencing with Words, Campbell’s study of Radcliffe in “Controlling Voices,” Hollis’s account of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, Simmons’s description of Barrett Wendell’s pedagogy at Harvard, Gere’s study of local sites of literacy formation in Intimate Practices, Crowley’s analysis of the University of Iowa in Composition in the University , and the localized research included in L’Eplattenier and Mastrangelo’s Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration 5—historical studies that continue to reflect and identify what writing instruction is as much as what it has been.