The Idea of a Writing Laboratory

The Idea of a Writing Laboratory Neal Lerner

The Idea of a Writing Laboratory

The Idea of a Writing Laboratory Neal Lerner

Southern Illinois University Press / Carbondale

Copyright © 2009 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 09

4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lerner, Neal. The idea of a writing laboratory / Neal Lerner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-2914-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8093-2914-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching. 2. Report writing—Study and teaching. 3. Writing centers. 4. Tutors and tutoring. 5. Technical writing— Study and teaching. 6. Interdisciplinary approach in education. I. Title. PE1404.L47 2009 808'.042—dc22 2008043704 Printed on recycled paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: In Search of Experimentation in the Teaching of Writing

1

1. The Secret Origins of Writing Centers 15 2. Writing in the Science Laboratory: Opportunities Lost 3. The Writing of School Science 52 4. The Two Poles of Writing Lab History: Minnesota and Dartmouth 76 5. Project English and the Quest for Federal Funding 6. Drawing to Learn Science: Lessons of Agassiz 126 7. The Laboratory in Theory: From Mental Discipline to Situated Learning 8. The Laboratory in Practice: A Study of a Biological Engineering Class Epilogue: Writing Laboratory Futures 194 Notes

201

Works Cited Index

225

205

164

146

107

34

1 Acknowledgments

T

he completion of this book would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of a whole bunch of folks. For their conversation, reading, and feedback, I thank Anne Ellen Geller, Beth Boquet, Michele Eodice, Kami Day, Rebecca Nowacek, Rich Haswell, David Russell, Christina Haas, Charles Bazerman, and Brad Hughes and the staff of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center. Southern Illinois University Press reviewers Albert DeCiccio and Shane Borrowman provided extremely helpful guidance. SIUP editor in chief Karl Kageff was a pleasure to work with and a calming influence. I am indebted to archive librarians Patricia Albright at Mount Holyoke College, Sarah Hartwell at Dartmouth College, Karen Klinkenberg and Elisabeth Kaplan at the University of Minnesota, Rebecca Schulte at the University of Kansas, Diane Kaplan at Yale University, and Nora Murphy at MIT for their generous assistance in conducting this research. In the biological engineering department at MIT, Drew Endy, Neal Zimmerman, Mathangi Radha, Michael Oh, and Kevin Vogelsang were generous with their time and extraordinarily patient with my questions. Special thanks to Natalie Kuldell for her generosity, feedback, and grace. My writing and research partners at MIT, Mya Poe and Jennifer Craig, were invaluable sources of support and stimulation and worked hard to keep me on task. The public libraries of Belmont, MA, and Brookline, MA, provided wonderful work spaces, as did the Coolidge Corner Peet’s Coffee. Finally, my family—Hannah and Clay Baker-Lerner, Tania Baker, and Jean Baker—are what makes all of this possible and worthwhile. The research in chapter 4 was partially supported by a grant from the International Writing Centers Association. Earlier versions of portions of this book were previously published in College Composition and Communication (“Rejecting the Remedial Brand: The Rise and Fall of the Dartmouth Writing Clinic,” copyright 2007 by the National Council of Teachers of English, reprinted with permission), Teaching English in the Two-Year College (“‘Laboring Together for the Common Good’: The Writing Laboratory at the University of Minnesota General College, circa 1932,” copyright 2006 by the National Council of Teachers of English, reprinted with permission), Written Communication (“Laboratory Lessons for Writing and Science,” copyright 2007 by Sage Publications, vii

Acknowledgments

reprinted with permission), Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (“Drawing to Learn Science: Legacies of Agassiz,” copyright 2007 by Baywood, reprinted with permission), the collection Marginal Words, Marginal Work? Tutoring the Academy in the Work of Writing Centers (“Situated Learning in the Writing Center,” copyright 2007 by Hampton Press, reprinted with permission) and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication (“Innovation across the Curriculum: Three Case Studies in Teaching Science and Engineering Communication,” copyright 2008 by IEEE, with Jennifer Craig and Mya Poe). Archival material appears courtesy of the Rauner Special Collections, Dartmouth College Library; Yale University Manuscripts and Archives; the University of Minnesota Archives; and the Mount Holyoke College Archives.

viii

The Idea of a Writing Laboratory

Introduction: In Search of Experimentation in the Teaching of Writing

T

his is a book about possibilities, about teaching and learning to write in ways that can be transformative for both teacher and learner. To find these possibilities, my outlook is not necessarily toward a utopian future or what has not yet occurred, but instead toward what the past can offer. The rich history of writing instruction in higher education—whether the setting has been first-year composition classrooms, writing centers, or introductory science laboratories—can tell us a great deal about the challenges and opportunities we continue to face, whether we are teachers, researchers, or students. As the chapters of this book detail, the history of teaching writing via laboratory methods is not necessarily a triumphant narrative of creative experimentalists and gifted teachers happily plying their trade in the interest of student learning. Instead, the complications of too little money, too many students, too little preparation, too frightening an unknown, and too little vision have crushed many a reform effort, leaving a legacy of cynicism that often imbues the enterprise of teaching students to write. One venue that has long embodied both the possibilities for student writing instruction and the limits of scarce resources is the college or university writing center, where I have long worked as a tutor, director, or researcher. The title of this book, The Idea of a Writing Laboratory, is a reference to Stephen North’s 1984 College English article, “The Idea of a Writing Center.” In his article, North offered those possibilities to his audience of English department colleagues while at the same time castigating them for their notions of writing centers as “fix-it shops” or “grammar garages.” While North’s plea for understanding has had debatable impact on English faculty, it certainly resonated with writing center readers, achieving status as “the single most important and most quoted essay in writing center scholarship,” according to Christina Murphy and Joe Law (“The Writing Center” 65). North’s “The Idea of a Writing Center” has become a manifesto of sorts for the writing center audience, one easily reduced to North’s pithy phrase, “In a writing center the object is to make

1

Introduction

sure that writers, and not necessarily their texts, are what get changed by instruction. In axiom form it goes like this: Our job is to produce better writers, not better writing” (438). However, North’s rejection of a remedial past of writing center work has also purposefully been a rejection of the writing laboratory, of the lab’s association with “students being dissected . . . or tutors creating Frankenstein monsters” (Carino, “What Do We Talk” 37). For North and others, a commonplace assertion is that “the concept of a writing ‘center’ conveys a more vibrant, comprehensive, and forward-looking point of view than the tired, fossilized concept of a writing ‘lab’” (Addison and Wilson 57). It is looking back to this laboratory past, however, where my interests lie. Here’s a short version of what I have learned about writing center history, one I expand on in chapter 1: I have learned that when writing centers were called writing laboratories, they often thrived, with a lineage going back to the 1890s when laboratory methods of instruction were trumpeted in a wide range of disciplines and at all instruction levels, but particularly in the newly required first-year English composition classes that proliferated nationwide following Harvard University’s creation of “English A” (Brereton).1 By the middle of the twentieth century, writing laboratories seemed to have an established role as a partner with firstyear composition in the enterprise of teaching students to write; six of the first seven meetings of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (starting in 1949) featured workshops on writing laboratories.2 But then writing laboratories and writing clinics, as they were also sometimes known, disappeared, cast off along with remedial writing classes in many four-year institutions from the late 1950s to the late 1960s (Lerner, “Punishment”). They were reborn in the open admissions era (Boquet, “Our Little Secret”), when a new generation of underprepared students presented challenges to higher education that seemed best handled by one-to-one instruction. However, now they were usually called writing centers, a reinvention that attempted to assert their centrality to student learning—in name, at least—and a rejection of that laboratory past when labs were, as described by Robert Moore in 1950, “remedial agencies for removing students’ deficiencies in composition” (388). For Stephen North, at least, the future is a much brighter one in which he imagined writing centers to be the “centers of consciousness” for writing at our institutions (446). To me, however, the loss of the writing laboratory is a loss of possibility, a loss of the very heart of the writing center’s past when laboratory methods were created as alternatives to the lecture and recitation that had dominated instruction in first-year English composition classes and that were largely seen as inadequate in 2

Introduction

teaching contexts that called for hands-on learning and social interaction. Laboratory methods and subsequent writing laboratories, in short, were experiments in teaching and learning that were largely forgotten in the move to writing centers. Experimentation in the teaching of writing is not confined merely to writing centers or to first-year composition classes, however. An ally when it comes to laboratory methods is writing instruction in science classes and their associated laboratories. It is in writing centers and in science laboratories that I can begin to imagine an experimental future, and these settings are the primary contexts for the histories I present and for the case study of a biological engineering laboratory class that is the final chapter in this book. While the fields of writing and science might strike many as completely different if not diametrically opposed, once I began to look more closely at their histories, I realized how much was shared. Notions of learning by doing—as opposed to learning by listening to lectures and regurgitating that content on multiple-choice exams, whether that doing was the “daily theme” that Barrett Wendell popularized at Harvard in the 1890s (Kitzhaber, Rhetoric 210) or the hands-on chemistry laboratory experiences that Amos Eaton devised for Rensselaer students in the 1820s (Griggs 31)—have shaped the teaching of writing and science starting in the late nineteenth century and continuing today. In science, hands-on learning was meant to overcome the problem that Louis Agassiz of Harvard described in the mid-nineteenth century: “The pupil studies nature in the schoolroom, and when he goes out of doors he can not find her” (quoted in J. Campbell 119). Both writing and science have struggled to enact these beliefs within a system of higher education that constantly trolls for efficiencies and cost savings. Learning to write in the classroom or tutoring center and learning science in the laboratory have also long shared challenges ranging from ensuring adequate working conditions to calculating faculty full-time equivalents to relying on less-expensive graduate student and adjunct labor. Further barriers can be found in classrooms under the control of teachers who all too easily fall back on lecture and rote learning as the path of least instruction, particularly when these paths are rewarded in systems of accountability in which knowledge is accounted for as filled-in bubbles on a Scantron sheet. After all, similar forces—rising enrollments, unease with prevailing teaching methods, and a new faith in the power of higher education to solve the problems that accompanied America’s vast industrial and cultural change—shaped all disciplines from the 1890s until now. 3

Introduction

The intersections of writing and science also parallel my own career as a teacher. Over twenty years ago, my first venue for the teaching of writing was a university writing center, where as a master’s student I was charged with helping basic writing students develop their grasp of paragraphs and complete fill-in-the-blank grammar and usage workbooks. That few students applied their mastery of the workbooks to the composition of their paragraphs made me an early skeptic about the value of decontextualized drill-and-kill worksheets. That many students seemed penned in by being permitted no more rhetorical space than a paragraph made me skeptical about the building-block approaches to teaching writing in which students were to master discrete parts in sequence—sentences, paragraphs, then whole essays—as if they were constructing modular homes or at least Lego-sized approximations of those homes. However, that the setting for these activities was a writing center showed me early on the many possibilities for such sites and the ways they could be uncoupled from the tasks assigned in classrooms—not necessarily subvert them, for antagonism between the writing center and classroom teachers did not seem to be productive for anyone involved, but instead offer students alternatives to worksheets or single paragraphs, particularly if the results of those alternatives would mean improved student writing. And, of course, it was a heck of a lot more interesting to have students engage in freewriting and peer revision than grammar worksheets and topic sentence exercises. For the last twenty years, I have plied my trade as a writing teacher in a wide variety of settings—suburban and urban high schools, rural and urban community colleges, private and public colleges and universities—and to a wide variety of students—Ford automotive technicians, nuclear power plant operators, returning adults working several jobs, eighteen-year-old freshmen, learning-disabled adults, ninth-grade ESL students within their first week of entering the country, pharmacy students, and undergraduate science and engineering majors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I have taught basic writing or first-year composition or tutored and directed writing centers for the bulk of those twenty years, but in 2002, I left a faculty position at a college of pharmacy and health sciences to work as a writing-across-the-curriculum lecturer at MIT. While I was not a stranger to the kinds of writing that science students would need to do (and scientists, too, as my wife is a well-published biochemist), teaching in a WAC program has immersed me deeply in the rhetoric of scientific writing and in science and engineering education more generally. Many of the communication-intensive required classes at MIT have been mapped on to existing laboratory classes; thus, I interact 4

Introduction

daily with the potential for laboratory learning to offer students rich opportunities to be immersed in scientific projects and the ways they can communicate that science to multiple audiences. The two departments at MIT that I work with most closely are biology and biological engineering, both of which take student writing far more seriously than many English departments with which I have been associated. For many of these faculty members, the laboratory and classroom work of undergraduates is part of a larger enterprise of professional preparation, and the need to make persuasive and focused arguments about your science to a wide variety of audiences is simply a given. While students do not always embrace writing tasks as their first priorities in the face of time-consuming problem sets as the dominant mode of out-ofclass homework, they usually accept the need. An adage I’ve heard around MIT goes, “Engineers who cannot write work for engineers who can.” The writing my students are doing is usually related to their laboratory work or is geared towards understanding the rhetorical demands of the scientific research article. The experimental situation, then, determines the content, but the laboratory becomes far more than simply a setting for generating data or learning particular techniques. As places of professional preparation and as settings for writing instruction, science and engineering laboratories are intertwined with the task of learning to communicate that science. And the principles of experimentation—problem solving, critical thinking, an ease with the unknown, and a persistence in the face of frequent failure—apply easily to writing tasks in many other settings and to the processes of writing. The fields of science and writing share further alignments. For better or worse, both share a certain cultural capital, the results of which are frequently recognized crises in their relative effectiveness at turning out competent graduates. For example, the National Academy of Sciences offered the following criticism in its 2005 book, America’s Lab Report: Investigations in High School Science: Most people in this country lack the basic understanding of science that they need to make informed decisions about the many scientific issues affecting their lives. Neither this basic understanding—often referred to as science literacy—nor an appreciation for how science has shaped the society and culture is being cultivated during the high school years. . . . Increasing this understanding will require major reforms in science education, including reforms in the laboratories that constitute a significant portion of the high school science curriculum. (Singer, Hilton, and Schweingruber ES-1)

5

Introduction

The teaching of writing has long seen similar critiques. In 2003, the National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges offered the following in its report, The Neglected ‘R’: The Need for a Writing Revolution: “Writing, always time-consuming for student and teacher, is today hard-pressed in the American classroom. Of the three ‘Rs,’ writing is clearly the most neglected. The nation’s leaders must place writing squarely in the center of the school agenda, and policy makers at the state and local levels must provide the resources required to improve writing” (National Commission 4). Such similar calls for reform suggest that both fields are seen as vitally important, and the long-standing nature of such calls indicates how elusive productive change has been. The central claim of this book is that the teaching of writing can find strength in a return to its experimental intent and can broaden its reach beyond the confines of first-year composition by collaborating with science educators who are also looking to reform their practices. In short, the teaching of writing and the teaching of science can find common ground in the idea of a laboratory. Certainly, writing studies has broadened its reach through successful writing-across-the-curriculum efforts over the last twenty-five years (Russell, Writing in the Academic Disciplines). However, I contend that composition faculty and researchers have rarely taken advantage of the alliances that can be made with our lab-coated cousins on the other side of campus. Experimentation and all it embodies are rarely seen as ways of invigorating a writing program struggling with the dual burden and opportunity of administering required first-year writing. The 1980s, in particular, seemed an era ripe for composition’s broadsides on “scientism,” largely following attempts to understand the cognitive nature of students’ composing practices (for example, Flower and Hayes). James Berlin offered a reading of the ideological terrain of composition studies in 1988 and then charged that “the rhetoric of cognitive psychology refuses the ideological question altogether, claming for itself the transcendent neutrality of science” (“Rhetoric and Ideology” 478). Robert Connors took up these charges earlier in the decade in his critique of composition research’s attempts to be “scientific,” claiming that “we as rhetoricians must be concerned with a wider realm than are scientists—for scientists are concerned only with facts and the relationships between them, while rhetorical concerns must include both the scientific occurrence and the axiological ordering of those facts” (“Composition Studies” 19). This us-versus-them binary, the savvy rhetorician versus the cold technologist, was not new, however. Back in the early 1950s, Charles Glicksberg of Brooklyn College described the situation in hysterical terms: 6

Introduction

The scientific Huns are on the march, and their objective is not only the elimination of English composition from the curriculum. If they had their way, they would sack the buildings in which the liberal arts are taught, raze them to the ground, and pour salt on the foundation. The new scientific barbarians, now that they have produced the atomic bomb, are determined to capture the citadel of education, adapt it to their own special ends, and establish a dictatorship of the physicists and technocrats. (91) This distinction between humanists and scientists is long-standing and stubbornly persistent, a way of drawing boundaries and capturing territory more akin to academic warfare and displays of excess testosterone than to productive debate. It is particularly unfortunate to me that the composition scholars who assert a neutral, fact-seeking stance on the part of scientists seem to show very little idea of what actual scientific practice looks like. Whether it’s a popular account of the frantic search to develop a vaccine to counter the 1918 flu pandemic (Barry) or a rich scholarly study set in the laboratories of research scientists (Latour and Woolgar), the documentary evidence of science as a human activity belies reductive notions of cold rendering of truth. For scholars in rhetoric and composition, the study of scientific discourse is an unfortunately rare occurrence, despite what Michael Zerbe describes as the power of scientific discourse to reach “into almost every corner of human experience” (4). The laboratory seems a strange world, filled with mysterious apparatus and arcane, esoteric language or one hostile to contemporary writing studies values. The occasional courageous writing-across-thecurriculum pioneer ventures forth into that world, but only at the risk of going native and forever more speaking to us from faraway locales such as IEEE on Professional Transactions or the Journal of Research in Science Teaching. To bridge these two worlds, this book describes the histories of writing and science education at both close and more distant proximities. Chapter 1 presents my quest to uncover the first writing laboratory, that one-to-one solution for the problem of teaching students to write. I move from Dalton, Massachusetts, and Helen Parkhurst’s “Dalton Laboratory Plan,” popularized worldwide in the 1920s and 1930s (Lager i), to Chicago in the 1890s when the Columbian Exposition World’s Fair embodied the nation’s experimental intent. In what historian H. W. Brands labels “the reckless decade,” educators in science and composition/rhetoric in the 1890s recognized that mass instruction was inadequate for a burgeoning student population, and that experimental or laboratory methods were 7

Introduction

essential. As I search for the first writing laboratory or writing center, I show how pressures of enrollment, inadequate resources, and an alwayseasy retreat to the status quo threaten the ideals expressed in the 1890s, as they do now. Chapter 2 presents a parallel history to my quest for the first writing laboratory—the history of the teaching of science via laboratory methods and, more specifically, the use of writing in those contexts. This story is similarly one of recognizing the need for individualized, hands-on instruction and the retreat from that commitment once handling large numbers of students made the school science laboratory little more than cookbook exercises and rote learning. Similar to the history of teaching writing via laboratory methods with a focus on the processes of writing (as opposed to the products), the history of teaching science via laboratory methods focuses on the processes of thinking and acting like a scientist. Unfortunately, these more abstract goals are never easily measured by standardized instruments or multiple-choice exams. My contention is that students’ writing about science has been an opportunity generally lost by science educators and teachers and researchers in English studies. A return to the experimental intent of the reformers of the 1890s includes looking toward writing as a means of assessing and enabling students’ learning of science. Chapter 3 presents archival research into students’ writing about their laboratory science in two particular periods of discontent and reform: the 1890s and the 1930s. Drawing from institutional records at MIT, Dartmouth, and Mount Holyoke College, I show how student writing about science rarely moved beyond what David Russell describes as “shaped in the image of other school writing: routine, mechanically correct, primarily evaluative” (Writing 93). As a result, writing was a means, in Russell’s words, of “enforcing disciplinary standards, rather than as a means of introducing students to the scientific community through meaningful participation in its activity” (Writing 95). As I established in chapter 2 in reviewing the science-education literature, students writing about science has largely been an opportunity lost. In chapter 4, I offer a close examination of particular institutional histories of teaching writing via laboratory methods with the contrasting cases of the University of Minnesota General College Writing Laboratory and the Dartmouth College Writing Clinic. The former was created in 1932 and represents an enactment of Deweyan Progressivism and experimentation that has rarely been realized since that time (G. Miller 97). The Dartmouth Writing Clinic (DWC) was opened not long after, in 1939, but throughout its life focused on a policing role that Dartmouth faculty never warmly embraced. By 1960, the DWC was closed down by Albert 8

Introduction

Kitzhaber and Vincent Gillespie when they arrived at Dartmouth for a Carnegie-funded, three-year study of its writing program (Kitzhaber, Report 215). The contrast between these two attempts at laboratory methods of teaching writing offers a cautionary tale of the fine line between teaching students to write and curing students of the disease of bad writing. In chapter 5, I move to the larger issue of curricular reform and federal efforts to bring about those changes, specifically the case of Project English, a post-Sputnik reform effort that promised to improve English teachers’ working conditions and preparation and, ultimately, student writing. The failure of Project English and its focus on curricular rather than pedagogical reform attests to the elements necessary for wide-scale reform of writing instruction to take place, including full involvement by teachers on the ground. Without these elements, we get waves of reform, national commissions and blue-ribbon panels, speeches from educational leaders and state legislators, spurts of new money, threats of “accountability” and mandated assessment. In essence, we get the pattern of crisis and response that has long marked educational reform at all levels in this country. In chapter 6, I turn again to the history of teaching laboratory science. Here the focus is not on writing per se but on a long-standing instructional technique—drawing—that has gathered much contemporary attention in composition classrooms given the prevalence of computer technologies and visual forms of communication. The use of visual representation to learn science can be traced to Louis Agassiz, Harvard professor of zoology in the mid-nineteenth century. In Agassiz’s approach, students were to study nature through carefully observing, drawing, and then thinking about what the observations might add up to. However, implementation of Agassiz’s student-centered approach has struggled with the conflict between science learning in which mastery of scientific facts is the goal and science learning as a socially situated activity with an emphasis on the process of learning, not merely its products. Present-day attempts to have students draw to learn science often succumb to these same conflicts, limiting their full potential. Chapter 7 puts the ideal of laboratory learning in theoretical perspective by looking at two competing theories that have guided pedagogy in writing and science. While “mental discipline” is often seen as a pre-twentieth-century theory of how students learn (and thus how instruction might be organized), its legacy continues to be felt in the emphasis on rote memorization in the sciences and on rote exercises in writing classrooms and centers. My belief is that educators in both fields need to turn toward situated learning as a robust way of understanding and reforming science 9

Introduction

and writing pedagogy. Notions of apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, and Newman), communities of practice (Wenger), and affinity groups (Gee, Situated Language) offer educators in science and writing ways to conceive of their work in dynamic ways that get far beyond simplistic binaries of hard versus soft, objective versus subjective. To close this book, in chapter 8 I offer an example of the idea of a writing laboratory through an observational/interview study of a sophomore biological engineering laboratory class at MIT in which writing, speaking, and research—as well as instruction in all three areas—are tightly woven. This class is by no means without challenges, particularly in terms of situated-learning ideals I describe in chapter 7. However, it offers one way for writing and science educators to marshal forces in the interest of student learning. At this point, I need to mention my processes of and motivation for historical investigation, particularly archival studies. My guide here is Robert Connors, for whom a belief in the limits—but necessity—of historical research was essential. In Connors’ words, “All historical work . . . is provisional, partial—fragments we shore against our ruin. We are trying to make sense of things. It is always a construction. It is always tottering” (“Dreams and Play” 21). I have come to realize that this tottering construction reveals many intertwining histories: the histories of our fields; the histories of our particular writing centers and classrooms; our histories as teachers, tutors, and writers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, and, for some of us, grandmothers and grandfathers. These stories come to bear on that moment when we sit down with student writers and ask them to join us on that often uncertain journey over the terrain of their texts or stand up in classrooms on the first day of the semester and imagine among the faces we see only possibilities. I believe that the more we know about these histories and, perhaps more important, the more we come to understand their influence, the better off we will be. Here is where it started for me: My first foray into serious literature—and into the study of history—came when I was growing up in the New Jersey suburbs. On Saturdays at noon, my friend Mickey Dickstein and I would walk into my town’s shopping district. One stop was always Eastman News, a candy store, baseball card, and comic book emporium run by an obese man who barely grunted a response to our questions: “When is the next Spiderman coming in?” Grunt. “Why did they raise the price on Richie Rich?” Grunt. I was always mildly interested in the superhero comics: the Fantastic Four, Superman, Spiderman. However, a real find was one of the “origins” editions of those comics. In those stories, 10

Introduction

the history of the superhero was told in much more detail than was usually conveyed by the quick overview at the continuation of an ongoing story (“Upon being bitten by a radioactive spider, Peter Parker developed strange and powerful abilities”). These secret origins—of both the heroes and villains—were almost always humble, often chance encounters with a powerful natural force: radioactivity, asteroids, bad chemicals. The result was the superhero as we now knew him or her. The superhero, however, preferred to keep that past covered up, for it was a past never to be reclaimed or revisited. What was so compelling for me about those histories were the connections revealed. The picture was filled in. Details became important. The present had a more or less continuous relationship to the past. Perhaps like many future English teachers, I was connecting with stories, with narrative, while at the same time the stories and characters themselves were connecting with their “origins.” And I made some larger connections—however tenuous—putting aside for a moment the isolation that seemed part and parcel of adolescent life, or at least mine. And the heroes’ avoidance of their histories seemed also to resonate with my family’s avoidance of its past as embodied by my Eastern European grandfather, who arrived in the United States as an adult from Poland but told no stories of the “old country” and of immediate family lost during the Holocaust. When I started to think, read, and write about writing center history, I was surprised to discover that a history existed at all, much less one so firmly connected to the present. My reasons for uncovering this history seemed simple enough. If I could just show that writing centers have been around a long time, then I could help legitimize their work. And from legitimizing will naturally flow respect, academic standing, funding, the usual formula. As Robert Connors writes, “Seldom does anyone plunge cold into the Archive without something to look for, something they’re hoping to find, hoping to see proof of” (“Dreams and Play” 22). But my search for the history of writing instruction, particularly in writing center settings, is also more complicated than that. Perhaps it’s the thrill that I’m after, opening that dusty archive box or long-forgotten article to discover that “Eureka, I’ve got it!” The origins of writing centers! Or if I can just connect with the excitement and promise that the pioneers of our field must have felt upon realizing the power of teaching writing in writing center settings. If I can just get some sense of that charge, some inkling of what it felt like at the beginning. Perhaps it is those original superheroes that I want to connect with, before their powers were diluted by kryptonite-bearing deans or tattered capes. 11

Introduction

The comic book superheroes often had humble origins, as do most of us, as does most of our writing. But then something extraordinary happened, and a mere mortal was transformed into someone with special gifts who was then faced with the crucial choice of whether to use those gifts in the interests of justice and righteousness or to be corrupted by the forces of evil and villainy. Once either path was chosen (and, of course, it was usually the first), those humble origins were left behind and never spoken of again, for superheroes lived not in the past but only striving toward a better future, just as my grandfather did. When it comes to the history of teaching writing, I’m afraid I just don’t agree. In David Gold’s words, “The perceived pedagogical failures and successes of the past and present shape the pedagogy of the future. If we, as instructors and scholars of rhetoric and writing, are to have a say in that future, we must be able to articulate a nuanced interpretation of our past” (152–53). We need to ask about the past and to resist the ignorance of that past, particular by those who consign everything before 1970 as little more advanced than cave drawings. While the conservative “current-traditional rhetoric” that James Berlin (Rhetoric and Reality) characterizes as dominating higher education’s teaching of writing in its past (and often its present) does describes some early writing laboratories, many others embody the kind of social-epistemic rhetoric that is highly valued (as I demonstrate in chapter 4). Thus, rather than a rendering of the primitive, the origins of writing pedagogy as laboratory methods offer a potential blueprint for what we now face. Struggles over literacy, access, and opportunity were just as strongly felt and debated at the turn of the twentieth century as they are today. I have read of ideas about teaching and learning written then that cut just as quickly to the central needs and tensions of our work as any contemporary article. The idea of a writing laboratory is an idea of teaching and learning as a continuous experiment towards what really works, towards the best of past practices and the search for new practices not yet imagined. Given these experimental possibilities for writing centers and their precursors, I have been surprised to see how little these settings have been taken up by the well-known historians (all of whom are my heroes) in their accounts of the teaching of writing in higher education. Booklength treatments by Robert Connors (Composition-Rhetoric), James Berlin (Rhetoric and Reality), and Sharon Crowley (Composition in the University) either do not refer to writing centers at all or contain just a fleeting mention. In this book, then, I add to Stephen North’s admonition of his English department colleagues to consider the potential of writing 12

Introduction

centers and urge teachers and researchers in rhetoric and composition studies to consider writing centers—and thus laboratory methods—as not just dynamic teaching sites but as areas for inquiry that are rich with potential. Conflicts over home- versus school-based literacies; issues of teaching nonnative English speakers; the impact of students with diverse races, classes, and cultures; the politics of institutional location—all of these topics and many more imbue the histories and present realities of college and university writing centers. Nevertheless, writing-centerrelated publications—and references to those publications—rarely make it out of specialized journals or edited collections (Boquet and Lerner). It is an academic field whose members are largely talking to themselves, perhaps not a surprise given the contemporary world of narrow academic special interests but unfortunate when the work of the field has so much to offer many others, including rhetoric and composition, communication studies, linguistics, sociology, and education. The history of science education in American colleges and universities suffers from a related but more severe problem: it is largely unexplored. 3 While the history of science as an academic discipline is well established, the education of those scientists and the classrooms and teaching laboratories in which they studied and taught are ripe for exploration. While science education writ large is not my primary focus in this book—my interests are in student writing (and, in chapter 6, drawing) about science—my intent in presenting the pedagogical origins of laboratory methods is to offer science educators possibilities for long-sought after reform. As I have noted, writing and science share roots in the recognition that learning is best enacted one-to-one or in small groups and that hands-on student activity is essential to that learning. While contemporary science educators struggle with the perceived need to convey content, usually relying on presentational methods (lecture) to deliver that foundational knowledge, the pedagogical history of the field shows that hands-on learning or laboratory methods have always worked alongside (and, even, instead of) mere lecture. Additionally, contemporary calls for reform of science education stress the need for active learning and meaningful engagement (see, for instance, Ramaley and Haggett). That spirit of experimentation should not be limited to writing and science, of course. Progressive educators such as Ken Bain, Parker Palmer, and Lisa Delpit consistently stress that what works from kindergarten to college is a learning environment that is creative, challenging, and meaningful. The process of creating these environments and embracing experimentation is certainly not simple in this time of No Child Left Behind (or Untested) policies. However, the long-standing success of 13

Introduction

pedagogical methods that embrace hands-on or student-centered learning cannot be ignored. In effect, the experiment started in both fields in the 1890s has much to offer educators today. Let me end this introduction by reiterating that the concept of laboratory is what is most important here, whether that is a scientific laboratory, a writing laboratory, or the laboratory as a teaching and learning concept. I am reminded of Elizabeth Boquet’s distinction between the writing center as site or place and the writing center as method or practice (“Our Little Secret”). Similarly, my intent in this book is to offer the laboratory as a method, practice, or pedagogy, not necessarily as a fixed and physical site. In that way, the idea of a writing laboratory is applicable to many fields, not just writing and science, but it is in writing studies most specifically that leadership needs to come and for whom recognition of the applicability of its history with writing reform needs to take place. In short, it is my belief that educational reform can grow from interdisciplinary understanding.

14

1 The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

I

n graduate school, a sociology professor gave me some sound advice: When trying to understand an educational reform, go to its origins, for it is there that you’ll find the originators’ intent, the pure soul of the experiment before it became tainted by compromise, subterfuge, or just plain neglect. Writing center work offers a reform of the usual way of doing business in the teaching of writing. Rather than a classroom teacher acting as expert witness, jury, and judge in evaluation of students’ writing, writing centers have long offered themselves as nonevaluative, relatively safe places, as experiments in the teaching of writing. As recommended in a 1950 Conference on College Composition and Communication workshop, “The writing laboratory should be what the classroom often is not—natural, realistic, and friendly” (“The Organization and Use of a Writing Laboratory” 18). Contemporary writing centers might not draw such sharp boundaries with their classroom-teaching colleagues, but the spirit of the writing center as an alternative place certainly lives on.1 Thus, my quest for writing center history was launched. If I could only figure out where the first writing center was created—and how and why—perhaps I would get some sense of that initial charge, some inkling of what it felt like at the beginning. I could connect with those early experimentalists and get an idea as to what the problem was for which writing centers were proposed as the solution. And hopefully that knowledge would apply to the contemporary scene where writing centers continue to struggle for recognition and resources, despite the trappings of academic legitimacy in the form of dedicated publications, a professional organization, and growing numbers of tenure-track directorships. For every writing center that seems on solid footing (as solid as one can get in times of budget uncertainty), there is another that is barely hanging on, in danger of being outsourced to a private company (Murphy and Law, “The Disappearing Writing Center”), or run by a contingent, part-time staff member or faculty spouse, asked to do something about student writing but given scant resources. A missing link in this writing center family tree is a knowledge of its own low-lying branches and its roots, its own history. For many contemporary academics, the idea of a writing center appears newly constituted, with a lineage, if known, only as far back as the experimental era 15

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

of the early 1970s. Consider, for example, this claim from 1985: “Once a rare phenomenon limited to a few innovative schools, the writing center or writing lab is now a common program in colleges and universities” (Haring-Smith et al. 1), or this more recent one: “If you look back at the history of writing centers, you will discover that few existed before the 1970s” (Bower et al. 1). This historical amnesia is also, perhaps, a function of the growth of writing center work as an academic discipline. Lepenies and Weingart note that disciplinary histories “serve the function of legitimation” (xv), and that “histories of disciplines are being written and rewritten, to extend the present (or what is to become the future) as far as possible into the past, thereby constructing an image of continuity, consistency and determinacy” (xvii). The story of the post-1960s writing center is a hero narrative that contemporary writing center directors are quick to recognize and celebrate (Carino, “Open Admissions”). This version of twenty-five years of writing center history goes something like this: We might all be “writing without teachers,” in the words of Peter Elbow circa 1973, but all writers need writing tutors, paraphrasing Muriel Harris circa 1995 (“Talking in the Middle”). When most contemporary writers make mention of writing center history, it is usually to invoke a dark past in contrast to an enlightened present. As I noted in the introduction to this book, Stephen North perhaps set the precedent for this rhetorical move in 1984 when he invoked Robert Moore in “The Idea of a Writing Center” (436). Moore, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in the late 1940s, described the landscape of tutorial support in writing in a 1950 College English article titled “The Writing Laboratory and the Writing Clinic.” North particularly took issue with Moore’s comment that “writing clinics and writing laboratories are becoming increasingly popular among American universities and colleges as remedial agencies for removing students’ deficiencies in composition” (388). Such a belief, for North, was evidence of a “limited conception of what such places can do—the fix-it shop image” (436). Following North’s assertion, the notion of writing labs seemed to be a verboten topic in the move toward writing centers. Here’s what Jim Addison and Henry Wilson had to say on the topic in 1991: As long as the writing “lab” remained a mere lab, the metaphorical baggage associated with more familiar labs served as an obstruction to the full development of the potential power and effectiveness of the writing center. After all, a “lab” is most commonly associated with images of dry, objective “research,” rather than

16

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

with the promotion and development of living, growing organisms such as developing essays, term papers, and other publications. . . . the overall flavor of the concept of “lab” does not lend itself well to the process view of writing: a lab is often more backwardlooking rather than forward-looking, in that the initial focus of a tutoring session is on the “sick” writing project brought into the lab for diagnosis and analysis. (56) One wonders, of course, if Addison and Wilson had ever actually set foot in a scientific laboratory, but nevertheless, they well captured a prevailing attitude. Reality, for better or worse, can offer complications to long-held beliefs. When I researched Moore and the writing clinic he directed at Illinois, I found a far more complex picture (see Lerner, “Searching”). Moore’s writing clinic certainly had elements of punishment for language crimes, but it also was a place that offered support for writers that they could find nowhere else on campus. Indeed, its role must have been a comfortable one for all involved, for that writing clinic existed from the late 1940s until the mid 1980s when its longtime director, Albert Tillman, retired or died (I never figured out which). From my research into Moore, I knew that writing laboratories and clinics existed in the 1940s and 1950s, but I wondered if the origins might have been earlier still. Peter Carino let the writing center world in on the secret in 1995 when he published “Early Writing Centers: Toward a History.” According to Carino, instructional efforts that looked like writing centers have existed since Philo Buck gave a talk on “Laboratory Methods in the Teaching of English” at the 1904 American Education Association conference (105). From Carino’s work, as well as Elizabeth Boquet’s (“Our Little Secret”), I knew that the idea of a writing laboratory was not born in the late 1970s/early 1980s when a flurry of books on the topic appeared.2 After all, when required English composition classes proliferated in the late 1800s (Brereton), someone back then must have advocated for the one-to-one teaching of writing that is the essence of a writing laboratory or center. Still, I needed a starting place, my own eureka moment for tracking down the experimental soul of the contemporary writing center, if not of the entire enterprise of teaching writing in higher education. In this chapter, I present that quest. Helen Parkhurst and the Dalton Laboratory Plan One of my starting points to find the first writing center comes from Christina Murphy, Joe Law, and Steve Sherwood in their Writing Centers:

17

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

An Annotated Bibliography. In their entry for Helen Parkhurst’s book Education on the Dalton Plan, published in 1922, they write, “Describes a method of instruction based upon classroom and laboratory. . . . The laboratories for each class would provide student-centered, self-paced learning that appealed to students’ interests and supported students’ autonomy. The central text and philosophy from which much writing center theory and practice derive” (13). That last line is worth repeating: “The central text and philosophy from which much writing center theory and practice derive.” Wow. Here, it seems, is the answer to the question of where writing centers come from, at least according to Murphy, Law, and Sherwood. Thus, I had my initial questions to investigate: Who was Helen Parkhurst, and did she create the first writing laboratory? Helen Parkhurst was born in 1887 and died in 1973, and went from teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Wisconsin in 1904 to devising a plan for classroom organization and teaching that was adopted worldwide by the mid 1920s (Lager i). Parkhurst’s methods were first tried in a public high school in Dalton, Massachusetts, hence the name Dalton Laboratory Plan. So what about this claim for “central text and philosophy”? After all, the application of the Dalton Laboratory Plan was largely in K-12 settings, was not about teaching writing per se, and was essentially forgotten by the time any significant publication about writing centers began to appear. Well, my reading of Parkhurst’s book, as well as materials about her, certainly reveals a kindred spirit. The “laboratory” component of the plan is the clearest relationship to writing center practice, where students and teachers are free to explore writing and reading and to make meaning from texts. As described by Parkhurst, “The important thing is not to make young children study the thing they don’t like, for the moment school is not as interesting as play it is an injury” (1–2). Parkhurst took particular care in choosing the word laboratory to describe her plan. She was aware of the connotation to drab science activities, but it was in the experimental sense that Parkhurst intended: I admit that the word laboratory may seem to some people inappropriate, because hitherto it has been associated exclusively with scientific experiments. But to me the word is most significant, and I cling to it advisedly in the hope that it may gradually shift the educational point of view away from the atmosphere of prejudice and moribund theories which the word “school” calls up in our minds. Let us think of school rather as a sociological laboratory where the pupils themselves are the experimenters, not the victims of an intricate and crystallized system in whose evolution they

18

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

have neither part nor lot. Think of it as a place where community conditions prevail as they prevail in life itself. (16) In practice, the Dalton Plan sort of looked like a writing center. In a series of subject-specific laboratories, students received predetermined contracts or “job-sheets” that they worked through individually, seeking out the help of the teacher as needed, and taking as long as was required. Ideally, students conducted their work around common tables strewn with reference books and other materials, much like the work surfaces of contemporary writing centers. Is Helen Parkhurst, then, the original promulgator of the writing center concept? And if so, why have is she relatively unknown? One problem is simply the progress of time. Parkhurst’s Dalton Laboratory Plan peaked in popularity around 1925, according to Parkhurst biographer Diana Lager (i). Arthur Applebee, in his history of teaching English, dismisses the Dalton Plan as one of many contract plans at the time, and one whose focus on individual work too easily translated into isolated students filling out worksheets and taking pencil-and-paper exams (93). Perhaps the greatest blow to the Dalton Plan was the simple fact that individual instruction for all has always been just too darn time consuming and, ultimately, expensive. H. W. James of Alabama College described the issue in 1926 in his “experiment with the [Dalton] plan carried on in a class in education made up of college Juniors” (303): “The plan requires a great deal more time on the part of the instructor. After trying out the method, the writer cannot believe that adequate individual conferences can be held with the same number of teaching hours. The instructor in this case spent more than fifty hours in conference as compared with the twelve hours of recitation which would have been required under the recitation method” (305). The Dalton Laboratory Plan, then, succumbed to the dilemma that has long haunted one-to-one work: the difficulty, if not impossibility, of conducting experimental teaching within a system that is set up in discrete blocks of time and predetermined units of labor. H. W. James recommended that “to hold adequate conferences would require at least twice the present number of teachers” (306), and it is a rare school system, college, or university that will make such an investment. The alternative has always been what James presciently described: “The writer believes that it would be wise to have a regular conference of the whole class once a week. This group conference would enable the instructor to call for individual conferences with students who are behind in their contracts or who need special help” (306). Thus, the Dalton Plan was best reserved

19

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

for remediation, for “removing students’ deficiencies in composition” (388) in Robert Moore’s words. Better yet, create an entity such as a writing center where those deficient students might be consigned. That’s the promise-and-punishment nature of one-to-one work: it was clear to Helen Parkhurst and others that whole-class teaching and curricular units designed as assembly-line production resulted in very little meaningful learning. However, experimental solutions such as the Dalton Plan could easily by co-opted as a way to slough off the least prepared students, the ones that took the most amount of teaching, of effort, of TIME! Wholeclass solutions could proceed quietly once those other students were whisked out of the room. Parkhurst biographer Sylvester Moorehead perhaps best summed up the ways that schools maintain the status quo and resist experimental methods, whether in the form of the Dalton Plan or individual conferencing: “Miss Parkhurst’s over-all emphasis, placing the learner before and ahead of all else in the school, will always be quite modern and generally ahead of much practice” (257). Precursors to Dalton My search for writing center origins didn’t stop with Parkhurst. It just seemed too much of a stretch to attribute her plan for school reorganization as the “central text and philosophy from which much writing center theory and practice derive” (Murphy, Law, and Sherwood 13). After all, English teaching is barely mentioned in Education on the Dalton Plan, with the exception of one testimonial from an “English mistress,” who offered that the “Dalton Plan offers the advantages of individual work. It leads to an understanding of the child and an appreciation of his difficulties” (quoted in Parkhurst 164). However, Parkhurst’s book did offer a few more clues. When I looked more closely, I naturally had questions. Who influenced Helen Parkhurst? And is it in her origins that I could find the germ cell of all writing centers? These questions first led to two men: Edgar James Swift and Frederic Burk. According to Parkhurst, Swift, a professor of psychology and pedagogy at Washington University in St. Louis, first offered her the idea of the classroom as a “laboratory” in his 1908 book Mind in the Making (10). Parkhurst cites two particular passages from Swift in her own book, “which seemed to contain the key to my special problems” (10). In the first, Swift criticizes the “didactic method” of teaching, which “still dominates our schools though the conditions that made it serviceable have long since passed. Mental expansion of the teachers themselves is the first step towards removing this medieval debris. They will then investigate their pupils, the schoolroom will become an educational laboratory and 20

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

activity will not be limited to the manual training department” (quoted in Parkhurst 11). Swift shows himself to be a true experimentalist in the second passage, which begins, “Thus far educational experiments have been too detached and fragmentary” (Parkhurst 11). After presenting these passages, Parkhurst notes that “it was Edgar Swift’s book . . . that made me take the firm resolution to become a free lance in education as soon as I could, with leisure enough to experiment in the search for a new and better way” (12). The Dalton Laboratory Plan in the realm of experimentation, then, is certainly aligned with the spirit of writing centers that I was seeking. However, Parkhurst eventually agreed to drop the “laboratory” appellation from the name, responding to complaints that “it brought to mind chemistry and vivisection” (quoted in Lager 36), mirroring the moves I described in my introduction when writing centers cast off the appellation of writing laboratories. In her book, Parkhurst also acknowledged Frederic Burk as an influence. Burk was the superintendent of the San Francisco State Normal School, a think tank for educational reform at the start of the twentieth century, and Parkhurst first met Burk in San Francisco in 1915 when she demonstrated the Montessori method at the educational pavilion of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition; she had studied with Maria Montessori in Italy the previous year (Lager 21). After seeing Parkhurst’s demonstration classroom, Burk felt that “she was the most skillful teacher he had ever observed” (Lager 22). It was not a surprise that Parkhurst and Burk would be so closely aligned. Burk strongly advocated for “individual” methods of teaching as a contrast to the “lock-step” approach that had dominated American schooling. In 1913, Burk and colleagues published Monograph C, a book set up to look like a legal document, with the subtitle “In Re Everychild, a minor, vs. Lockstep Schooling, A suit in Equity.” While not exactly litigious, Monograph C was a series of chapters that students could use for self instruction in all subjects, thereby putting students in control of how slowly or quickly to proceed and how much instruction they needed. The result of this method, according to Burk, writing in 1924, was “electrifying. . . . The lack of interest and disciplinary difficulties disappeared as mist before a rising sun” (“Breaking” 123–24). While Swift and Burk seemed to be direct influences on Parkhurst, one person who Parkhurst does not acknowledge is Preston W. Search. Parkhurst biographer Sylvester Moorehead notes the oddity of this omission (53); not only did Frederic Burk attribute many of his ideas to Search’s influence, but Edgar James Swift also cited Search in his book (253). Could 21

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

it be, then, that Preston Search was the originator of all things writing center, the experimental mad genius who first made the connection between writing and laboratories?3 Certainly, Search receives high marks for innovation. Preston Search was the superintendent of schools in Pueblo, Colorado, in 1888 when he first instituted his ideas on school reform. In an 1894 article, Search described the practices in his school as follows: The work is now conducted largely by what may be called laboratory methods. The entire time of the pupil is spent in active advance work. Every room is a true studio or workshop, in which the pupils work as individuals. The province of the teacher is not to line up the pupils and to consume time by entertainment, lecturing, and development of subjects; but to pass from desk to desk as the inspiring director and pupil’s assistant, with but one intent and that the development of the self-reliant and independent worker. (emphasis added, “Individual Teaching” 157–58) Search’s classrooms do bear a striking resemblance to writing centers and contemporary writing classrooms. Consider, for example, his description of science teaching: “workshops are true laboratories wherein the pupils work purely as individuals. . . . As in other departments, there is no attempt to have pupils carry an accumulation of facts from the laboratory, but they are trained to become students of investigation, thought, originality, and power” (“Individual Teaching” 162). One easily sees the “central text and philosophy” of Parkhurst here though Search is not acknowledged in Education on the Dalton Plan.4 As I looked for the experimental soul of writing centers, Search’s assertion of the laboratory as an educational ideal seemed so far ahead of its time. Still, simply a focus on the term laboratory began to produce a growing number of possibilities for the first writing center to ever have existed. Peter Carino’s supposition that Philo Buck was the first to connect teaching writing and laboratory methods in 1904 seemed largely incorrect. Before I knew it, I was plunged into Search’s time, the 1890s, and his ideas for educational reform suddenly did not seem so far-fetched or out of step with his contemporaries. Laboratory Methods in the s Once I found laboratory as my mantra and delved deeper into the educational literature of the 1890s, all sorts of candidates began to appear as the progenitors of contemporary writing centers. One particular candidate was John Kennedy, the principal of the Batavia, New York, school system. Kennedy’s Batavia Plan, first developed in 1898, was as simple as adding 22

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

an additional teacher to a classroom crowded with fifty-three children. That second teacher’s role, however, was, in Kennedy’s words, “to find the weak spots in the room and make them the strong spots” (The Batavia System 31). In this two-teacher classroom, one teacher would conduct recitation as usual while the other would work individually with students. The result, according to Kennedy, was a transformation of the recitation teacher from nagging disciplinarian to supportive guide. According to Kennedy, “Before she knew it, the other teacher was transformed into a ministering angel . . . There came over her features an unwonted serenity; her voice took on an unaccustomed note of sweetness; we actually found her beaming on the children that she had been hitherto nagging and scolding. The room flowed on, and the very woman that had been an [sic] the verge of hysterics with forty-nine was throwing the broad mantle of a mother’s love over seventy-eight” (“The Need of Individual Instruction” 297). When Kennedy offered his plan at the 1900 meeting of the National Educational Association, one respondent declared, “I believe the time has come to abandon the idea that has grown up around the recitation—the teacher on the platform wise, the pupil down below docile” (Kennedy, “The Need of Individual Instruction” 302). I have a photograph of a Batavia classroom from Kennedy’s book, The Batavia System of Individual Instruction, and it shows on the left side one teacher at the front of the room conferencing with one student while several others sit at their desks reading or writing. On the other side of the room, the other teacher stands, hands folded in front of her, all students’ eyes directed her way. The separation between activity and docility is palpable. While Kennedy’s approach was truly experimental and physically resembled a writing center in some ways (and a writing tutorial program in other ways), he never does mention the word laboratory, and as far as I can tell, his approach never made it into higher education. I needed to look elsewhere. Another candidate, cited in Edgar James Swift’s book, is Gilbert Morrison, a physics teacher at Central High School in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1883. In Morrison’s obituary, a colleague wrote that Morrison “was one of the first to develop the laboratory method of instruction fully, and to advocate its claims at teachers’ institutes and conventions” (“Gilbert Burnet Morrison” 365). Another early advocate was Charles Scott of St. Paul, Minnesota, who addressed the National Educational Association in 1894 and claimed that “the laboratory method of teaching is gaining a firm hold in our educational system” (193). Scott went on to describe the reciprocal nature of teaching via laboratory methods, for both teacher and student stood to benefit: 23

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

The teachers themselves are learning at the same time another lesson, no less important; that the school is a laboratory for them as well as for their pupils; that only as they study the children can they hope for the best success in teaching. The demand from our colleges and universities for laboratory work and laboratory methods, for students with the power which comes from doing and the knowledge which is based on personal investigation, is leavening our high schools. (193) Scott unfortunately does not come out and name those colleges and universities demanding and enacting laboratory work, so I was still at a loss for the first writing center. Perhaps a clue could be found with C. C. Thach of Auburn, who told his National Educational Association audience in 1898 that “what is needed, then, in our entire school work in teaching composition is less psychology and more practice; more of the method of the gymnasium, of the studio, and of the laboratory; i.e., the method of learning to do a thing by doing it” (97). What I was learning from studying the 1890s was that the idea of the writing laboratory is by no means new. Indeed, my time spent flipping through the pages of early copies of English Journal or digging in university archives shows me that very little is new when it comes to teaching writing. Instead, reforms of practices come in response to widespread crises, and those reforms themselves get shaped by competing forces, whether the status quo, the availability of resources, or the guiding philosophies of the reformers and the resisters. The fact that these reform efforts often barely resemble the original intent and that the crises keep occurring—changing only in intensity, not necessarily in nature—masks the lessons learned from the past. Instead, we think see new challenges, ones demanding new solutions. It seems unreasonable to imagine that anyone has been through this situation before. Well, my study of the 1890s (and other crisis eras) has revealed that a great deal of what we see as contemporary challenges and reforms has been experienced before. A key force behind these moments has been drastic increases in higher education enrollments. The four points at which enrollments have increased by the greatest percentage in relation to the preceding era are 1879, 1929, 1949, and 1969 (U.S. Department of Education). At each of these points, colleges and universities were not only faced with far larger numbers of students than they had previously seen, but the students themselves were far more diverse—whether in terms of preparation, race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status—than students of the past. The methods of teaching that had worked—or at least that 24

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

were not met with much resistance—were simply inadequate. It is also important to note that it is in this same era that Harvard first required English composition classes in response to the problem of poorly prepared upperclassmen (Applebee; Connors, “Rhetoric”; Rose “The Language of Exclusion”), and mandatory English composition began to proliferate nationwide. However, in these composition classrooms, lecture and recitation, or the teaching practices that Albert Kitzhaber has described as “a mass of principles to be committed to memory” (Rhetoric 219), were seen to be wholly inadequate. What was needed was a new approach, an experimental approach to teaching students to write. What were needed were laboratory methods. The context for these experiments, the 1890s—the “Gay ’90s”—saw an overall cultural trend toward experimentation and risk taking. In 1893, one quarter of the country’s population stared in awe at the technological marvels displayed at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, and science innovation was seizing the public consciousness (Brands). For many educators, experimentation seemed as promising to schooling as it was to Thomas Edison in his New Jersey laboratory. Historian H. W. Brands labels this era the “reckless decade” and traces the dizzying efforts at everything from electrification to homesteading to urban reform in his book by that name. For educators, the word laboratory was a natural extension of these trends, and in 1896, John Dewey established his Laboratory School at the University of Chicago (Cremin 135). In an 1894 series in The Dial on composition teaching practices nationwide, several prominent educators described their classrooms as writing laboratories. Particularly noteworthy descriptions were offered by Fred Newton Scott at the University of Michigan and John Franklin Genung at Amherst. Scott, for example, offered the following: As Professor Genung has well said, the teaching of composition is properly laboratory work. If that is true, why should it not be placed on the same footing as other laboratory work as regards manning and equipment? I confess that I now and then cast envious eyes upon our laboratory of chemistry, with its ten instructors and its annual expenditure of ten thousand dollars, and try to imagine what might be done in a rhetorical laboratory with an equal force and a fraction of the expenditure. (122) Aha! There, it seems, is the first writing/rhetorical laboratory, shaped in the strong vision of none other an experimentalist than Fred Newton Scott. As an added bonus, Scott’s description captures well the century-long lament from writing centers as underresourced and underappreciated. 25

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

Well, I haven’t found evidence that an actual writing laboratory existed at Michigan during Scott’s time. However, his envy for the resources of science classrooms and acknowledgement of the threats to enacting the concept of the laboratory in composition and across the disciplines would prove to be important themes as the twentieth century unfolded and laboratory methods ran up against the challenges of a growing student population. The Burden of the Laboratory Methods into the s What had seemed like a worthwhile experiment in teaching writing in the 1890s—the laboratory method—evolved into a source of tremendous frustration on the part of an overworked and underpaid teaching staff by the 1930s. While rising enrollments were a force for pedagogical change, they also presented tremendous challenges to the status quo: From the turn of the century to 1930, the American population grew by 75 percent, but enrollments in higher education increased by 400 percent (Levine 68), and the students banging on the universities’ doors were the children of the immigrants who had come to America in the 1890s. In the mid-1920s, the federal General Social Survey of a sample of first-generation Americans found that only three of every twenty-two immigrants’ children of college age in fact attended college; however, by the late 1930s, twelve of thirty-one had some college education (Levine). In America’s public schools, the population boom was even more pronounced, and plans for “individual teaching” proliferated, with one author listing fifteen different schemes, including the St. Louis Plan, the Seattle Plan, the North Denver Plan, and the Winnetka Technique (Stephens 22–46). Given this climate, one would think that higher education would easily embrace the benefits of laboratory instruction in English composition, seeing the individual attention ideal for the new kind of students with a wide variety of preparation. The rub was that individual attention was extremely labor intensive. As I pointed out earlier in this chapter, full implementation of the Dalton Plan was limited by the conferencing demands on a single teacher, and other laboratory methods had similar drawbacks. One of the keenest investigators of this dilemma was Edwin Hopkins of the University of Kansas (Popken). In a series of reports first commissioned by the Modern Language Association and the National Council of Teachers of English in 1909, Hopkins and his committee labored to detail and quantify the burden under which high school and college English teachers suffered. In their first report issued in 1913, the committee noted, “English composition is as much a laboratory subject as is any subject of scientific or industrial training, without however 26

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

requiring expensive material equipment; and with a proper number of pupils, the chief demand on the teacher’s time is that of supervising laboratory practice, oral or written” (Modern Language Association 8). The key here was the “proper number of pupils.” Hopkins and his committee had crunched the numbers and found that the workload was untenable for most college English teachers. The result was that “instructors wear out, suffer from indigestion and nervous exhaustion, lose their efficiency, impair their eyesight, become the prey of shattered nerves, break down and find their way to the hospital or cemetery, because of ‘killing’ work in English composition” (Modern Language Association 7). 5 Ten years later, Hopkins did not find much had changed as far as teacher workload, noting in his report that as a result “the teaching of English composition has become in many schools so nominal and so barren of results that some observers are beginning to think it entirely useless” (Hopkins 34). It was a double bind for the professoriate. On the one hand, almost all acknowledged the necessity to teach writing via practice, feedback, and revision. Writers extolled the virtues of “the office hour” (Baldwin) or the teacher-student writing conference, which was the essence of the laboratory method (see Lerner, “Teacher-Student”). But on the other hand, as Hopkins had shown, the time needed for such work was untenable. Higher education was not structurally set up to allow for laboratory methods. In 1912, an anonymous editorial in English Journal asked in its title, “Shall ‘Laboratory Work’ in Composition Be Given Up?” (48). The answer was an emphatic no, according to that writer. Instead, “Why not give laboratory principles an adequate test, somewhere, for a sufficient time, to determine whether or not students can be trained to do certain definite things according to the standard of established present usage?” (48). In his 1925 survey of the “American Arts College,” Frederick Kelly found that “individual help given by teachers to students is everywhere, but any regularly devised scheme for making use of individual instruction is rare” (88). This period was key in the evolution of a stand-alone writing center, for the movement from laboratory teaching as a method to laboratory teaching as a site, to use Elizabeth Boquet’s terms (“Our Little Secret” 466), would mean that some students could get the full experience of laboratory methods in the classroom while others would get shunted off to entities called “writing laboratories” that were often little more than holding tanks filled with drill pads. In the early twentieth century, higher education embarked on a new experiment in teaching writing, one that would ensure that those beleaguered faculty had adequate time for conferencing and that students least prepared for writing in college 27

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

would have their needs met as well. The solution: test ’em, sort ’em, filter ’em—in other words, remediation. Remedial Roots In my search for the experimental soul of writing centers, I wasn’t ready to buy into the conventional wisdom that early writing centers would be little more than penal holding tanks for the least prepared. However, I did not anticipate that I would come across the bold thinkers of the 1890s, and I was eager to trace my steps forward from the 1890s to the 1930s and find the very first stand-alone college writing laboratory. What I found, instead, was troubling, perhaps best exemplified by the attitude of Grace Ransom, writing in English Journal in 1933: “How can the English teacher find time both to develop creative thought and to establish habits of correct usage in written composition? How can she teach even reasonably correct writing in a school whose pupils come, for the most part, from foreign-speaking homes, and whose parents, many of them, can do little more than sign their names?” (749). Ransom’s elitist attitude certainly was not unusual, based on the legacy of regret about student preparation demonstrated by many writers of this era (and all eras, for that matter). Couple these attitudes with the lack of prestige composition teaching offered as compared to teaching graduate-level literature seminars (Connors, “Rhetoric” 72), and many in English departments clamored for a way to deal with the constant reminder that the university accepted students who were not qualified to do university-level work. One of the first solid references to stand-alone writing centers comes from a 1928 national survey by Warner Taylor of the University of Wisconsin. Taylor notes the following as one of the “changes of major import” to freshman English: “The inauguration of English ‘clinics.’ Six questionnaires [out of 232 responses] deemed this feature worthy of special mention. By clinic was meant a systematized method of compelling students found delinquent in English after having received credit for the Freshman course to take extra work under supervision to bring them abreast of a normal standard of correctness” (emphasis added, 31). The language here is certainly along the lines of Robert Moore’s “remedying deficiencies,” and the connection between the English clinic and correctness is awfully reductive. As I looked further, I was afraid that the following 1929 account by E. S. Noyes of Yale University could be the first writing center: “There is practically no composition in the regular Freshman English course at Yale. Each Freshman does, however, early in the fall, write three short themes. . . . On the evidence of these themes, plus the still more important evidence of the ten-minute quiz papers which nor28

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

mally precede each recitation, Freshmen who are considered deficient in writing are assigned to the Awkward Squad” (678). Awkward Squad! To make matters worse, Noyes reported, “Once in the Squad, a man stays until he is cured” (679). If that wasn’t troubling enough, another publication of the era contains this tidbit from Professor Baldwin Maxwell of the University of Iowa: “Next year we are planning to introduce what is generally known as hospital English, to which upper classmen theoretically may be made to return and take without credit a course in the mechanics of English composition” (Carter 8). This medical theme was taken up earlier by James Hosic in a 1917 federal study of structural reorganization of high schools. In discussing student motivation, Hosic noted, “If each pupil in the school knows that he may at any time be remanded to the English department for special treatment, he will not willingly become a candidate for the ‘hospital’” (139). Correctness, awkward, cured, hospital! What happened to individual instruction for all? When did laboratory methods turn into students as laboratory rats, as the subjects of experimentation, rather than the experimenters themselves? When did the lack of preparation for college-level writing become a disease to be cured by quarantine in the Awkward Squad? This story is a familiar one: An obsession with correctness has long been present in the teaching of English (Connors, “Mechanical Correctness”), whether that is a way to mark students as culturally deficient or simply a more tangible focus for instruction than the much more difficult task of helping students make meaning over what they’re writing. An instructional focus on English fundamentals is also a way for the institution to shift the responsibility for learning from the teacher to the student. Give them worksheets, the thinking goes, and if their subjects and verbs still don’t agree, it’s not our fault—it’s theirs. As college enrollments burgeoned into the 1930s, more students were more under-prepared than ever before. The reaction could be downright hostile, such as that shown by Burges Johnson and Helene Hartley of Syracuse University, who described composition classes in 1936 as “flooded with hordes who come from high schools overcrowded with students lacking the background of cultured homes and the tradition of good English speech” (i). This statement goes a long way to confirm the original purpose of required English as not so much to improve students’ writing skills and ensure academic success but to act as a filter, in Susan Miller’s words, “to separate the unpredestined from those who belong” (74) and to maintain the value of a degree for a few without undercutting the inflow of tuition money from the many. As David Russell has argued, “By weeding out students who were not ‘college 29

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

material,’ exclusionary policies in language instruction allowed universities and departments to achieve selective admissions de facto though they may have been forbidden it de jure” (Writing 63–64). Increasingly rare in this era were true composition laboratories— where small numbers of students received close attention from an instructor, rather than large masses of students filling out worksheets or writing their daily themes as a beleaguered instructor or two circled around the room. Occasional accounts of the “good” laboratory class appeared in the professional literature, such as Paul Mowbray Wheeler’s description of “advanced English composition” at Johns Hopkins, a “laboratory course” in which “the size of the class is rigidly limited. The ideal number is fifteen” (557). Instead, we find from Warner Taylor’s report that on average in 1928 each instructor of first-year composition worked with 93 students (20). On the bright side, the situation had improved slightly from Hopkins’ 1913 report, in which the data showed that instructors on average had 104 students each (Modern Language Association 8). Who knows what they were doing with all that free time! The writing clinic, laboratory, or center as an outlet valve for this situation seemed inevitable. Certainly, students were not going to receive effective instruction under those conditions, were not going to learn to do anything other than eek out deadly dull daily themes and continue to make the same mechanical errors they had made previously. The creation of stand-alone writing clinics or laboratories for the least prepared (or the “most deficient” in the language of the time) would accomplish several purposes: • Colleges and universities could offer a physical and tangible sign that they were doing something about students’ writing. In an era in which the value of a college degree was by no means an easy or universal sell (Levine), the quality of that degree needed to be ensured. • Beleaguered composition instructors could have some of their overwhelming burden relieved as under-prepared students would be shunted off to “sub-freshman” English and writing laboratories. • Drill-and-practice exercises and lecture/recitation on grammar could be similarly shunted off to the writing clinic and stop taking up considerable amounts of class time. That is not to say the existence of writing laboratories and clinics became universal into the 1930s. My guess is that tutorial solutions operated on far less formal bases and that most institutions filtered out the under-prepared through screening tests and several levels of pre-freshman English. By 1928, 40 percent of the 225 institutions surveyed by Taylor

30

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

offered basic writing courses, and 90 percent of the institutions surveyed by Fountain in 1939 had some sort of remedial course work. By 1940, a National Council of Teachers of English survey found 67 percent of the 292 institutions surveyed offered basic writing courses (Berlin, Rhetoric and Reality 65). In 1930, H. J. Arnold of Wittenberg College recommended several “diagnostic and remedial techniques for college freshmen” (262): for composition, the diagnosis would be based on a student’s mastery of “(a) capitalization, (b) punctuation, (c) grammar, (d) sentence structure, and (e) spelling” (264). Based on this test, the next step would be “to segregate into special groups all students whose scores . . . fall below a critical point” (265). Teaching those classes would be graduate students and adjunct faculty, a situation that would prompt Oscar James Campbell of Columbia University to report in 1939 that “crowds of young men and women have been lured into the teaching of English by the great number of positions annually open at the bottom of the heap, and there they stick, contaminating one another with their discouragement and rebellion” (181–82). Within that environment, the chances did not seem good for a writing clinic, laboratory, or center to embody the experimental ethos I was searching for. If Helen Parkhurst’s Dalton Laboratory Plan was the “central text and philosophy from which much writing center theory and practice derive” (Murphy, Law, and Sherwood 13), then the attitude towards the under-prepared in the early twentieth century and the creation of writing clinics to contain those students was a counter-script from which many writing center nightmares derive. It is important to note that encouraging examples of early writing centers were to be found in the 1930s. As I discuss in chapter 4, the University of Minnesota General College Writing Laboratory—founded in 1932—was a model of Deweyan Progressivism that many contemporary writing centers would do well to emulate. In a similar vein, faculty from the Central State Teachers College in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, described their writing laboratory in 1936 as follows: The student spends certain hours each week in the writing laboratory where he co-operates with other students and with the instructor in a study of the essentials for good expression, engages in actual writing under the guidance of the instructor, and learns to appraise the quality of his work. The desire is to help the student grow in ability to write by providing direction in the fulfillment of his ordinary writing requirements rather than by setting up artificially motivated writing exercises. (Heaton and Koopman 63)

31

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

The promise of the writing laboratory could flourish in some instances, but unfortunately common was an Awkward Squad attitude that positioned the writing laboratory as a way to keep underprepared students out of sight and out of mind. My search for the first writing center, then, was not a complete success. Perhaps one of those “English Clinics” referred to by Warner Taylor in 1929 was far more than a place for “removing students’ deficiencies” and was instead an alternative space for students to have the opportunity to engage with their subjects and find meaning in their writing. If so, it was an outlier in the late 1920s, for it would be relatively rare until the early 1950s that a stand-alone writing center represented a worthwhile experiment in the teaching of English, and even then the experience was short-lived as a renewed backlash against remedial students drove laboratory methods underground (Lerner, “Punishment” 62–63). That seems like a familiar cycle, perhaps broken only in our present era when writing centers seem far more commonplace, far more accepted, though far less experimental. Secret Origins Revisited As far as I can tell, those are the origins of writing centers and the laboratory approach to teaching writing. I haven’t settled on a single person, a single institution, or a single exemplar writing center that rose out of the primordial muck and mutated into a comfortable place with worn chairs and cheerful signage. But I keep searching for those origins in what often feels like an obsessive task. I’m convinced that the origins of writing centers offer a blueprint for what many teachers of writing now face. Struggles over literacy, access, and opportunity were just as strongly felt and debated at the turn of the twentieth century as they are today. Perhaps the teaching practices I have described in this chapter will have a ring of familiarity. After all, the pedagogy of laboratory methods was embraced by the process movement of the 1960s and 1970s—though perhaps now called the “workshop” or “conferencing” approach following the work of Donald Graves and Donald Murray at the University of New Hampshire, who popularized the term. Such practices now seem a commonplace, a starting point for any class on teaching methods for writing or a faculty workshop on writing to learn. We want students to learn to use real writing for real purposes, a striving for authentic activity that embodies the experimental nature of the laboratory (it seems only in school settings would one need an experiment in authenticity!). The power of this goal sustains me during my more cynical periods, whether those come from my study of the history of teaching writing, from my day-to-day practice, or from frequent threads on professional 32

The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

listservs that offer a woe-is-me chorus to the narrative of the beleaguered compositionists. Instead, I think of this: The idea of teaching writing via laboratory methods—of teaching and learning as a continuous experiment towards what really works, towards the best of past practices and the search for new practices not yet imagined. This is the ideal of the writing laboratory, of writing centers, and of teaching writing in any course or subject—or, more grandly, of teaching any course or subject. It is an ideal worth striving for. When it comes to the experimental ideal, one would think that laboratory science classes would have long embodied those values. As I show in the next chapter, however, the struggles over laboratory work in science bear striking similarities to the struggles over laboratory methods in English composition. Similar forces—burgeoning enrollments, a lack of student preparation, and the stranglehold of the lecture as a preferred form of instruction—shaped the outcome in every college classroom. Science was not invulnerable to these forces, and the result—historically and currently—strongly shapes the teaching and learning that students encountered.

33

2 Writing in the Science Laboratory: Opportunities Lost

I

n the last chapter, I offered a quote from Fred Newton Scott that I will repeat here. In an article in The Dial, Scott asserted that “teaching of composition is properly laboratory work” (122), and then went on to make a comparison to another familiar laboratory, that used to teach undergraduate science: Why should [composition] not be placed on the same footing as other laboratory work as regards manning and equipment? I confess that I now and then cast envious eyes upon our laboratory of chemistry, with its ten instructors and its annual expenditure of ten thousand dollars, and try to imagine what might be done in a rhetorical laboratory with an equal force and a fraction of the expenditure. . . . The student in composition needs as much personal attention as the student in chemistry. (122)

The first time I read this quote, the picture seemed clear: By the 1890s, I figured, laboratory science had firmly established itself as a regular practice in higher education and garnered the kinds of resources that English faculty could only envy. After all, that largely describes the scene today: science research labs supported by federal grants are much more likely to be pictured on the cover of the alumni magazine than a first-year composition class or a writing center. Well, as in the history of teaching writing in laboratories and centers, once I began to look more closely, a more complex reality emerged. What I learned was that the struggle to fully realize laboratory methods to teach college science—particularly the use of writing to inculcate students into the research and communication practices of scientists—was by no means resolved in Scott’s time and is far from settled now. In this chapter, I describe the evolution of teaching college science via laboratory methods, a history that bears striking parallels to the adoption of laboratory methods to teach English composition. As I described in chapter 1, up to the 1890s, instructional approaches in English composition courses consisted largely of, in Albert Kitzhaber’s words, “a mass of principles to be committed to memory” (Rhetoric 219). After that point, 34

Writing in the Science Laboratory

the recognition of writing as a laboratory subject led to a recognition of the need for students to practice writing as much as possible. At Harvard, Barrett Wendell devised the method of the “daily theme.” At Columbia, Charles Sears Baldwin described in 1894 a system of “frequent themes and, following immediately on each theme, a private conference with each student at an appointed time” (291). If students were to learn to write, they needed frequent practice and meaningful feedback on that writing; in short, they needed the kind of one-to-one attention and feedback that seemed to be the hallmark of science laboratory instruction. For science educators, however, realizing these goals, even during periods of pedagogical reform, has been elusive. Science classrooms and laboratories have all-too often featured reductive measures of students’ grasp of content: multiple-choice tests, fill-in-the-blank laboratory sheets, experimental reports that were rote exercises in filling out an IMRD template—introduction, methods, results, discussion—rather than the kind of argument about scientific findings that is the stuff of real scientific writing and of real science. This dilemma continues today as a new generation of science educators readily agree that laboratory learning should include hands-on activities, student-centered learning, problem identification and solving, and collaboration. However, the use of writing to support and infuse those activities—in other words, the communication activities of practicing scientists—has not been fully realized. This chapter offers a narrative history of college science educators’ attempts to use writing as a means of students learning and expressing that learning in laboratory classrooms. My particular focus is in the genre of the laboratory report—or, more accurately, the scientific research article, and how that remarkably complex task has eluded science educators as a tangible goal. But I also call for writing researchers, theorists, and educators to realize their natural affinity with science and engineering colleagues across campus and to broaden the scope of their research and teaching interests. Laboratory methods of teaching writing are potentially vital to any field, but for writing studies and science education, a renewed focus on writing to learn science offers opportunities to fulfill the promise of reform efforts of the 1890s. Science and the College Curriculum in the Nineteenth Century If I had to choose one key forebear of the teaching of science via laboratory methods—a spiritual descendent of Preston W. Search, Frederic Burk, James Swift, and Helen Parkhurst—I would go with Amos Eaton. Eaton was cofounder with Stephen Van Rensselaer in 1824 of the Rensselaer School (now Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) in Troy, New York 35

Writing in the Science Laboratory

(Griggs 30). Experimentation and student-centered learning were key elements of the Rensselaer School’s teaching methods. Eaton described his approach as follows: “In giving the course in chemistry, the students are to be divided into sections, not exceeding five in each section. These are not to be taught by seeing experiments and hearing lectures, according to the usual method. But they are to lecture and experiment by turns, under the immediate direction of a professor or a competent assistant. Thus by labor, like apprentices to a trade, they are to become operative chemists” (quoted in Griggs 31). In Eaton’s apprentice-expert format, students would offer lectures to teach other the material at hand; criticize those lectures, “such as to point out all errors in language, gesture, position, and manner of performing experiments”; and perform experiments “before studying any elementary rules” (Griggs 31). The result, in Eaton’s words, was that the “place operates like a charm. It astonishes me to see how quick students become master of a subject, when they are put to the work of preparing for a lecture on it, and to illustrating a proposition by experiment” (quoted in McAllister 385). I would like to think that Eaton’s commitment to the essential social nature of learning spread rapidly throughout higher education well into the nineteenth century. While Eaton did influence some educators such as Mary Lyon, the founder of Mount Holyoke Seminary (now College) in 1837 (Shmurak and Handler 316), higher education in the mid-nineteenth century was generally hostile to the study of science, much less to the idea of students as experimenters. In other words, science teaching as a whole was not a long-accepted practice by the time of Fred Newton Scott’s 1894 article in The Dial. According to historian Stanley Guralnick, early in the nineteenth century the status of science faculty sounded remarkably like present-day English adjunct instructors: “The science professor, to apply the term loosely, was at best a peripheral entity in the collegiate organization. . . . His salary was uniformly lower than that of other professors, and his security such that he easily fitted the classic mold of the ‘last hired and the first fired’” (142). When the rare science faculty member attempted to teach laboratory science in the mid- to late nineteenth century, many institutions immediately put a stop to such practices. In his history of American higher education, Frederick Rudolph presents the scene at Amherst College in 1877: One of the old guard was horrified to discover that Professor Benjamin K. Emerson, a German-trained doctor of philosophy in biology and geology, was keeping “his juniors 4 or 5 weeks on the dissection & study of the clam & then . . . [requiring] a thesis

36

Writing in the Science Laboratory

on the subject from every student.” Amherst had not known such nonsense before, and soon Professor Emerson was deprived of biology, which was turned over to the safekeeping of a professor who agreed to the president’s injunction that he teach biology “as an absolutely dependent product of an absolutely independent Creator.” (Le Duc quoted in Rudolph 247) Some institutions, such as Yale, Harvard, and Dartmouth, created separate schools for the study of science, leading a writer to note in 1888 that at Yale “students had no more dealings with the Sheffield [Scientific School] students ‘. . . than the Jews with the Samaritans’” (quoted in Barnes 45). Following the model of Rensselaer, institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia’s School of Mines, and Cornell’s College of Civil Engineering were created in the 1860s as specialty schools that offered “practical” curricula in sciences and engineering (Kargon and Knowles 2). Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century, science established itself as a key component of the college curriculum. In the face of a dramatic enrollment spike—from 1879 to 1899, higher education enrollments more than doubled (U.S. Department of Education)—science faculty offered compelling arguments for the study of their disciplines, and students eagerly chose those courses. Educational historian George DeBoer notes that educators saw the appeal of science study “as a body of useful knowledge, as a way of thinking, and as a tool for disciplining the mind” (62).1 According to historian Sherman Barnes, learning science in the laboratory, in particular, “was declared to be good in ethics as well as in science because it required truthful statement, self-control, and industry” (45). Science could also be justified, as did President Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins, as “the unfolding of the Creator’s Law” (quoted in Barnes 46). This relationship between religion and science proved to be a persuasive appeal. In Barnes’ words, “It became almost a pious attitude that knowing the laws of nature would raise men’s minds to the knowledge of God, for natural laws are thoughts of God, and natural science the rethinking of God’s laws” (46). The study of science, then, was essential to the study of the liberal arts. A powerful force in this acceptance—particularly in regard to laboratory science—was the influence of German-educated faculty who had experienced laboratory learning firsthand (Rosen 279). Also key was the growth of public land-grant institutions following the initial passing of the Morrill Act in 1862 and its reauthorization in 1890 (F. Rudolph 247–53). But perhaps most powerful was simply the explosion of scientific knowledge

37

Writing in the Science Laboratory

in the late nineteenth century. As the U.S. economy shifted from agrarian to industrial, science and engineering were positioned as a way to provide solutions to the problems that rose with industrialization (Rosen 280), and job opportunities abounded, particularly in the engineering fields (Bazerman, The Language 143). By the 1890s, America was enamored with scientific discovery, and higher education knew a market when it saw one. For students who would choose to study science, learning by doing in the laboratory seemed an obvious practice. Learning Science by Doing Science Just as “laboratory methods” became a descriptor for the teaching of writing in the 1890s, as science teaching spread in the late nineteenth century, so did the realization that students needed to learn science by experiencing science in laboratory settings (including the outdoors as a vast natural laboratory). As described by Paul Freer of the University of Michigan in 1898, the “development of the pupil’s reasoning power and his faculties of observation are the important objects to be attained, and not to fill his mind with masses of facts and figures, which are surely forgotten as they are learned” (210). In other words, the lecture and recitation methods that had largely defined college instruction up to this point were inadequate for the subject of science—just as they were inadequate for first-year English composition classes, as I pointed out in chapter 1. Instead, laboratory methods were needed, ones in which students would learn by doing, by collaborating, by speaking, drawing, and writing. This was the work of real science research, after all, and in the heady atmosphere of reform that permeated the late nineteenth century, it seemed perfectly reasonable to have students engage in similar activities. A key early figure in this movement was Louis Agassiz, Harvard professor of zoology and founder of the Comparative Zoology Museum. Agassiz’s teaching methods were an attempt to counter a problem he described as follows: “The pupil studies nature in the schoolroom, and when he goes out of doors he can not find her” (quoted in J. Campbell 119). In a widely anthologized essay, “In the Laboratory with Agassiz,” published in 1874, Samuel Scudder described Agassiz’s inductive approach and the value he placed on students developing the power of observation and on drawing to learn, as I describe in chapter 6. As Scudder struggled to describe the fish haemulon, Agassiz offered advice such as the following: “‘That is good, that is good!’ he repeated; ‘but that is not all; go on’; and so for three long days he placed that fish before my eyes, forbidding me to look at anything else, or to use any artificial aid. ‘Look, look, look,’ was his repeated injunction” (370). 38

Writing in the Science Laboratory

Agassiz’s larger lesson here is the essence of inductive learning. According to Scudder, “Agassiz’s training in the method of observing facts and their orderly arrangement was ever accompanied by the urgent exhortation not to be content with them. ‘Facts are stupid things,’ he would say, ‘until brought into connection with some general law’” (370). In Agassiz’s method, facts were not primary; the key was the connections, inferences, and thinking associated with those facts. Students as experimentalists meant learning by discovery, by experiencing the natural world and drawing the lessons it had to offer, just as any scientist would do. As described by W. L. Poteat of Wake Forest College, the “essential feature of the laboratory method of instruction is that it brings the student into direct contact with nature. He does not study about nature; he studies nature” (287). Thus, Agassiz and his like-minded colleagues were offering disciplinary training, not mere mastery of content devoid of context. By the 1890s, learning science by experimentation became widespread. John Campbell of the University of Georgia could assert in 1891 that in college biology teaching “little attention . . . is now paid to mere facts, as contrasted with the great stress laid on the processes by which those facts are acquired” (7). In chemistry, Lyman Smith asserted in 1903 to his National Educational Association audience that “text books are not essential. Pupils need more hours for laboratory work and less home study of chemistry” (878), and Charles Mabery recommended in 1893 four to six hours per week of laboratory work for high school chemistry classes (467). Josiah Cooke of Harvard, who himself has started teaching small groups of students in his basement laboratory in the 1850s, asserted in 1892 that “one of the most striking features of the changes which have come to pass in methods of education during the last fifty years is the substitution in all departments of natural science of laboratory teaching for the old system of class-room recitation from text-books” (3). By 1906, educational historian Charles Thwing would survey the ways that science teaching had changed up to that point and note that the “place of the laboratory in Chemistry has become great, and apparently permanent” (443); in physics, a “generation ago there were probably not more than half a dozen physical laboratories. At the present time every worthy college is equipped” (443); in geology, “the laboratory method of instruction has tended to supplant the didactic” (443). Thwing traces these efforts to the work of Agassiz at Harvard and notes that the “idea of research became thus firmly established in the American college, both as a means of studying and a condition of teaching. The worth of this method has come to be recognized as of the utmost importance not only to Biology, but also through Biology to all sciences” (444). 39

Writing in the Science Laboratory

As I described in chapter 1, this learning-by-doing approach was also rapidly taking hold in college writing classrooms. Given the prevalence of laboratory science, the possibility was created for faculty to offer ample opportunities for students to communicate their work in meaningful ways, for the German-trained researchers/teachers to apprentice their charges into the complex rhetorical practices of professionals. Unfortunately, the archival evidence I’ve examined shows a reality far from this ideal. As I show in detail in chapter 3 with examples from MIT, Dartmouth, and Mount Holyoke College, during this initial heyday for laboratory learning, students generally needed to write out experimental protocols, record observations or results (often rendered in a drawing), and, at best, provide a short inference or conclusion. In these tasks, however, there is little evidence of reasoning, problem solving, or creativity, little evidence of an authentic rhetorical situation for students. Writing and drawing were largely for monologic knowledge display, particularly given the lack of instructor response to student writing that has been the norm for the archival student work I have found. David Russell describes student laboratory writing of this period as “shaped in the image of other school writing: routine, mechanically correct, primarily evaluative” (Writing in the Academic Disciplines 93). The purposes of writing in the sciences, according to Russell, took on many of the same purposes as freshman English and its “sub-freshman” variants: “Writing came to be used as a means of exclusion, a means of setting and enforcing disciplinary standards, rather than as a means of introducing students to the scientific community through meaningful participation in its activity” (Writing in the Academic Disciplines 95). It was not just student writing in the sciences that did not fulfill the promise of the school science laboratory as a site for authentic learning. By the early twentieth century, laboratory science instruction as a whole would encounter ample criticism, a critique that continues today. Lecture/Demonstration versus Laboratory Early concern for the quality of teaching science in the laboratory came from one of the pioneers in the use of laboratory methods, Josiah Cooke at Harvard, who warned in 1892 about the “mischievous tendency in laboratory teaching to degenerate into the mechanical repetition of certain processes without a proper appreciation of the underlying principles which the experiments were intended to illustrate” (10). By 1910 John Dewey weighed in, noting that “science has been taught too much as an accumulation of ready-made material with which students are to be made familiar, [and] not enough as a method of thinking, an attitude 40

Writing in the Science Laboratory

of mind” (122). In other words, just as quickly as students were seated behind those laboratory benches, some instructors were devising the kind of cook-book approach to experimentation that unfortunately has had as much staying power as grammar-usage worksheets. One problem, as true for laboratory methods as in the teaching of English, was a lack of resources, whether that meant qualified and creative teachers or adequate facilities for a burgeoning student population. As far back as 1871, J. George Hodgins and Alex Machattie of Ontario, Canada, studying the “schools of technical science” in the United States in an effort to import a similar system to their country, offered a cautionary finding: “Schools of Technology are sui generis. Their chief specialty is, in the highest sense, ‘object teaching,’—or teaching by illustration and practice. They require much mental, but still more of manual effort and physical labour on the part of the students. The classes, and even the individual students, require more constant teaching oversight and professorial supervision than in Colleges and Universities” (14). By the 1890s and after the widespread acceptance of science teaching in the laboratory, colleges and universities were realizing that they were perhaps not up to the challenge, either. John Campbell, describing the teaching of biology in 1891, noted that “if it be true, as it doubtless is, that the best results are not generally being reached in the laboratory work conducted in a large number of our colleges, the cause is to be found mainly in two particulars—imperfect preparation and an inadequate number of teachers” (135). Campbell offered as one solution the use of “advanced students in directing the laboratory work of beginners” or peer teaching, the results of which were “usually satisfactory” (135). However, this forward-looking solution of peer-to-peer teaching (and backward-looking given Amos Eaton’s approach at Rensselaer early in the nineteenth century) was relatively rare in Campbell’s time; the solution for many faculty was to fall back on what was familiar: lecture, teacher demonstration of an experiment, and student recitation. With cookbook methods and prepackaged curriculums and textbooks turning the lab into a dull place to be, science educators began to express widespread frustration with the laboratory. As one writer described, “Individual laboratory work has long enjoyed a prominent place in our chemistry teaching but has recently been the butt of severe criticism” (Horton 311). Another science educator declared that “laboratory methods may be as formal and ‘dead’ as any others” (L. Smith 242). An author of a 1935 review of laboratory methods of teaching science concluded that “this limited study may well lead one to ask whether laboratory methods of teaching are not more concerned with nice arrangement of the 41

Writing in the Science Laboratory

subject matter of the field than with the changes which take place in an individual by reason of these laboratory methods, changes which make of him a scientist” (Leighton 70). A key issue was the matter of compensation for faculty who were assigned laboratory duties: Was two hours of laboratory teaching equivalent to one hour of lecture? One writer offered that this formula was “to throw on the teachers of chemistry much more than their comparative share of instruction in the institution without securing the slightest recognition for this increased work” (Payne, “The Lecture-Demonstration: I” 1101). If teaching resources were stretched by laboratory instruction, physical resources for equipment and supplies were similarly taxed. As V. F. Payne of Transylvania College noted in 1932, “A consideration of the vast outlay of wealth in equipment for individual student experimentation should serve to make us ask whether we are receiving full value for outlay” (“The Lecture-Demonstration: II” 932). Another writer made it clear that it was time for the glory days to be over for college science teaching in the laboratory: “Teaching costs per student credit hour in the college sciences are, in many cases, higher than the average cost of all other subjects combined, including the outlay for apparatus and equipment, thus making science instruction very expensive” (Grier 19). The result of this scrutiny was to turn to a familiar means of teaching: Why couldn’t students learn about laboratory work by watching an experienced scientist (or at least their teacher) demonstrate the experiments correctly? Students could dutifully observe what was happening. It was the surgical theater ready to revolutionize the teaching of science—and it did not escape anyone’s notice that it cost a lot less for one person to do an experiment than to have thirty-five or a hundred students engaging in such methods. As Fred Anibel concluded from his study, “the lecture-demonstration method requires about two-thirds as much time for presenting experiments as does the regular individual laboratory method [and the] cost of the lecture-demonstration method is much less than the cost of teaching by the individual laboratory method” (365). The debate over teaching science via demonstration methods versus laboratory methods began to occupy a good deal of space in the science education literature throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Study after study was performed to compare these two methods in every scientific discipline, leading F. A. Riedel of the University of Kansas to title his 1927 article, “What, If Anything, Has Really Been Proved As to the Relative Effectiveness of Demonstration and Laboratory Methods in Science”? The answer was not much, for the question is based on a number of unexamined assumptions, starting with “effectiveness in terms of what.” 42

Writing in the Science Laboratory

The struggle over demonstration versus laboratory methods of teaching stemmed from the many goals that had long been ascribed to science laboratory classes. For instance, Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, told a group of high school teachers in 1906 that he, indeed, had been the first undergraduate in Josiah Cooke’s chemistry laboratory, and that laboratory instruction should aim “to train the powers of observation, and what may be called the judgment in inferring” (703). Other writers cited student outcomes such as the “ability to judge wisely and habits of scientific honesty” (L. Smith 878), as well as “an intelligent respect for nature and for what is natural, as opposed to what is merely formal and artificial” (Poteat 288). In addition, a “wholesome self-reliance is cultivated” (Poteat 288), as was “the true spirit of scientific thought” (Mabery 467). The difficulty, of course, is how to assess these more abstract outcomes, and how far easier it was to assess students’ grasp of content via multiple-choice exams. Laboratory teaching and its relative inefficiency, much less the use of writing to express student learning, would never fare well if mastery of content was the goal. And it usually was. One of the more fervent and prolific critics of laboratory methods of teaching science, particularly at the high-school level, was Elliot Downing of the University of Chicago, and Downing’s publications through the first three decades of the twentieth century represent the assertions of the conservative, status quo point of view. As early as 1917, Downing told readers of School Review that “teachers of science have not been slow to see that the adoption of the laboratory method does not of necessity insure good teaching. Indeed, the multiplication of apparatus and the consequent added responsibility of its successful care and administration often make the laboratory a handicap to a fairly successful instructor” (“Supervised Study” 647). Downing anticipated the arguments against laboratory teaching that would gain prominence in the 1920s and 1930s (led, in part, by Downing). After all, time and money were potentially squandered in the school science laboratory: It is to be noted that the laboratory method of acquiring information is very wasteful of time. It is justifiable only when the concepts involved are new and need clarifying by contact with the materials or occasionally when an important principle may be simply demonstrated by the student’s experimentation. Most information, if the student really has need for it, is most economically acquired either from books or from lectures. (“Supervised Study” 648) Still, in this article Downing does not come out against laboratory teaching as a whole, just laboratory teaching done wrong. He offers particular 43

Writing in the Science Laboratory

wrath for laboratory guides that reduce learning to routinized following of directions: “The laboratory guide is prone to become a receipt book, and the teaching based upon it has been dubbed ‘the cook-book style.’ It scarcely deserves the appellation, for it even lacks the satisfaction of an edible product” (“Supervised Study” 650). By the 1920s, Downing’s cause was to review the various studies of “lecture-demonstration” versus “laboratory methods of instruction in science,” and his conclusion was that “the lecture-demonstration method of instruction yields better results than the laboratory method in imparting essential knowledge and is more economical of time and expense” (“A Comparison” 697). To be fair to Downing, I should point out that in another article he did show some regard for teaching scientific thinking, albeit in militaristic terms: “The teacher who fails to drill pupils in the scientific method is not doing his whole duty as a teacher of science” ( “The Elements” 231). Still, by 1931, Downing would once again sum up the literature on science teaching and conclude, “Experimental work in science may be interesting busy work, but its value as a means of teaching science is evidently not great” (“Methods” 319). Downing was representative of those who believed that the intent of science instruction should be “getting over to the pupils the desired information” and as such, demonstration would always be superior to laboratory work because it “saves time and a great deal of money” (“Methods” 320). In this era, if writers acknowledged learning outcomes other than mastery of scientific facts, it was often about students learning “hands on” how to follow experimental protocols, a kind of rote training in the science lab that almost every student has experienced at some point in her or his academic career. Here, at least, was learning that could be tangibly assessed or even observed. Standardized instruments could be devised (in the interest of fairness and objectivity, of course), including the test of laboratory aptitude, or TLA, which was designed to measure, according to its creators, “both knowledge of ‘general laboratory technique’” and the “ability to apply ‘such technique in various experimental situations’” (Curtis 402). By the 1930s, another blow to laboratory teaching was the rise of general education courses. These science courses were intended to give students a preliminary flavor of the scientific enterprise, and laboratory work was relatively rare (Curtis 352). Still, work in the laboratory persisted in many science courses, generally surviving the purge of the 1930s. With colleges and universities largely equipped with the facilities for science teaching laboratories, someone had to use those lab benches. By the 1940s, Harry Cunningham of Kent State could offer yet another review of studies of 44

Writing in the Science Laboratory

“Lecture Demonstration Versus Individual Laboratory Method in Science Teaching” and hope that “in the future, our educational philosophy will lead us to place a high value upon experimentation in the field of science teaching and thus encourage the continuance of this type of work” (79). Some seventy years after Louis Agassiz revolutionized the teaching of science with hands-on activities and inductive learning, science educators seem to have made little progress enacting those ideals. What was left was merely hope. Long Live the Laboratory While the move to demonstration methods of laboratory teaching was trumpeted by many science educators, attempts to have students learn science in the laboratory did not disappear. Just as laboratory methods to teach writing were recycled when surges in enrollment—and thus less-prepared students than had previously been seen—came after World War II and again in the 1960s (Lerner, “Teacher-Student”), these same forces drew attention to students’ struggles to learn science. Crises in the nation’s scientific problem solving and thus its identity as a world power—World War II, Sputnik, the 1960s, and Star Wars—all turned the nation’s eyes upon Johnny and Jane, who couldn’t do science. Nevertheless, while laboratory and hands-on learning became important once again, science educators seemed unable to overcome long-standing dilemmas, particularly in the use of writing. Here, for instance, is a 1988 description of the “problem”: “The science laboratory has always been regarded as the place where students should learn the process of doing science. But summaries of research on the value of laboratory for learning science did not favor laboratory over lecture-demonstration . . . and more recent studies also show an appalling lack of effectiveness of laboratory instruction” (Novak quoted in Tobin 403). In this climate, it is no wonder that student writing about science is rote, mechanistic, and dull. According to Carolyn Keys, When all the students in the class obtain the same results to an activity, and there is only one scientifically acceptable outcome, the learners quickly realize that they must somehow generate, copy, or paraphrase the knowledge claim that is desired by the teacher. Thus, writing in this genre can easily become a rote activity, especially when the students have no opportunity to determine the appropriate methods for the investigation, ways to display the data, or new meanings for the data. (125) Keys’ concern is shared by many contemporary science educators and educational researchers, ones today grounded in ideas of situated cogni45

Writing in the Science Laboratory

tion, social constructivism, and collaborative learning. Indeed, over the last decade or so research on learning to write in science has regularly appeared in journals in the field. For instance, in his 1994 review of studies on writing to learn science, Rivard concludes that “writing can enhance science learning when teachers tailor tasks to attain meaningful curricular goals, when learners possess the necessary metacognitive knowledge, and when the instructional environment sustains a view of scientific literacy that embraces deep conceptual understanding” (978). Moore found that for introduction to biology students, those who were required to write and revise essays on “specified topics”—and received explicit instruction on how to do so—performed significantly better on exams than students who did no writing or who wrote without revising or instruction (“Does Writing About Science?”). Brian Hand and various colleagues offer extensive research on the “Science Writing Heuristic” (SWH), a “tool for promoting thinking, negotiating meaning, and writing about science laboratory activities” (Hand, Wallace, and Yang 131). Several studies of middle school, high school, and college students have shown use of the SWH to result in students’ improved understanding of science (Keys et al.; Hand, Wallace and Yang; Hohenshell and Hand; Rudd, Greenbowe, and Hand; Rudd et al.; for a summary of this work, see Wallace, Hand, and Prain). Finally, a relatively new effort at using writing to learn science is Calibrated Peer Review (Chapman), a National Science Foundation effort to support student writing and response by automated organization of assessment activities and norming of results. The intent, according to creator Orville Chapman, is to mimic the anonymous peer review process of professional scientists (2; see also Prichard; Pelaez). While this body of research and practice is promising for what it offers reformers of science education, it is largely restricted to K-12 settings and often does not consider the laboratory report itself as a genre worth cultivating. Writing in the science classroom often exists in informal modes—journals, creative pieces, dialogues, or even essays (Keys 118)—the kind of writing that is essential for students to do to engage with the material, but not, I would argue, the way for students to learn the relationship between doing science and communicating what they are doing, not the kind of reasoned report that professional scientists have created since Robert Boyle’s presentations to the Royal Society of London in the mid-seventeenth century (Swales). And it is not a way, in David Russell’s words, “to engage students in the discovery of knowledge, to involve them in the intellectual life of the disciplines” (Writing in the Academic Disciplines 100).

46

Writing in the Science Laboratory

One exception is Carter, Ferzli, and Wiebe’s creation of “LabWrite,” an online college-level tool that guides students through the various subtasks of creating a laboratory report: answering pre-lab questions, keeping a lab notebook, and collecting and reporting data. In their study of LabWrite’s effectiveness, Carter, Ferzli, and Wiebe found that students using LabWrite “learned the science of the labs more effectively than students using normal instructional materials,” were “judged to be significantly more effective in applying scientific reasoning to the lab experiment,” and “demonstrated a significantly more positive attitude toward lab reports than students in the control group” (“Teaching Genre” 405–6). Yet even these authors seem lukewarm about the genre of the laboratory report: “The object is not so much to learn the genre of the lab report itself as it is to engage in the lab report as a way of learning science” (“Teaching Genre” 398). The separation of genre from science seems odd to me, particularly in what we know about genre as not merely a static form but instead as a dynamic socially situated practice (C. Miller). The scientific article as a way of thinking about the process and communication of science is tightly wound to its authors’ identities as scientists or would-be scientists. In other words, the key questions, methods for addressing those questions, and ways of situating those questions and answers within an ongoing body of research speak to the human act of science, not merely to a static document. 2 That is not to say that students writing in the sciences do not have guides at their disposal. The textbook industry has met this market with a host of titles to choose from (for instance, Alley; Paradis and Zimmerman; Moore, Writing to Learn Science; Day; Matthews, Bowen, and Matthews; Penrose and Katz; Knisely; Pechenik; McMillan). However, the vision of student writing in science in these guides often represents a rhetorical situation that is largely ahistorical and seems far from motivating. Here, for instance, is what Knisely offers to justify the structure of a scientific article or laboratory report: Scientific papers are descriptions of how the scientific method was used to study a problem. They follow a standard format that allows the reader, first, to determine initial interest in the paper, second, to read a summary of the paper to learn more, and, finally, to read the paper itself for all the details. This format is very convenient, because it allows busy people to scan volumes of information in a relatively short time, then spend more time reading only those papers that truly provide the information they need. (20)

47

Writing in the Science Laboratory

While scientists’ act of reading research articles might resemble this process to some degree, the emphasis on reading as information gathering—and thus writing as information conveyance—captures none of the dynamism of the experimental process and largely ignores the complexity of the rhetorical choices open to a scientific writer. Another problem is that these ongoing efforts at bringing writing instruction to science education do not necessarily constitute a wave of reform. In their relatively recent review of the literature on teaching science in the lab, Hofstein and Lunetta conclude that “the assumption that laboratory experiences help students understand materials, phenomena, concepts, models and relationships, almost independent of the nature of the laboratory experience, continues to be widespread” (46). The authors also assert that “teachers need ways to find out what their students are thinking and learning in the science laboratory and classroom” (49). Yet nowhere in their twenty-six-page review do the authors make any mention of writing or speaking as a means of achieving those goals. Instead, student writing in the science lab all too often suffers from the following assumptions: Experiments are regarded as decisive tests of validity of hypotheses and conjectures. This myth is reinforced by insistence on a third person, passive voice, emotionally neutral style of laboratory report in which the experimentally determined factual evidence supposedly “speaks for itself,” and any suggestion that the experimenter/inquirer is engaged in the active construction of meaning is carefully excised. (Hodson 94) One result of science educators passing along these myths is, for students, the premature death of the laboratory report as a sustainable genre of writing. Opportunities Regained The stakes for more effectively addressing how well students learn science always seem high. On July 3, 2006, the New York Times weighed in, noting in an editorial that the “United States could easily fall from its privileged perch in the global economy unless it does something about the horrendous state of science education at both the public school and university levels” (“How to Educate” A14). For the Times, the solution lies in the concept of laboratory: “The emerging consensus among educators is that students need early, engaging experiences in the lab—and much more mentoring than most receive now—to maintain their interest and inspire them to take up careers in the sciences” (“How to Educate” A14). 48

Writing in the Science Laboratory

One does not need to look far to find similar high-stakes unease over instruction in writing. The Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges offered in its 2003 report that the “nation’s leaders must place writing squarely in the center of the school agenda, and policy makers at the state and local levels must provide the resources required to improve writing” (National Commission 4). Certainly many fields can lay claim to the need for educational reform and the need for more resources. But science and writing share, for better or worse, a certain cultural resonance that makes crises of student learning seem that much more critical. As witnessed by such examples as the massive federal effort to win the “space race” following the Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957 and the “Johnny Can’t Write” Newsweek magazine expose of the mid-1970s, the failures of science education and the teaching of writing are national news, barometers of cultural inadequacy. Writing and science share many other things: In science, the values of hands-on learning and student inquiry are unmistakable; in writing classes, the need for students to engage in sustained practice on meaningful tasks with helpful feedback is vital. Yet writing in science struggles to enact this school-based version of professional activity, and writing in first-year English composition often suffers from uncertain staffing of those courses, a reliance on textbook-driven curricula, and negative student attitudes about a required hurdle. The promise of the laboratory, then, often looks like a hollow version of the original reforms. Our institutions have a remarkable capacity to resist change, to assert the status quo once the wave of “crisis enthusiasm” has passed. That lecture dominates as a pedagogical technique seems remarkable, given the number of its detractors over the last hundred-plus years. But a reversion to what is relatively easy, to what seems the most efficient way of teaching content—if teaching content is indeed the goal—occurs in classrooms and lecture halls every day. Teaching writing well is simply hard to do, whether that is in first-year English or upper-division molecular biology lab. This dilemma is compounded by the self-imposed separateness of writing studies and science education. While laboratory methods of teaching in both fields have long been offered as a way of meeting the challenges established by national commissions and study groups, researchers, theorists, and educators in science and writing studies seem largely unaware of what they have in common. That lack of relationship, however, is not simply a lack of acknowledging a shared history or a lack of learning from previous reform efforts. What are also lost are the opportunities to learn more deeply about scientific rhetoric and science education. In his book Composition and the Rhetoric of Science: Engaging the Dominant 49

Writing in the Science Laboratory

Discourse, Michael Zerbe establishes the necessity for rhetoric and composition studies to take up these challenges, asserting that the dominance and power of scientific discourse in everyday life—and its seemingly impenetrable authority—are ripe for critique. In Zerbe’s words, It is my belief that rhetoric and composition studies offers the institutional, intellectual, and cultural capacity necessary to develop a wide-spread, sophisticated, and sorely needed scientific literacy. . . . Because scientific rhetoric influences students so profoundly—even and perhaps especially those who do not major in a science—it is incumbent upon rhetoric and composition studies to provide an opportunity to students to develop or hone the requisite intellectual skills to engage this discourse in fully informed ways. (6–7) Research opportunities abound for writing studies scholars to contribute to what it means to write in science and engineering classes and laboratories. Consider, for example, Charles Bazerman’s description of the challenge for scientists in understanding their writing as a rhetorical act: Scientists . . . are unlikely to recognize difficulties in framing successful investigations and claims as rhetorical, unlikely even to be aware of rhetoric as a relevant field. Even if they are aware that their claim making can be fruitfully conceived in rhetorical terms, they may have little idea of what the relevant branches of rhetoric are, what books to read, or whom to talk to. Finally, even if they find a willing rhetorician to talk to, very few of those rhetoricians have had any experience in talking to scientists and applying rhetorical knowledge to problems of scientific communication. (Shaping Written Knowledge 332) If scientists are unlikely to recognize and react to the rhetorical situation for their writing, science students have far less of a chance. While some scholars have made contributions to our understanding of what it means for students to write in engineering and science classrooms (for instance, Herrington; Haas; Patton and Nagelhout; Geller), much work—and opportunity—remains. In terms of shared pedagogy, some hopeful signs have emerged for writing to learn science. In a recent College Composition and Communication article, Moskovitz and Kellogg suggest the use of scientific primary research articles in the practices of first-year English composition. Such study would offer students the opportunity “to take up issues relating 50

Writing in the Science Laboratory

to the science itself, and to expose the role of disciplinary conventions in knowledge production” (311). From the science side, Gillen stresses the importance of teaching science students to analyze and critique—in other words, to study the rhetoric of—the arguments presented in scientific research articles. Gillen justifies this approach in terms similar to what Moskovitz and Kellogg offer, noting that “research articles are powerful tools for promoting active learning, and in particular, they can encourage authentic scientific thinking” (34). And such activity can occur in the production of research articles or laboratory reports, not just in their analysis. Authenticity is indeed a goal of laboratory methods, whether that is in the authentic literacy practices of scientists or meaningful tasks in a first-year writing classroom. Achieving authenticity is challenged by the realities of staffing and resources, and struggles over outcomes. However, the need for hands-on learning, for collaboration and problem solving—and for the reading, writing, speaking, and drawing that grow from and support such activities—has long been clear. Writing and science are both, after all, laboratory subjects, a reality first acknowledged in the 1890s and no less important today. Experimentation, the essence of the “scientific method,” offers both fields opportunities to enact significant reform and overcome the limits of long-established practices identified by the National Academies and Commissions. It is in the idea of writing and science as laboratory subjects, I believe, that both fields can be dynamic and meaningful.

51

3 The Writing of School Science

A

s I described in the previous chapter, the experimental nature of science teaching in the late nineteenth century was often driven by ideas of students as novice scientists learning inductively about the natural world; however, student writing about science in this era seems largely impoverished. In David Russell’s words, “writing came to be used as a means of exclusion, a means of setting and enforcing disciplinary standards, rather than as a means of introducing students to the scientific community through meaningful participation in its activity” (Writing 95). For examples of actual writing in laboratory courses in chemistry, biology/zoology, and physics, I offer evidence from student work at Dartmouth, Mount Holyoke College, and MIT in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.1 During this heyday in the popularization of laboratory methods to teach science, students generally needed to write out experimental protocols, record observations or results, often rendered in a drawing, and, at best, provide a short inference or conclusion. The rhetorical situation for much of this writing was impoverished—students were writing or drawing to a reader/examiner who would offer little written feedback and merely check to see how well students could render the content that had been passed along through lecture or textbook. It was school-based writing as Russell has described with little connection to the complex tasks of actual scientists. These struggles to enact the idea of the writing laboratory in settings that were otherwise innovative in the enterprise of teaching students science attest to the long-standing difficulty for faculty across the curriculum with integrating writing into their teaching. In this, at least, contemporary teachers of writing share a great deal with their historical counterparts. Writing in Biology, Chemistry, and Physics at Dartmouth, – In the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, the popularization of laboratory methods to teach science certainly did result in the frequent use of student writing. This use, however, was narrow in its intent and outcomes, representing an anchoring in the traditional methods of education—give students lots of information of which they then demonstrate their mastery—despite the potential creativity of laboratory methods. 52

The Writing of School Science

My examples of this student writing start at Dartmouth College in the late nineteenth century. Below is a reproduction of the lab notebook of John Gerould, Dartmouth class of 1890 and future Dartmouth professor of botany (courtesy of Dartmouth College Library). EXAMPLE: EXPERIMENT NO. 

Preprinted Column Diagram or description of apparatus and materials used in this experiment.

Student Response [Gerould drew a picture of a jar on its side with a stopper and tube attached and a mouse inside.]

Experiment performed, i.e. statement of how the apparatus and materials are manipulated.

A mouse was put into a bottle connected with a bag of H. The stop cock of the bag is turned and the bottle is filled with H.

Statement of effects or results as ascertained by careful observation.

After a few seconds the mouse turned on his side, panted and struggled but when air was admitted he revived.

Inferences that may be drawn, or any adequate explanation of the observed results.

H does not support life as the mouse would have died of suffocation if he had remained long enough in the gas.

Top of facing page Miscellaneous Notes, Queries, Formulas, etc., relating to the experiment recorded on the opposite page. [Gerould left this side blank]

As was true for many of the teaching materials in science labs at this time, Gerould responded to preprinted instructions in an introduction chemistry lab to study the effects of a hydrogen-only environment on a live mouse. Gerould’s account starts with a drawing of the “apparatus and materials,” continues with a brief description of methods (“A mouse was put into a bottle connected with a bag of H”), a statement of observed results (“After a few seconds the mouse turned on his side, panted and struggled but when air was admitted he revived”), and, finally, an inference or conclusion (“H does not support life”). Certainly, the element of problem solving might have been attractive to some students, but this 53

The Writing of School Science

work and its reporting is a far cry from the meaningful communication of a professional scientist. In fact, Gerould’s chemistry notebook is an ironic counterpoint to the extensive and exhaustive field notes on the various species of flora and fauna he encountered in the Hanover, New Hampshire, area. Here, for instance, is an entry in Gerould’s field notes written in 1885, his freshman year at Dartmouth: Oct. 8, ’85. The hillside wood in Drs. Field was a veritable rendezvous of the birds this morning. Robins were there, disputing loudly among themselves and chasing each other from tree to tree; cautious blue-jays occasionally could be seen darting thro. the withering foliage; cedar-birds with muffled voices perched in the tree-tops; hairy wood-peckers were busily sounding the trees in search of grubs; a species of warbler which I couldn’t identify and songsparrows, bluebirds & peevers (?) were quite common. Oct. 10. Shot a white-throated sparrow. Oct. 11. I observed two species of crickets, the large, black kind, about an inch in length, and a smaller species of a brown color & perhaps 1/2 the size of the former laying their eggs. The site of oviposition was a ledge sparsely covered with a sandy soil & moss. They first scraped away the obstructing moss then stuck their ovipositors which consist of two hollow semi-cylinders joined side by side into the loose soil. Only 2 or 3 eggs are laid in one place. The eggs of the larger were of an elongated oval shape, about 1/8 in long and light brown in color. A cricket which I killed was seized upon by others of the species which bit off and devoured an antenna and tore off and carried away some of the protruding foctal eggs. Queries—What is the use of the two abdominal palpi? And Do crickets hibernate? I think that cricket do not “sing” by rubbing their feet or femoral joints against the body or wing for I observed a cricket while singing that was motionless—at least his legs were. The future botanist was clearly signaled by this “personal notebook” with its detailed observations, questions, and speculations, in contrast to the templates he minimally filled out in his chemistry laboratory workbook. In another chemistry class, Gerould was asked to offer similar reductive writing. Below is a reproduced page (courtesy of Dartmouth College

54

The Writing of School Science

Library) from Gerould’s response to the class text, Laboratory Exercises in Chemistry with Simple Apparatus (Edwin J. Barlett, 1889). Oxygen (O). 8. See 6, 1. 1. Heat (dry t.t.) 1gr. Of potassic chlorate (KClO3 ). Test the gas evolved with a glowing stick. Potasic chloride (KCl) is left in the tube. 2. Dissolve a small portion of this KCl in water, and add a drop of silver nitrate (AgNO3 ) solution. Test a solution of KClO3 in the same manner. What difference? 3. Place in a s.n. test-tube a mixture of 2 or 3 gr. Of KClO3 and half as much manganese dioxide (MnO2). Arrange for the collection of a gas over water, and heat the tube. Collect two jars of the gas. 4. Into one jar (mouth upwards) plunge a glowing stick; when it bursts into flame, remove it—blow out the flame, return it. Continue this until the O is exhausted. 5. Wind a fine iron wire twice about the brimstone end of a match, using not more than one eight of the match; have the other jar of O all ready; light the match, and plunge the wire nearly to the bottom of the jar. A portion of the iron will burn in the O. 6. Ozone (O3 ). Put about 2 c. c. of dilute H2SO4 into a test tube; add gradually about 1gr. Of baric peroxide (BaO2); finally warm. Observe odor, and plunge into the tube a strip of paper that has been dipped into a mixture of potassic iodide solution and starch paste. With the glowing stick ascertain whether or not O is present. [From Gerould’s hand-written response on facing page:] O 8. 1. The KClO3 melts and a gas oxygen is given off. The splinter burns brightly. 2. The KCl solution gives a white precipitate (silver chloride). The KClO3 SOl. gives no reaction. 3.4. Stick burns with a peculiarly bright flame. 5. The lower end of the wire burns and is consumed. 6. A peculiar odor like that of wet matches shows presence of ozone. The paper dipped in the sol. of Potass. iodide and starch paste turns bluish. No O is present. Stick will not burn in the ozone.

The step-by-step instruction or protocol led to writing in which Gerould briefly offers visible results (“The KClO3 melts”) and inferences based on what cannot be seen (“and a gas oxygen is given off”), plus a few words of judgment: “peculiarly bright flame,” “a peculiar odor.” Writing is a means of demonstrating understanding in this context, but the primary reader is the instructor/examiner, and the larger social functions of writing about science are nowhere to be found.

55

The Writing of School Science

In physics, this use of writing to demonstrate one’s ability to follow lab protocols is demonstrated below, in a reproduction of Arthur B. Meservey’s (class of 1906) Physics I lab experiments with magnetism conducted in 1905 (courtesy of Dartmouth College Library). Meservey’s report is typed on a mimeographed sheet and follows the standard format of establishing the objectives for the lab, the theory that might predict results, the apparatus used to conduct the experiment, and the results Meservey found (which are rendered primarily with a drawing). This report, however, rather than a retrospective account of what Meservey did, is instead an instruction set to be followed for conducting this experiment. I did not find the instructional materials supporting this lab and thus cannot say for sure if Meservey was merely recopying the lab protocol; however, the last line—“This result, I think, is fairly accurate.”—would seem to indicate that Meservey is writing this as a retrospective account. The result is thus a fairly odd mix of instruction set and presentation of results. [Note: the following was typed on a mimeographed sheet] EXPERIMENT LXIII. APRIL 4, 1905 OBJECT— To plot the lines of magnetic force, (1) of a magnet and the earth together, (2) of the magnet alone. THEORY— If a small bar magnet is suspended free to turn, it will set itself tangent to the line of magnetic force at its center. If the length is small the curve drawn through the ends of the bar approximates very closely the curve of the line of force. If, then, the position of the ends be marked and the bar moved so that one end occupies the former position of the other end, and this position be marked, etc., a curve drawn through these various points will represent the line of force in that part of the field. APPARATUS— Two sheets of paper, bar magnets, small magnetized needle, pins and thread. 1. Place the needle with its axis pointing east and west. Trace the lines as described above, from one pole to the other or untill [sic] they run off the paper. There will be two points in diagonally opposite corners of the paper where the earth’s force and that of the magnet counteract each other, and the position of the needle is indeterminate. 2. Fasten a thread in a north and south direction, holding it above the paper by means of pins. Fasten a bar magnet to the paper with wax. Place the needle in such a position that it points directly at the magnet and is parallel to the thread. Mark the position of the ends and change the position of the paper, with the magnet on it, and of the needle, till the other end of the needle is where the end away from the magnet was,

56

The Writing of School Science

still keeping the needle parallel to the thread. If the needle is thus kept parallel to the direction of the earth’s field, the lines traced on the paper will be the result of the action of the magnet alone. Sources of error— if the needle is too long, the resulting curve is a less close approximation of the line of force; if it is too short it is hard to tell the direction in which it points and mark it accurately. This result, I think, is fairly accurate. [Following two pages are drawings of experimental result]

Finally, to show how writing was used in a variety of sciences classes at Dartmouth during this period, below is a reproduced page from the physiological chemistry lab notebook of Deering Smith, completed in 1917 (courtesy of Dartmouth College Library). Carbohydrates (cont.) Starch I obtained saliva by chewing paraffine. I added an equal quantity of thin starch paste to the saliva obtained above and keep at 40°C for 15 min. at the end of that time I tested, and found no starch present, but sugar present. The starch had been inverted to glucose by the ptyalin in the saliva. Glycogen 16) Glycogen tastes sweetish and slightly bitter. ” is soluble in H2O, and gives a red color with iodine. 17) Trommer’s Test – negative. 18) I converted some of the solution into glucose by heating with Hcl. The presence of the glucose was proved by Trommer’s Test. Cellulose 21) Cellulose (absorbent cotton, or filter paper) is not stained by iodine. 22) Cellulose (I used filter paper) is soluble in Zinc chloride (Schultze’s reagent), and in a sol. of Cu(OH)2 in NH4OH (Schweitzer’s reagent). The cellulose was ppt. out as fine flakes upon the addition of H2O. 23) Making parchment. I immersed a piece of heavy filter paper for a few seconds in a cold mixture of 1 vol. H2O, & 2 vol. H2SO4 , and plunged the paper into cold water immediately on its removal. A tough parchment was made. 24) I dissolved another piece of filter paper in the warm acid. Then I diluted it and tested for glucose. It was present by Trommer’s Test.

Smith’s approach is highly personable in a way, with the frequent use of personal pronouns and a straightforward approach to recording what he did and what he found. Nevertheless, the use of writing is quite minimal,

57

The Writing of School Science

largely in the form of brief notes and brief conclusions, and consistent with student examples that have long filled filing cabinets of science teachers throughout institutions of higher education. This short-answer template shows little evidence of reasoning, problem solving, or creativity. Instruction in report writing never moved much beyond the minimalist prose of fill-in-the-blank worksheets or the assertion that good writing equals correct writing. Writing Zoology at Mount Holyoke While Dartmouth offered extensive science instruction to its all-male student body, about 120 miles due south in South Hadley, Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke Seminary and then College has long been noted for its exemplary science teaching, for the research produced by its faculty, and by the ways that faculty have offered opportunities for undergraduate women to participate in those professional activities. As described by Miriam Levin in her history of Mount Holyoke, “Teaching science was a source of power and a means of advancement for Mt. Holyoke faculty and graduates, and for the institution as well, in a nation where the demand for professionals with scientific knowledge grew faster than supply” (3). Teaching science at Mount Holyoke also meant a strong emphasis on hands-on, laboratory work. Louis Agassiz, whose teaching is largely the subject of chapter 6, was an important influence in this regard on several faculty members, particularly Lydia Shattuck and Cornelia Clapp, both of whom studied in the early 1870s at Agassiz’s Anderson School of Natural History on Penikese Island off Cape Cod (Levin 52). Clapp founded the zoology department at Mount Holyoke in 1875 and focused her teaching practices on, in Levin’s words, “creat[ing] a classical laboratory-based zoology course by identifying the organisms and developing the protocols that would allow students to systematically explore anatomical structures and physiology” (74). Observing, writing, and drawing played key roles in this laboratory learning, an influence from Louis Agassiz to Cornelia Clapp that can be seen as late as 1921 in Ann Morgan’s description of the “Ideals of the Department” of zoology for the Alumnae Quarterly: It is the hope of the department that it may teach zoology with some of that happy blending of strength and flexibility which is inwrought in its tradition. We shall pass through many pedagogical fashions, but the worthy ones must always be based upon the need to look, to look again, and always to think, before and after. It was Doctor Clapp’s habit to insist uncompromisingly upon the fact. Her “Exactly what did you see?” finally produced an ability

58

The Writing of School Science

to think one’s own thoughts. It is hoped that with some of her mixture of sympathy and Socratic determination, we also may help our students to be cautious pioneers, but still pioneers as so many Mount Holyoke students have been in the past (17). Mount Holyoke’s commitment to laboratory teaching of science was accompanied by an emphasis on student writing. Instructional materials that I found in the college archives consistently established the tasks that students needed to accomplish and the standards for acceptable writing that should result. For instance, in General Chemistry: General Directions for Laboratory Notebooks, undergraduates around the turn of the twentieth century found the following advice: Take notes on the spot. An experiment performed mechanically is valueless. Study meaning of all phenomena and record no work carelessly. The description of an experiment should be so clear that the examiner can gain in the shortest possible time a full conception of the work done. This result can be best secured by the use of prominent headings and paragraphs to indicate subjects or transitions in the work. The description of each experiment should be complete in itself without reference to the printed directions. Such description of each experiment should include: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Object of experiment. Materials used. Description of apparatus with clear sketch if at all complicated. Conditions of experiment, i.e. heat, cold, &c. All observed phenomena. Conclusions drawn from experiment. (Equations should be introduced where necessary when the work is sufficiently advanced)

This note-book must be handed in after each laboratory session. It can be obtained at beginning of your next session. Note criticisms and make corrections where necessary. (Rowell papers) In another example from 1916, the preface to the Laboratory Directions for the Course in General Physiology (Zoology B-I and B-II) by Abby H. Turner contained the following: “‘Laboratory’ should be synonymous with ‘Opportunity,’ not with ‘Drudgery.’”—E. P. Lyon Laboratory work consists of two parts, the doing of an experiment and the preparation of a written report of it. Read the

59

The Writing of School Science

directions for each experiment through before beginning to work. Consult the blackboard for additional directions or corrections. If results seem peculiar, try to find out what the matter is. See first whether directions have been followed. When careless mistakes have been made, expect to repeat the work outside of laboratory hours. The written report of the experiment should be clear and concise. It should supplement or replace the account of the experiment given in the directions. It should state the results obtained. It should include the conclusions to be drawn from the results. The perception of the conclusion is the aim of the experiment. Don’t omit to state it. Use good English. “In observing use your own eyes. In describing experiments use your own words. In thinking over results use your own mind.”—A. F. Blood. This can be done even though two students must often work together. (3) Thus, the scene would seem to be set for potentially rich production of student writing, albeit in the fairly proscribed forms of experimental reports, with an emphasis on clarity and conciseness and a reminder to “Use good English.” Little different, actually, than most contemporary directions for students to write about science (as I demonstrated in chapter 2). The reality, however, as at least evidenced by what students have chosen to donate to the Mount Holyoke archives, falls far short of the possibility for rich writing about science. Instead, the emphasis in these examples is on writing as a way of demonstrating knowledge and a means for the teacher/examiner to judge the correctness of students’ demonstration of that knowledge. Creative engagement with the discourse of science—or at the very least a compelling write-up of scientific study—was not what I have found. My first example of writing in zoology at Mount Holyoke comes from a 1902 laboratory notebook by Elizabeth Lathrop Rowell, and this example is the kind of writing and drawing of science that I saw repeated in many college students’ notebooks from 1890 to the 1930s. As shown in figure 3.1, for her “Zoology Work on the Frog,” Rowell needed to draw the creature and accompany that drawing with a detailed description of “external characteristics.” The writing and drawing are largely a description of what Rowell was able to observe, a way of seeing with the pen (or pencil), and its accuracy and completeness were the qualities seemingly valued by Mount Holyoke faculty, at least based on the few comments and corrections I saw made on similar student work. In the few examples of complete reports that I found in the Mount Holyoke archives, student writing was also largely descriptive in nature, 60

The Writing of School Science

detailing a natural process or a scientific procedure. For example, figure 3.2 shows the final page of a five-page typed report on “The Formation of the Human Placenta,” written by Ruth Garrod in 1932 for Zoology 203. Garrod’s report, while not an account of laboratory experimentation, still largely relies on statements of fact and supporting drawings to demonstrate her knowledge of a biological process. Her instructor’s comments and edits found throughout the report focus primarily on judging Garrod’s accuracy. For example, her instructor brackets and emphasizes the following: “The sluggish circulation of the placenta is responsible for the low oxygen content of fetal blood. Compensation is found however in the fact that there is a relatively large amount of blood which circulates rapidly,” and offers in a handwritten note, “But this is a contradiction?” Her instructor also crosses out Garrod’s figure title, “Ready to Go Out to See the World,” which accompanies a depiction of a fetus in the late stages of development. In her final comments, the instructor gives the paper a B- and notes, “Outlines good. Legends for text-figures not quite fitting.” The instructor is attempting to move Garrod to more professional kinds of presentation of science, as well as attending to the accuracy of her descriptions, but by no means is Garrod’s report a close approximation of a professional scientist’s writing, except in the form of descriptions commonly found in textbooks. Scientific writing, in this context, is not about discovery or about persuading a reader to accept one’s interpretation of a scientific phenomenon, but about accurately and faithfully rendering some static reality. In what is the only example I found of a complete undergraduate report conveying the results of actual experimentation, below is the first page of Priscilla Rasquin’s 1931 report on “Methods for the Demonstration of Fat in Intestinal Tissue,” completed for Zoology 302 (courtesy of Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections). While this report comes much closer to the discursive moves one would find in published scientific articles, it still suffers from a fairly narrow conception of that task and its potential. For instance, the start of the report makes no attempt to offer context for the work or justify its importance as most scientific introductions would do (Swales). Instead, we get the following single sentence: “For the demonstration of fat, osmic acid is commonly used but as a fixer its penetrating power is poor and other methods were found to show more fat in both surface epithelium and in the deeper layers of the tissues.” There is certainly a gap shown in the limits of osmic acid, one to be filled by Rasquin’s research, but by the second paragraph, Rasquin is describing her particular methods with no other context setting for those methods. 61

Figure 3.1. Excerpt from Elizabeth Lathrop Rowell’s “Zoology Work on the Frog,” Zoology 2, Mount Holyoke College, 1902–3 (courtesy of Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

Figure 3.2. Excerpt from Ruth Garrod’s report “The Formation of the Human Placenta,” Zoology 203, Mount Holyoke College, 1932 (courtesy of Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

The Writing of School Science METHODS FOR THE DEMONSTRATION OF FAT IN INTESTINAL TISSUE

For the demonstration of fat, osmic acid is commonly used but as a fixer its penetrating power is poor and other methods were found to show more fat in both surface epithelium and in the deeper layers of the tissue. Rats were used to provide the fresh tissue and these were killed with illuminating gas as the use of chloroform might have an effect on the fatty tissue. They were injected with a .5 solution of Trypan blue for a period of four to five days previous to killing. One to one and one-half cc. of solution were injected each day and about 2½ cc. were injected on the last day. One day at least was allowed to elapse between the last injection and the time of killing in order that the animal might fully recover from the effects of the ether. Food was removed 48 hours before the rat’s death and water 24 hours before in order that the epithelial cells lining the intestine might be in a resting condition. Just before killing, the rats were fed a mixture of olive oil, Sudan III and a little meal. The Sudan III did not sufficiently color the fat droplets taken in by the cells and a subsequent staining was necessary. Herxheimer’s fat stain was found to give the most intense color to the the [sic] fat and to stain more fat than either Sudan III or nile blue sulphate.

The rest of the report follows this pattern of describing experimental methods and offering the results of those methods. The second to last paragraph, however, comes closest to accomplishing more sophisticated discursive moves as the author puts her results into the perspective of what has been published by others: Smith and Rettie (1928) identify these cells as leucocytes and Bloor (1916) as the “white blood cells of the intestinal lymph spaces.” They seem to resemble eosinohpiles more than anything else. Those cells noted as resembling lymphocytes in unstained, osmic acid fixed material may have been incompletely fixed. No nuclear structure could be seen and in stained material, the cells were practically impossible to locate. The transport of fat from epithelium to lacteal is possibly aided in some way by these leucocytes. Fat must be passed through the cells. In the rat, the only evidence of fat in a stainable form between the cells was found by the use of Bell’s method. Smith and Rettie think that the fat is in a condition of fine dispersion, too fine to be detected by stains until it is coalesced in the epithelium and lacteals. With a more accurate technique better results would no doubt be obtained. (6)

65

The Writing of School Science

What is particularly vexing about these writing examples from student laboratories is that, according to Lisa Mastrangelo, during this same period, Mount Holyoke provided innovative instruction in rhetoric, offering its students opportunities for debate and attention to the processes of writing (57). Another irony is that in science instruction, according to Shmurak and Handler, undergraduates were often co-investigators with science faculty—though the creation of postgraduate degree programs around 1900 would mean that increasingly it was graduate students who could play that role (Levin 112). Being involved in conducting laboratory research and being involved in the sophisticated task of writing up that research for eventual publication, however, are very different kinds of opportunities, the former a kind of inexpensive labor that is essential to the scientific enterprise, the latter a rare opportunity for any undergraduate, no matter how sophisticated her or his skill in laboratory science. Nevertheless, writing in zoology classes at Mount Holyoke must not have all been rote descriptions of organisms and processes. Based on several assignment prompts I found in the Mount Holyoke archives, students had opportunities to explore significant ideas through writing. For example, the following exam prompt comes from a 1918 physiology class: Soldier is called from dug-out at 3 a.m. eats hasty but good and abundant breakfast, waits an hour or two, and goes over the top at dawn. Weight of gas-mask, rifle, ammunition, emergency rations and other equipment is not less than 40 pounds. There is a heavy protecting barrage in front. No resistance from the enemy is encountered until his trenches are reached when the fighting becomes stubborn and ground is won very slowly for four hours. Day, hot and hazy, with no wind. Water very limited as supplies are cut off for most of the day. Soldier’s company is forced to retreat about noon under enemy fire across no-man’s land to old trenches, now much battered. Enemy attacks are continued but trenches are held though with great difficulty until reserves come up at midnight. Soldier is sent behind lines to rest a few hours. Discuss somewhat fully the physiology of the situation under the following headings. 1. Fatigue, factors involved in effects of fatigue, in resistance to fatigue, in recovery from fatigue. 2. Changes in respiration when gas-mask must be put on. There is some resistance to breathing in this case, though of course not great. 3. Changes in circulation during the day. How are these possible? 4. Control of body temperature.

66

The Writing of School Science

5. What kinds of waste are increased in quantity? 6. If soldier should be wounded, what powers does he have to aid recovery? How is he limited? The significant factors in injury are usually hemorrhage, destruction of tissue, infection and delayed treatment, some or all. 7. From the standpoint of the nervous system, he would naturally run away in reflex response to most unpleasant and dangerindicating stimuli. Show by diagram the pathway in the nervous system such a reflex would follow. What is your understanding of the connections of the nerve cells whose use prevents such a disgrace? (Mount Holyoke College, Zoology Department)

In the context of World War I, such an assignment certainly passes the test of relevance and immediacy, as well as the application of scientific knowledge to a real-world issue. Finally, student writing about zoology could also include considerations of what it meant to teach the subject. For her 1923 exam in Zoology IV, Lorna Stockdale, class of 1923, found the following question: If you were giving a course in embryology in which laboratory work on mammalian material was limited to two weeks (over four lessons), what points in mammalian development would you emphasize in the four lessons and how would you do it? Make brief laboratory outlines for separate lessons or one outline for the four lessons. For the young women of Mount Holyoke, writing about science was not restricted to concise and accurate descriptions of organisms and their constituent parts and functions. Nevertheless, these creative and provocative writing prompts under examination conditions do not necessarily map neatly on to the writing tasks of professional scientists. As I described in chapter 2, writing about science in this era—and largely today—was an opportunity lost. Writing in Mining and Metallurgy at MIT While the zoology department at Mount Holyoke and the Department of Mining and Metallurgy at MIT might not at first thought offer much in the way of commonalities, through the lens of student writing produced in these two departments, the similarities are striking. Archival material from the Department of Mining and Metallurgy at MIT from 1908 to 1924 offers additional evidence of the relative lack of imagination for student writing about science and the continued imperative for faculty to use writing as a means of judging the correctness of students’ demonstration of knowledge.

67

The Writing of School Science

The Department of Mining and Metallurgy was one of the original courses of study offered when MIT opened in 1865 (Institute Archives, MIT Libraries) and was firmly established by the early twentieth century. At that point, laboratory work was primarily found in a required metallurgical laboratory and its accompanying class titled “Laboratory Reports.” For the latter, instruction was not necessarily explicitly focused on writing, at least according to the catalog description. Instead, “students and instructors meet and discuss the various points brought out by the week’s work” (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bulletin 248). It is important to note that MIT did have an English department at this time—another long-standing course of study—as well as required first-year English composition. According to the 1908 catalog, “English Composition at the Institute is taught as an essential part of the training of every educated man, but special emphasis is laid upon its importance in technical work” (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bulletin 367). We are also told that in students’ “third and fourth years written work is now arranged in professional Courses in connection with regular technical work” (367). So what was the result of this writing-in-the-disciplines approach? A 1908 metallurgy lab example of a “Report on Potassium Cyanide Test” by J. S. Pearce (figure 3.3) is strikingly similar to my first two examples and is little more than a fill-in-the-blank worksheet as the student extracted gold from an ore sample. Pearce and his classmates recorded characteristics of the ore and added the essential details of method: “aerated 37 hours,” “Ore mixed by coning,” “Split shoveled 3 times,” “Sampled with spatula.” These minimal details of methods and results offer no insight into problem solving, experimentation, or context. The goal was seemingly to answer the question of how much gold could be recovered from the ore, not exploration of student thinking about this question or the contextualizing of the answer in the intellectual and practical work of professional engineers. By the 1914–15 school year, however, the teaching staff must have realized the unsatisfactory nature of these “reports.” The instructional handout below (MIT Department of Mining and Metallurgy Curriculum Materials, 1908–1926 [AC 72], Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA) indicates that “it seems desirable that each student should have at the end of the course a set of notes upon this work.” The purpose of these notes would serve to professionalize students in a way, as they would be “valuable for future reference after he has gone into practical work, and will serve as a guide to practical note taking at that time.”

68

Figure 3.3. J. S. Pearce’s “Report on Potassium Cyanide Test,” Department of Mining and Metallurgy, MIT, 1908 (MIT Department of Mining and Metallurgy Curricular Materials, 1900–1926 [AC72], Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

The Writing of School Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mining Laboratory Locke Work with Professor Richards.

It seems desirable that each student should have at the end of the course a set of notes upon this work. Such a set of notes will be valuable for future reference after he has gone into practical work, and will serve as a guide to practical note taking at that time. These notes are to be made out and handed in after each run and later at the end of the term the whole bunch is to be handed in for final inspection. Keep notes of work with Professor Richards separate from those with Professors Hofman and Bugbee. All neostyle notes which may be given you are to be bound with your own notes. As these are about 8-1/2 x 10 it will make your note book neat and uniform if you use paper of this same size. Your written notes, should (unless covered by neostyle sheets), include a story of each run, a description of each machine with its principle of action, adjustments, nature of its work, its strong points, its weak points and any other facts you may learn about it. It is unnecessary to duplicate in your written notes anything given you on the neostyle sheets. Notes should be taken at the Saturday sessions in Laboratory Reports, and these should be included as a part of your note book.

Thus, the instructional staff asserts (in nonassertive language) that professional mining engineers do indeed need to write accurate notes and that schoolwork can provide opportunities to learn this skill. While students are not given a great deal of explicit instruction in this handout, they are told that notes should be “neat and uniform” and should include “a story of each run, a description of each machine with its principle of action, adjustments, nature of its work, its strong points, its weak points, and any other facts you may learn about it.” In this brief handout (which remained unchanged for the next ten years), the rhetoric seems remarkably nonprofessional in a way. There is no mention of fellow engineers as audience, no mention of the purpose for maintaining accuracy and neatness, no explanation how the “story of each run” and what students may learn about the equipment will be of use other than as a way for the instructional staff to monitor student learning. For example, the instructions for “Report on Jigs” from the same school year (below; MIT Department of Mining and Metallurgy Curriculum

70

The Writing of School Science

Materials, 1908–1926 [AC 72], Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA) simply ask students to “write a report of your work on both jigs including construction and mechanisms (sketches), principle of action, effect of adjustments, and the work that each jig is doing.” Why and for whom is not specified. NO. . REPORT ON JIGS.

First instruct No. 3 and No. 4 regarding their duties. Remove the tailings from each of the jigs and put them on the drying tables. Be very careful not to mix the tailings of the two jigs. Write a report of your work on both jigs including construction and mechanism (sketches), principle of action, effect of adjustments, and the work that each jig is doing. Hand your report to the instructor at the end of the shift. The next position is NO. 6, HELPER ON ROUND TABLE.

By 1925 the department came up with a far more hard-line and detailed two-page handout of directions for report writing, as shown below (MIT Department of Mining and Metallurgy Curriculum Materials, 1908–1926 [AC 72], Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA). The sharper edge of these instructions is clear from the first sentence. Students were also told that this new scrutiny has a preprofessional purpose, that “young and even old engineers have been criticised for lack of ability to present a satisfactory report.” Unfortunately, according to these instructions, “the way in which the reports are written” would mainly seem to be correct use of symbols, terms, and references, as well as those familiar obsessions: grammar, punctuation, formatting. In fact, it is the English Department that appears as the standard bearer of correctness in these instructions rather than, say, engineers or other colleagues. DIRECTIONS FOR REPORT WRITING.

In the past there has been an unfortunate tendency toward hasty and improperly written reports from students, and, therefore, for the future, it has been decided that reports will be marked not only upon the material which they contain, but also upon the way in which the reports are written. Young and even old engineers have been criticised for lack of ability to present a satisfactory report, and it is to help correct this that the new policy is to be inaugurated. The criterion will be that the report should satisfy the English Department in that it should be grammatically correct, properly punctuated,

71

The Writing of School Science

properly paragraphed, properly set off into headings and sub-headings, and clear and coherent and not containing abbreviations that are not good usage in print. In fact, where any question arises, the best basis of decision would be how the editors of books would settle the question. Specifically, the use of various symbols as  for number or pounds or mesh; ‘ for feet or minutes; “ for inches or seconds; & instead of and; chemical symbols in the place of the names of elements or substances are especially bad. In general, abbreviations are not used in text, but are allowable in tabulations, but wherever they are used they should be letter abbreviations, such as ft., in., lb., gr., k., cc., etc. and not a character. Publishers have adopted standard abbreviations. The Mining Library contains the style book of the Maple Press Company and possibly style books of other companies. Reference should be made to these when there is any doubt regarding proper abbreviations. Students will also find it very helpful to consult T. A. Rickard’s book on Technical Writing, or other similar books. A typewritten report will not receive any more credit than a good handwritten report. In fact, a typewritten report in poor shape would not receive as much credit as a handwritten report neatly written and properly presented and following the rules for report writing. Finished mechanical drawings should be made where it is desirable to show the details to scale but in many cases free hand sketches without a mass of detail will more clearly illustrate principles. Such sketches, when used, should be neatly drawn and made with the parts in proper proportion. In the preparation time allowed for many reports, as, for example, in Ore Dressing, the student will find the time insufficient for mechanical drawings and he is obliged to fall back on free hand sketches. These sketches will be fully acceptable and it is felt that the experience gained from preparing them will be very valuable in developing a sketching ability which every engineer should possess. Whenever material is taken from another source, whether book, periodical, pamphlet, catalogue, letter, or word of mouth, the full reference should be given in the form of a foot-note, and where extensive abstracting is made, it may be wise to prepare bibliographies of authorities cited and place these bibliographies at the end following the system used in Peele’s Mining Engineer’s Handbook. In preparing manuscript foot-notes are usually inserted between two lines as follows: “The flotation of oxidized copper ores has been discussed by John Smith.1 He states that while some processes work very well in the 1

72

Engrg. Min. Jr.-Press, vol. 152, p. 813, Oct. 29, 1923.

The Writing of School Science

laboratory they do not work so satisfactorily in commercial plants with the result that no flotation plants are today operating on oxidized copper ores as far as the author is aware.” “The production of monazite in the Carolinas has virtually ceased, owing to competition from the Brazilian mines.” 2 2

W. H. Brown, Private communication. October, 1924.

When a book is printed foot-notes so indicated in the manuscript are transferred to the bottom of the page. Standard forms of references and standard abbreviations for periodicals have been adopted by publications and will be found in style books previously mentioned. In the case of periodicals the name of the periodical, the name of the author, the volume, the page, and the date should be given. In the case of books, the reference should include the title of the book, the name of the author, the name of the publisher, the date of the publication, and the page. In a report of any length all figures and tables should be numbered consecutively and no table or figure should be inserted which is not discussed or at least referred to in the text. A table of contents should be provided whenever a report becomes lengthy, say over five pages. In writing theses the preceding rules apply and in addition a standard size of paper, 8½ by 11 inches, is to be used. A margin of 1 inch should be left on either side and a margin of at least ½ inch at the top and bottom. Page numbers should be placed in the upper right hand corner but not close to the edge because when theses are bound the binder trims off about 3/16 inch from the top, bottom and right hand side of the page. Page numbers or anything else coming too close to the edge will, therefore, be cut off. For this same reason no folded page should be inserted which is 8½ by 11 inches in size because the binder will cut off the folded edge. The better method is to fold it to a smaller size and then paste it on a standard 8½ by 11 page so that by no possibility can the folded sheet be cut. Photographs, drawings, etc. occupying space less than 8½ by 11 inches, should be made either on a standard 8½ by 11 page or else mounted on such a page. Large drawings should be left separate and folded to a size somewhat smaller than 8½ by 11. Our practice in the past has been always to have the binder put in a pocket at the end of the thesis and these drawings are inserted in this pocket. January 9, 1925.

This relationship between English and engineering was, perhaps, the best that the English department could hope for. As described in its

73

The Writing of School Science

departmental summary for the president’s 1925 report, “Instruction in English is recognized more than ever as essential in the undergraduate curricula of all technical departments. The Department of English is cooperating with them by providing courses to suit their needs and with a view to the improvement of all written work” (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Report 32).2 That this view was largely reductionist, largely a matter of correction and format checking, is a legacy that most English departments share in the history of writing across the curriculum. As the promise of laboratory methods in the 1890s moved into actual implementation, the importance of hands-on learning and meaningful tasks met up with the realities of large class sizes, underprepared students and instructors, and an easy retreat to lecture as the dominant mode of teaching. For science educators, the reductive vision of student writing in science as shown in my examples was commonplace, and such rote methods and the paucity of learning they evidenced created the backlash against learning in the laboratory that I described in the previous chapter. Writing and Reality In my search for examples of student writing about science, I came across the following cover note by Dartmouth undergraduate A. T. Luey, written in 1936 to accompany his paper for Physics 21: “In this paper I have made my discussions rather cryptic. I do not mean to pretend that any of them are a sufficient discussion of the facts, but they indicate the line of thought that is usually adopted in their explanation. Any further writing would practically amount to direct copying of sources” (Hull papers). Perhaps science faculty at Dartmouth, Mount Holyoke, and MIT did not embrace the idea of reading and responding to the necessarily “cryptic” discussions that students might offer if they were asked to do more than merely describe scientific organisms and processes. Of course, having students engage in “direct copying of sources” was not satisfactory, either. The safe path, then, was to use writing in ways that were easily measured, easily corrected, easily taught. As I demonstrated in chapter 2, such reductive notions of student writing have not been replaced by contemporary notions of writing to learn and learning to write in science classes. The legacy of short student responses to demonstrate mastery of content is by far the norm despite the efforts at reform and the calls for students to engage in critical and creative thinking as top-notch scientists would do. As three institutions at the forefront of scientific research—as well as noted innovators in the

74

The Writing of School Science

teaching of science—Dartmouth, Mount Holyoke, and MIT demonstrate that the application of laboratory methods to student writing about science was no easy task. In the struggle between mastery of content and development of students’ discursive skills as apprentice scientists, mastery all too often wins the day.

75

4 The Two Poles of Writing Lab History: Minnesota and Dartmouth

A

s I described in chapters 1 and 2, an experimental approach to educational reform took place in both writing and science starting in the 1890s and has held grips of varying strength until now. That grip has been weakened at times by an easy retreat to the status quo, by pressures of rising enrollments and underprepared students, by an obsession with testing and efficiency, and by a lack of vision. As I show in the case studies in this chapter, these influences have strongly shaped reform of teaching practices in writing classes and writing laboratories. What starts off as an experiment can easily become a convenient means of sorting out and marking underprepared students, quarantining them in a clinic until they’re cured of the disease of bad writing. This process in the teaching of writing was particularly evident in the 1930s when higher education, in particular, was called on to meet unprecedented demands to be inclusive of students who previously were not inclined to go to college, the children of the great immigrant waves of the turn of the twentieth century. By the time of the Great Depression, ensuring enrollments wasn’t merely an ideal but a necessity in a time of economic crisis. The new students attracted by these efforts were far more diverse and far more practically minded than previous generations and presented reformers with an opportunity to experiment with curriculum and instruction. Embodying this spirit of experimentation, the University of Minnesota General College was created in 1932 as a twoyear alternative for students who either were not accepted or who failed out of Minnesota’s four-year system, and is the subject of the first part of this chapter. The focus of the second part, Dartmouth College, one of the founding colleges in the United States and an elite institution, started its writing clinic in 1939. That both Minnesota and Dartmouth felt the need to embrace individual solutions to the problem of inadequate student writing attests to the equal-opportunity difficulties of learning to write in college and the power of individual or laboratory methods. The similarities of the stories from Minnesota and Dartmouth are many: a belief in the effectiveness of laboratory methods of teaching writing, a struggle for adequate resources to fulfill this belief, and an easy

76

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

retreat to whole-class solutions when new resources were not forthcoming. It is a story repeated on many campuses, two year and four year, open admissions and highly select. It is the promise of laboratory methods versus the perils of actually implementing such ideas. The Minnesota General College Writing Laboratory The creation of University of Minnesota General College was the result of a confluence of tumultuous events in the 1920s and 1930s. First was the pressure of unprecedented numbers of students as higher education enrollments increased from a little more than 150,000 in 1890 to over 1,100,000 students by 1930 (Willey 221). There were several reasons for this rapid rise: One was simply the identity and prestige that was conferred by having graduated from college. As Malcolm Willey put it, writing in 1937, “The urge to be a ‘college graduate’ is a potent one in this country” (224). By the 1930s and the grim economic possibilities for high school graduates during the Great Depression, higher education also took on a role as a holding tank of sorts, keeping students out of the job market while they prepared for hopeful careers (Willey 224). Finally, the political and social climate of a time opened opportunities for reform. As described by historian Gary Miller, “The rise of fascism in Europe engendered a sense of crisis that pervaded American society. People again sought answers to the broad social questions that had been set aside in the 1920s. The social consciousness that had been the hallmark of the progressive period prior to and immediately after World War I now reasserted itself, both in society generally and in education specifically” (73). Some writers at the time described the situation in stark terms, as a loss of faith in what used to be and an uncertainty about what would come next. Frank Baker offered the following description of the challenges educators faced in his address at the opening of the University of Chicago Graduate Education Building: In the midst of all this change in the world of things, we have, up to 1920, remained static in the social, economic, and moral fields. Suddenly, however, the houses that have been built up have begun to crumble over our heads. The code of morals under which we were brought up and which served as a fixed guide for our conduct has suddenly crumbled and left us without a guide or landmark by which to chart our courses. The economic system that seemed entirely satisfying and completely successful has suddenly broken down. The democracy that we had looked on as a triumph of perfection has failed, and we find ourselves in a world

77

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

torn between the tyranny of Fascism on one side and the tyranny of the proletariat on the other. The feeling that education must adjust itself to this changing world, that it must adapt itself to the needs of a new civilization, has much to with the development of the experimental attitude. (738) One aspect of this “experimental attitude” was the recognition of the need for general education or curricular efforts not focused narrowly on preparation for the careers of the past, such as the ministry or law, or even for the newer careers brought about by industrial expansion, but, instead, education that was, according to Malcolm Willey, “adapted to the needs of purposes of men and women who will lead unspecialized lives” (258). While Willey’s tone seems disdainful of those unspecialized Americans, the need for educating all Americans, not just the elite, was expressed by many educational reformers of this era. Malcolm MacLean, the first director of the University of Minnesota General College, described the intent of the “experimentation” of the 1930s as follows: [Universities] recognized that they must not merely admit, but also serve well and fully with useful studies, not only the sons and daughters of an intellectual and social aristocracy, but also the youthful offspring of “white-collar” workers, skilled and semiskilled laborers, farmers, and still others rendering personal service. All of these, it is clear, must be given by public institutions every chance for “higher education” . . . in order that they and the community or state may benefit. (MacLean, Little, and Works 135) In other words, America’s democratic and economic ideals depended on a system of higher education that would educate all Americans. American society needed general education, for, in MacLean’s words, “It is the intent to develop young people into vital, sensitive, and awakened persons in order that they may live more richly and, in consequence, serve their society better” (MacLean, Little, and Works 137). Out of this environment the University of Minnesota General College was created, and university president Lotus Coffman recruited Malcolm MacLean to serve as founding director. MacLean had received his PhD in English from Minnesota and had worked on educational reform efforts at the University of Wisconsin before returning to his home state (Gray 315). University of Minnesota historian James Gray describes a “missionary zeal” (315) that MacLean brought to his task, and by all accounts, the project was remarkable in its thorough adherence to progressive ideals and in its full commitment to experimentation. In the view of educational

78

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

historian Lawrence Cremin, the General College “embodied as effectively as any some of the most authentic ideas and traditions of the progressive education movement” (314). In terms of its students, the college was meant to work with a population of students who sought higher education but were unable to make the transition to a four-year institution. Cornelia Williams reported that more than 60 percent of the General College students she surveyed in 1935 had entered the General College because they had been denied admission to four-year colleges or had failed out of those programs (176). The numbers at the time were startling: While enrollments at the University of Minnesota reached unprecedented levels in the early 1930s, almost half of those students dropped out by the end of their sophomore years, and only 15 to 20 percent were graduating in four years (MacLean, “A College of 1934” 240). As I described earlier, opportunities were scarce for these students who left the educational system, and few could depend on a sudden kick start to the economy. Instead, other forms of higher education needed to be created. For MacLean and his staff, the General College was a true experimental alternative for these students, in which the progressive intent was “to awaken in its students a social and civic consciousness, a sense of community responsibility, and a willingness to participate actively in the solution of common problems for the common good” (MacLean, “Organization of the General College” 30). In short, it was a college intended to strengthen the community by developing the community’s essential assets: its college-age youth. As described by MacLean, the purpose of the General College was “not to ‘eliminate the unfit,’ not to ‘divide the sheep from the goats, the dumb from the bright, the college material from the non-college material,’ but instead to direct each student, so far as we were able, to that curriculum, that job, that other training institution, wherein he would find the most use for his powers, whatever they might be, and the deepest personal satisfactions and social usefulness” (“Editor’s Foreword” x-xi). While this charge might seem limiting to the students (after all, determination of one’s “powers” was—and often remains—rigidly fixed by race, class, and gender), MacLean did believe that he was preparing students for leadership positions in their communities, just as the traditional universities had long served the nation’s elite. In fact, MacLean’s future leaders might even be superior because of their grounding in the “commonplace”: We see that men and women besides being workers are husbands and wives; fathers and mothers; social, economic, and political

79

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

beings; biological animals; religious and emotional entities; and recreationists. We think that, in the course of time, education can and must train all its students to understand themselves and others in all these relationships. Out of such a mass of understanding persons may emerge increasingly great leaders in the special fields, who will progress more rapidly than the leaders do now because they will be understood and supported by laymen of general rather than special education. (“A College of 1934” 241–42) In terms of curriculum, the experimental nature of the General College extended to a series of classes that stressed practical subjects and handson learning. Class titles included “Practical Applications of Psychology,” “How to Study,” and “Straight and Crooked Thinking” (Cremin 316). The hands-on experiences that MacLean and his staff were trying to achieve responded to what MacLean perceived as the failures of traditional education in the University of Minnesota system, in which learning solely came from books and teacher talk, not from experiencing and learning from the rich opportunities to be found in the communities in which students lived. MacLean described the irony in a 1934 conference address: I have known students of chemistry at Minnesota who have studied intensively for four or five years and in that time were unaware of and never visited the local brewery, distillery, dye works, tannery, drug manufacturers. They lived in a “gown” world of theory and laboratory furthering the sense of isolation of study from reality. Students of German never went to the German church or the Deutsche Haus. Many students of sociology did not watch our recent truck strike, visit a juvenile court or neighborhood house, stand for an hour in a breadline. Few of our students of government sit in on meetings of the common council, the legislature, or watch the daily work of the political boss or the ward heeler. With the most completely equipped observation and demonstration laboratory immediately under the eyes of faculty and students in urban universities they nevertheless go on fixing their eyes on the shadowy past through lecture and textbook. (“Experimental College” 76–77) Overall, experimentation and hands-on learning were key to MacLean and colleagues’ approach at the General College. Their sense of themselves as a laboratory for educational reform comes across strongly in the ways that MacLean communicated the work at Minnesota to outside audiences. For instance, at the 1934 Institute for Higher Administrative

80

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

Officers, MacLean described the specifics of the approach at the General College and added, The college is, like others described or to be described at this Institute, an attempt to clarify issues, redirect aims, modify educational structures to meet national youth needs. We are experimenting by means of newly devised, wide-range, overview courses; empirical teaching methods; extensive examination procedures; and, finally, intensive analysis and counseling of students in order that we may bring into being the philosophy here expressed and test as we go the validity of its concepts and of our means. (“The General College: The University of Minnesota” 127) MacLean consistently reminded his audiences that all experiments are prone to failure, that the work at the General College should not be duplicated in whole at other places. But what was most important was that educators embrace experimentation to find solutions to a wide variety of problems. As he described at the Institute, One more word. I have no delusions of grandeur about what we are doing. We see a problem which many others see. It is a tough one. We have set up an experiment to attempt to solve it as others have. We seem to be making some progress. All I wish is that our experiment and many others may go on, new ones be developed, duds discarded, so that in a short time we may know what to do with and for our thwarted and blocked young people and through them for the future of education and society. (“The General College: The University of Minnesota” 127) The hands-on, experimental nature of the General College curriculum extended easily to the writing instruction it would offer students. Rather than a traditional composition class or whole-class solutions, when the General College looked to create writing instruction, it embraced the ideals of the writing laboratory: teaching writing one-to-one, voluntary rather than coerced attendance, student-chosen assignments, and a focus on process rather than on “daily themes” and drill on fundamentals. While the General College did offer English courses—some of which MacLean himself taught (Appel, “English Studies” 274)—the Writing Laboratory was established in 1932 “to replace the usual composition course,” according to Francis “Mike” Appel, its first director (“English Studies” 280). In a 1932 planning report for the General College, Malcolm MacLean described an approach remarkably similar to contemporary

81

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

writing centers, an approach based on his experiences as an English student and teacher: I believe that in conjunction with the lectures [in English] we should have a room or rooms set aside for laboratory work in writing under the charge of the assistant in the course and a graduate student or two. To this room the students in English could go and spend several hours weekly in preparing their themes under the guidance and stimulus of these assistants. I believe that such a process would give us new techniques and, I think, better techniques in the teaching of English. (“Report on the Preliminary Formation” 16–17) From the start of the General College in 1932, students enrolled in the Writing Laboratory “course” voluntarily and made a commitment to attend for an entire academic quarter (Appel, “Writing Laboratory” 193). From Appel’s perspective, these students were not the least-prepared writers consigned by angry faculty to “get thee to the writing laboratory!” Instead, Appel asserted that “we have no ‘remedial’ English because we feel that if there be such a thing, then from the common-sense point of view people from the most illiterate to industrial or university administrators and many authors would need some so-called ‘remedial’ English” (“A Writing Laboratory” 76–77). Once enrolled, students met for one two-hour period each week with the addition of “a single weekly lecture . . . in the fall of 1934 to discuss general problems of writing and to give the student the opportunity to hear papers of other students read aloud” (Appel, “English Studies” 282). Appel described the laboratory’s overall approach and consistency with the General College ideals in a 1935 letter to Miss Ena Marston of St. Helen’s Hall Junior College of Portland, Oregon: In keeping with the philosophy of the General College, the writing laboratory seeks to avoid the artificiality of theme writing and to remove the obstacles which students face in answering their own writing needs, e.g., term papers, letters home, book reviews, reports, etc., which have been assigned them in other courses or which have naturally arisen from their lives in or outside the college. The procedure, then, is simply that of having the students write for two consecutive hours each week in a room equipped with special chairs and desks. During the laboratory period the instructor tours the class and confers with each student in turn. He may answer questions concerning the papers returned corrected to the student, or he may read part or all of the paper which the student

82

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

is writing at the moment. Errors are corrected as they arise. No drills in grammar are assigned. (letter to Miss Ena Marston) The Writing Laboratory proved to be a popular option, growing from 70 students in its first year of operation to 300 students—or nearly half of the student population of the General College—in its second year (Appel, “Writing Laboratory” 293). The Design of the General College Writing Laboratory

In the four areas that have shaped writing centers since their inception— physical space, curriculum, teaching methods, and staffing—the General College Writing Laboratory represented the ideals of experimentation and hands-on, student-centered learning. However, the success of the General College Writing Laboratory was ultimately limited by the college’s overall lack of resources—an unfortunately familiar circumstance to many attempts at instituting laboratory methods of teaching writing. Physical space. The various descriptions of the physical layout of the Writing Laboratory all stress a certain functional design. According to MacLean, “In a quiet skylight room we provide chairs and slanting tables for ease in writing” (“College of 1934” 244). Francis Appel described a “quiet lofty room [that] serves to put [students] in the mood for writing” (“A Writing Laboratory” 74). In the view of other administrators, the lab space was “a garret under the eaves” (Spafford and others 83). As was true for many early writing laboratories, the location was essentially classroom or study-hall space with comfortable furnishings. While individual instruction was the goal, the setup allowed many students to be writing while some students were conferencing with the instructor (enrollment in the laboratory was typically twenty-five to thirty-five students at a time [Appel, “Writing Laboratory” 296]). The image is a Donald Murray-esque writing workshop some forty years before Murray described this approach (see Fisher and Murray). It was akin to the scientific laboratory where students were working on their “experiments” and getting assistance from the instructors at their point of need or at critical moments in their process of writing. As noted by Appel, “More than half the achievement of the writing laboratory, I am sure, can be attributed to the fact that conferences with the student take place when the student is writing” (“A Writing Laboratory” 75). Curriculum. At the General College Writing Laboratory, writing instruction did not mean weekly drill on English fundamentals; instead, emphasis was placed on “the reorientation of the students’ attitudes toward English, so that they will derive continuing pleasure and satisfaction

83

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

from expressing themselves effectively” (Eckert 80). According to Appel, the “instructor in the laboratory merely conspires with [the student] to achieve clear expression and never assigns him a theme” (“A Writing Laboratory” 71). The implied reference and criticism was to the “daily theme” method that Barrett Wendell of Harvard first popularized in the late nineteenth century and that had become a staple of composition practice nationwide (Kitzhaber, Rhetoric). The Writing Laboratory recognized the need for an alternative, one stemming from the college’s interest in cultivating individual interest and offering instruction from a populist mindset. As Appel described, “This procedure seems to be one way of doing for many students what most instructors in English have done previously for only a few” (“A Writing Laboratory” 77). So what did students write? According to Appel, in the first quarter students focused on short exercises intended to increase students’ powers of description and observation. In the second quarter, students worked on “the preparation and writing of an extended expository paper, often in a field of special interest to the student, but usually on a topic assigned in some other courses” (“Writing Laboratory” 294). In the third and final quarter, students had free rein to write what they wished, and the result was “every possible type of writing, from a series of satiric poems to a series of articles on socialized medicine, from the first chapter of a novel to the three acts of a play. Often, however, as a result of the lessons learned during the second quarter, students simply plan to write all of their book reports or term papers for other courses” (Appel, “Writing Laboratory” 295). In what was, then, a true writing-across-the-curriculum laboratory, the one text consistently referred to is Appel’s own A Manual for the Writing Laboratory (later published by Holt as Write What You Mean), a workbook containing many pages of student-written examples and focusing on descriptive writing and the avoidance of overly generalized prose. However, given that students were urged to write from their interests and “freely and naturally in their native idiom,” instructional materials could include “almost any book or magazine as a handbook of composition . . . for on every page appear constructions and punctuation similar to theirs” (Appel, “A Writing Laboratory” 73). Malcolm MacLean, in his foreword to Appel’s Write What You Mean, perhaps best summed up the curricular focus of the Writing Laboratory, one befitting the larger social mission of the college: “It is clear that in a democracy, wherein every one of us as a man or woman must take part in civic, social and economic affairs, sharing and laboring together for the common good, this communication of knowledge, ideas and feelings 84

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

about elections, housing, roads, crime, and unemployment is of utmost importance” (“Editorial Foreword” iii). Teaching methods. Rather than the current-traditional teaching methods with an exclusive focus on written products and their correctness that James Berlin largely ascribes to teaching writing during this era (Rhetoric and Reality), the General College Writing Laboratory approached writing instruction in ways that sound remarkably contemporary. Attention to students’ composing processes, a lack of fetishizing of grammar instruction, and the recognition of the need for multiple drafts and multiple sources of feedback were all hallmarks of the Writing Laboratory approach. For a two-hour period each week, Appel and his full-time assistant, Lorraine Kranhold, roamed around the room, conducting conferences with individual students and answering “general questions for the others” (Appel, “Writing Laboratory” 295). Students could also meet with instructors during their office hours for additional conferencing time. So what did the work in this laboratory look like? According to Malcolm MacLean, “The instructor and his assistant criticize and help when called upon by the student during the progress and at the completion of each paper. No correction of errors in grammar, spelling, or punctuation is made at first” (“A College of 1934” 244). The description of the Writing Laboratory approach in the 1936 College Bulletin stresses that students would find the instruction far different—and far more attractive—than what they might be used to: Departing from the usual procedures of the composition course, the Writing Laboratory uses for purposes of instruction the papers that a student writes to fulfill assignments in other courses or to respond to the common demands of communication, such as letters to friends, letters of application, course notes, book reports, or term papers. Because of this complete freedom to write, the instruction is given almost entirely in conferences with the student as he writes in the laboratory. The instructor serves principally as a tutor whom the student consults when he has difficulty in writing. (Bulletin of the University of Minnesota 2–3) One of the ways that Appel and colleagues further separated themselves from the standard fare in composition instruction was that the usual reliance on grammar workbooks had no place at the General College Writing Laboratory. Appel reported that this development came through experience: “At first, feeling that good writing depended largely upon a knowledge of grammar, we assigned a self-instructing, self-testing manual of grammar; but when it became apparent that there was but 85

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

little demonstrable correlation between a knowledge of grammar and the ability to write, the manual was discarded” (“English Studies” 281). Appel also noted that multiple drafts were an essential feature of the teaching methods and that “throwing away rough drafts constituted a major crime, and no copies were accepted without the first papers” (“A Writing Laboratory” 74). The result of these methods was, according to MacLean, “fully satisfactory. For sheer vitality, interest, individual thoughtfulness, clarity, concreteness, and connotative force, the papers are far better than the average Freshman’s writing” (“A College of 1934” 245). One feature of the Writing Laboratory’s course-like nature was the need to give students grades on their written work. However, even in this area, the approach was befitting the Progressive, collaborative nature of the college. As described by MacLean, “No marks at all are given in the first quarters, but in the last weeks of the spring term, the student and instructor, conferring together and comparing early attempts with later, arrive at a judgment of progress and assign a mark” (“A College of 1934” 245). MacLean considered the Writing Laboratory approach a success, noting that “students who are not taking the course and even students from other colleges of the University are coming to the laboratory for assistance on term papers and theses” (“A College of 1934” 245). Students throughout the university were voting with their feet—and the Writing Laboratory had become a valuable resource. Staffing. As I noted earlier, the Writing Laboratory was initially staffed three-quarter time by Francis Appel, who was an English faculty member, and full-time by Lorraine Kranhold, an English instructor. Considering that in 1935 nearly 350 students elected to take the Writing Laboratory (Appel, “A Writing Laboratory” 77), the workload must have been overwhelming at times. Appel commented, “The limitations of staff and classrooms forced us to accept 35 students in each section, but when by accident we have had only 25 students we have found that they made greater progress and had greater satisfaction in the course, and that there was much less strain on the instructors” (“Writing Laboratory” 296). He was more frank about this topic in a long report to MacLean in 1935, opening with “All indications point to the fact that we have passed the ceiling of our effectiveness in teaching in the laboratory” (letter/report to M. S. MacLean 1). The large student enrollments meant far less personal attention, which, in turn, meant that students were dropping out of the “class”: The outstanding feature of the administration of the laboratory lies in the personal contacts obtaining between instructor and

86

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

student. Anything that thwarts this feature can be considered to thwart the main objectives of the course, as far as teaching techniques are concerned. With the enrolment in each section of the laboratory (except one) averaging fifty students or more, most of the students have a conference, or comment, at best only once every three weeks. Each of the instructors has commented upon the sad state of affairs and has tried every device that has occurred to him in the hope of alleviating the situation. The immediate result seems to be a rapid cancellation of students from the various sections, not because they did not like the course, but because they felt they were not receiving enough attention. (Letter/report to M. S. MacLean 1) During writing laboratory time, “the instructor has conferences with about half the students in a section and answers general questions for the others” (Appel, “Writing Laboratory” 295), perhaps indicating that only half the students were well served at any given session. Appel boiled this struggle down to discrete blocks of time in his 1935 report to MacLean: The obstacle standing in the way of [effectiveness] seems to be sheerly a matter of time. A simple arithmetical calculation will reveal why this is. If there are fifty students in a section, only two minutes can be allotted to each student (using a stop-watch); with two fifty-minute periods each week, that would mean that once every three weeks a student might have six minutes of the instructor’s time. That is not enough. (Letter/report to M. S. MacLean 1) As had been true for conferencing in traditional classrooms (see Lerner “Teacher-Student”), the logistics of conferencing with all students proved to be an insurmountable challenge, one even beyond the experimental approach of the General College. Appel also recognized that not every English teacher was cut out for laboratory work, noting that it should not “be forced upon a staff, for the laboratory method requires enthusiastic and not mere perfunctory teaching by the instructors. They, too, must break down the walls which have been built around the study of composition” (“A Writing Laboratory” 77). Structurally, such walls and issues of overwork are long-standing dilemmas in the teaching of writing. The General College Writing Laboratory was not immune to these challenges, and the pioneering vision of MacLean and Appel couldn’t see beyond them. It was an expensive proposition to consider a writing laboratory with a large contingent of professional staff or, in what would have been an even more radical move

87

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

for the time, a staff of peer tutors, but that approach was relatively rare until the 1970s (Ervin). Another crack in the foundation was captured in a 1945 letter from Lorraine Kranhold to Malcolm MacLean, who, in 1939, had left the General College to take on the presidency of the Hampton Institute. For Kranhold, the experimental origins of the General College were being cast aside, some thirteen years after its founding: Perhaps I need not tell you that I have long been fed up with the increasingly sterile and uninspired character of the General College program in recent years and that I have been dismayed and disheartened by the progressive neglect of those educational principles that flourished in the old days. Watching the slow death of general education at Minnesota has sometimes been very painful. With the departure of Dr. Potthoff, almost the last of that hard working group who made up the staff from ’32 to ’39, I believe that the apostasy will, indeed, be complete, and I have told Dr. Morse that I am resigning. (1) Mike Appel stayed on longer than Kranhold, retiring from the university in 1955 as a General College professor of literature and writing. The Minnesota Gopher Grad Alumni Magazine article about this occasion notes that Appel was “the first faculty member assigned on a full-time teaching basis to the General College when that unit opened its already battered doors in September 1932” (Morse 23). For Appel, the future would be a departure from teaching writing in laboratory settings; he had “taken a position as supervisor of an industrial construction project for a local firm” (Morse 23). The Idea of the General College Writing Laboratory Revisited

Several features of the General College Writing Laboratory are common practices in contemporary writing centers and composition classrooms: a focus on student writers’ individual needs and thus the use of one-toone teaching; an emphasis on multiple drafts and the process of revision; a recognition that students write best when they choose the topic or when they bring to the center an assignment from another class and thus have motivation to get feedback on their writing; and a realization that grammar, usage, and correctness are best taught late in the writing process and then in the context of students’ actual writing, rather than via drill-and-practice worksheets. The real power of the General College Writing Laboratory, however, was its centrality, its position in relationship to the larger teaching and 88

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

learning ethos of the General College, and, in turn, the centrality of the General College mission to the advancement of democratic values and social justice. And when the mission is one as fully invested in the democratic process and spirit as was Progressivism, the result was downright fantastic. The remarkable alignment and integration of the goals and mission of the College as a whole with the practices and purposes of the Writing Laboratory seem to be the historical anomaly to me, however. Of course, one dilemma is that the alignment of goals started at the top. Malcolm MacLean created an institution that became a model of Progressive thought for many two-year institutions (G. Miller), and he consistently highlighted the Writing Laboratory in his many publications about the college, a relatively rare rhetorical move for college deans and presidents. When the alignment of a college starts at the top, it is not difficult to imagine a focus far different than General College’s, centered on meritocratic ideals, high-stakes testing, and drill in fundamentals before students are allowed to move on to more meaningful work. After all, the writing center’s ability to transform the institution seems far more limited than the opposite vector. Another dilemma was the limited work that could be done at the General College with a small staff and rising demand for writing instruction. In reflecting on the work of the General College, MacLean described the limitations: “We battled for room space, for supplies, equipment, academic and clerical assistance, . . . for visual education men and machines to illuminate our general education and for budget allowances to support them all. And we ran into a multitude of problems, whipped many of them, made passes at others and left others still unsolved” (“General College: Its Origin” 34). This lack of resources is a familiar issue for most contemporary writing center directors and writing program administrators, particularly in twoyear-college settings such as the General College where budget tradeoffs seem to always result in the loss of something, whether time, technology, or teaching. However, as I pointed out earlier, staffing contemporary writing centers with undergraduates, professional staff, and faculty—usually in a dynamic mix at some of the best two-year-college writing centers—offers a way of stretching resources and making the writing center far more than a site for merely instructional support. Faculty and staff development, teaching and learning expertise, writing-across-the-curriculum efforts, and cross-disciplinary conversation and research are the features of these model writing centers. It is not difficult to see how these elements grow from the ideals of the General College Writing Laboratory. History, however, has not always been on the side of the General College. While Malcolm MacLean stressed the need to understand students’ 89

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

needs and interests as essential in creating the General College curriculum, students would not necessarily reciprocate. In her comprehensive study of General College students, Cornelia Williams reported that these young people revealed themselves to be more conservative than the average college student, in many instances more conservative and more satisfied with the status quo in education, law, government, and society in general than their conservative parents. . . . [I]t is indeed disturbing to find a group so young already so conservative, so smugly complacent about a world which, even in 1937–38, was tottering on the brink of catastrophe. (183) This mismatch between students’ personal goals and the college’s mission quite predictably contributed to a heavy attrition (as did the economic chaos of the Great Depression): fewer than 20 percent of the students enrolled between 1932 and 1940 completed an associate’s degree (Cremin 317). More recently, the General College was stripped of its ability to offer degree programs in 1986, nearly shut down during a budget crisis in 1996 (Pugmire), and as of fall 2006 eliminated completely with elements of it reconstituted as a department within the College of Education and Human Development (University of Minnesota, General College). In the University of Minnesota’s quest to focus on “success” versus “access” and be “one of the top three public research universities in the world” (University of Minnesota 2), the General College was deemed expendable. When the experimental promise of the General College Writing Laboratory met up with the restraints of limited resources, the outcome was not in favor of experimentation. And the General College itself could not survive the changing institutional climate that MacLean and his progressive colleagues surely wouldn’t have recognized. In other words, the case of Minnesota shows that it is not easy being an experimentalist or an educational reformer. As shown by the General College Writing Laboratory, writing instruction has long been a key component of reform efforts, while at the same time, as indicated by periodic waves of handwringing over “Johnny can’t write” and back-to-basics solutions for this dilemma, writing instruction is also a tool of the conservative status quo. The forty-year history of the Dartmouth Writing Clinic is an example of writing playing that latter function, of experiments in reform looking like punishment for students’ language infelicities rather than the promise of writing as a way of transforming student learning. Both Dartmouth and Minnesota, however, met similar ends as institutional climates changed. That, too, is a lesson in the difficulty for experiments in teaching writing to be sustainable. 90

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

The Dartmouth Writing Clinic If the University of Minnesota General College was created out of a populist mindset, attempting to bring college education to students who would otherwise be denied that opportunity in the 1930s, Dartmouth College has a far more long-standing elite reputation. Established in 1769, the ninth-oldest college in the country and the last post-secondary institution created under colonial rule (Dartmouth), Dartmouth has long had highly competitive admissions as befitting its Ivy League status. Nevertheless, stringent admissions criteria do not necessarily translate into student writing performance acceptable to the faculty. While the Dartmouth Writing Clinic had much more ad hoc origins than the systematic planning of the University of Minnesota General College Writing Laboratory, by the 1950s, its cause would be taken up by faculty with a clear vision of student writing: poor writing was not to be tolerated, and the Writing Clinic could play a key role in the elimination of that unfortunate-butvisible example of student incompetence. But that gets too far along in this narrative. At the beginning, the Dartmouth Writing Clinic was an experimental place. In 1939 Peter Cardozo, a Dartmouth senior, proposed the idea of a writing clinic to the head of the English department. According to Cardozo, his intent was to hold office hours for his fellow undergraduates during which they could come on their own volition or by faculty referral. At the time, writing instruction was found primarily in the two-semester composition sequence, English 1 and 2; however, Cardozo felt that his peers held “tremendous enthusiasm” for writing instruction outside of first-year composition, and Cardozo also taught a popular non-credit short story writing class (Cardozo; “Workshop for College Men”). Cardozo’s proposal was accepted, and for the fall semester after he had graduated, he was hired as a half-time instructor at 700 per year to run the new Writing Clinic. Cardozo’s efforts were picked up by the New York Times, which announced in sober terms that the “clinic’s function will be to analyze the faults in papers graded and returned by the instructor. This remedial work will include organization of material and presentation of ideas in a clear and interesting manner” (“Dartmouth Has Writing Clinic” 57). By 1940, Cardozo had achieved success as a short story and novelette writer (having sold his first story while still an undergraduate). When Dartmouth asked that he pursue graduate study to continue in his teaching role, Cardozo opted instead for a writing career (Cardozo). His brief tenure at the Writing Clinic marked a trend that would continue throughout its life: No director lasted more than three consecutive years on the job (many were English faculty members with half-time release to run the 91

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

clinic), and the last clinic director was a faculty member with a full-time appointment in another department. As a result, he could only devote one afternoon a week to his clinic duties. Throughout the 1940s, the clinic maintained a relatively low profile. However, in 1947, Dartmouth faculty created a Committee on Student English whose charge was to “obtain information concerning the use of English by students in the college” (Joyce et al. 1) and whose primary task was to run the Writing Clinic. From its inception, the members of the Committee on Student English identified as their main charge a kind of truth telling over the state of Dartmouth student writing. In its first annual report in 1949, the committee noted that it had read a sampling of student writing from a senior-year course, Great Issues, a course “in which the demands for superior standards of literacy had been made manifest” (Joyce et al. 1). The assessment was grim: “Many of these papers displayed deplorable weaknesses in organization, sentence-structure, word-usage, and even in spelling and grammar” (Joyce et al. 1). Committee members offered several conclusions, the first of which had to do with the Writing Clinic: “A writing clinic could not be staffed adequately to confer with all students who write unsatisfactory English. The probability is that most such students can write satisfactorily if they are required to do so by their instructors. Only the flagrant offenders whose errors individual instructors cannot readily correct should be sent to the writing clinic” (Joyce et al. 2). This pattern remained consistent over the life of the clinic: It was for “flagrant offenders” or “students whose English is defective” (Bell et al. 4), as described in the 1951 Faculty Bulletin; or for “those students who through causes other than carelessness seem unable to meet [Dartmouth] standards” (Booth, Demaree, Kelly, et al. 2), as described in the committee’s 1953–54 report; or “students prone through ignorance to write badly, illiterately, can have their ignorance dispelled by the Writing Clinic” (Booth, Demaree, Elstan, et al. 1), according to the committee’s 1954–55 report. In other words, there were two classes of student writers: the careless and the ignorant. The former should be dealt with through a faculty get-tough policy. The latter needed to report to the Writing Clinic, where, as befitting Mike Rose’s description of remedial writing instruction, they would “sit in scholastic quarantine until their disease can be diagnosed and remedied” (“The Language of Exclusion” 352). Still, committee members felt they were offering students a far more palatable choice than “the hated ‘remedial class’” (Bell et al. 5), noting in their 1950–51 report that “some of the pillars of our program” included “the maintaining of a maximum in voluntary attendance, the suiting of assistance to individual need, and the offer of help in everything from spelling to extemporaneous writing” (Bell et al. 92

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

5). In its more public profile, the committee members made sure to assert this help as a kind of rehabilitation that those “flagrant offenders” most needed. A 1948 New York Times article announcing the creation of the committee noted that “attendance at the clinic will be compulsory until the student’s difficulties have been corrected” (“Education Notes” E9). The committee members turned to Dartmouth faculty as allies in their efforts to combat “defective English” and uphold Dartmouth standards. Faculty were offered various means to refer students to the Writing Clinic and to keep the lines of communication open. In its 1950–51 report, published in the Faculty Bulletin, the committee noted that the Chairman of the Re-reading Committee of English 1 and 2 [firstyear composition] agree to make out for us a list of men who, though they passed English 1 or 2, showed linguistic weakness sufficient to warrant further surveillance. As a final move toward fuller liaison with the Faculty, the Writing Clinic will notify Freshman advisers whenever any of their men have been referred to the Clinic. When a member of the teaching staff sends a student to the Clinic he may also expect to receive a note from the Clinic informing him of the work being done with the student. (Bell et al. 5) In addition to offering its role as a surveillance mechanism, the committee made more discrete appeals to faculty, whether through notices in the Faculty Bulletin or direct mailings. A 1950 blurb in the Faculty Bulletin opened with the following: “The Editor, speaking for the Committee on Student English, of which he is a member, would like to ask each of his colleagues this question: Do you have any student who, in work for your courses, uses notably poor English? If you do, please consider the advisability of sending him, with one of our cards of introduction, to the Writing Clinic” (“Writing Clinic” 5). A postcard mailed to all faculty the previous year had a similar tone: “Will you kindly bring to the attention of students in your courses the work of the Writing Clinic, designed to aid men who need assistance in their written work. Such men may be sent by the instructor or may come of their own accord” (Kelly and Cross n.p.). This genteel approach seemed to frame the Writing Clinic as a finishing school of sorts, the kind of smoothing of rough edges that would be familiar for many in the Dartmouth community. The message was that the Dartmouth commitment to excellence would be maintained once those inevitable language infelicities were dealt with. While these internal appeals based on faculty’s perceptions of student need and image were one tactic, another far more aggressive approach in the early 1950s was to take the Dartmouth dilemma to the public. On 93

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

January 15, 1951, newspapers throughout New York and New England carried news from Dartmouth. The headline from the New York Times read, “Decry Lack of Grammar: Dartmouth Teachers Report Many College Men Faulty in English.” The text in these “Johnny can’t write” articles is a predictable mix of schoolmarm-ish chiding and conservative blame game. Particular ire in the New York Times article came from Dartmouth instructor Donald L. Cross, who criticized “progressive” high schools for producing students whose lack of skill with English grammar and usage would deem them Writing Clinic material. This crisis in basic skills was not merely a phenomenon isolated to college campuses, however, as the article noted that employers were wondering just how an elite institution such as Dartmouth could graduate students “handicapped by a lack of knowledge of the fundamentals of good English usage” (“Decry Lack of Grammar” 12). Dartmouth, then, was leading the charge against Progressivism and declining high school standards. Its public image as a standard bearer for correct writing and high culture was reinforced, despite the internal resistance that the Committee on Student English was meeting back home. Another round of press releases in January 1955 even depicted committee recommendations as already in place, despite internal evidence to the contrary. This theme was gleefully picked up by the Springfield (MA) Republican in a January 16, 1955, article titled “Watch Your English”: Groans from the business world echo on Dartmough [sic] College campus. In response to the criticism that students today are leaving educational institutions without a proper command of their own language, students are now cautoned [sic] to watch their English. From now on whether they are writing an examination or a paper on geology or botany or Chaucer or history—or whatever—if they abuse the language they are likely to find their grades lowered. In many courses, examination question sheets carry headnote warnings that reduction in credit will penalize answers marred by faulty composition. It isn’t enough to answer the question correctly. The student must do it in such fashion that the faculty reader doesn’t have to read the answer two or three times to be sure he understands what has been written. However, for the consolation of the current undergraduate who may be penalized for a dangling participle, be it noted from results of tests, in which students have taken the same examinations as given 50 years ago, that they write just as well as their forebears. In fact their academic achievement is greater than that of their

94

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

parents. The answer is that society today demands more of college and high school graduates that [sic] was demanded of earlier generations. But nonetheless, Dartmouth students are currently required to write clearly and concisely. Otherwise, down goes the grade. (n.p.) This strategy on the committee’s part might have reinforced the public image of Dartmouth as an elite institution, but back in Hanover faculty were not exactly lining up to cooperate. It was one thing to maintain a national identity; it was quite another when that identity was at odds with the day-to-day workload of faculty and also a constant reminder that Dartmouth had a problem that would not go away. Given this lack of cooperation from Dartmouth faculty, committee members’ tone would turn increasingly harsh. Appeals to Faculty—Time to Get Tough

In memos and reports, the Committee on Student English exhorted faculty that strong writing skills—or at least correct writing—were essential to Dartmouth’s students’ success. From its first report in 1949, the committee made it clear that faculty needed to play a significant role in bringing about these ends: “If the instructor makes clear his demands for respectable English, and makes notations on written work calling attention to minor errors or infelicitous expressions, and refuses to accept papers which are grossly neglectful of organization and expression, he will receive an improved quality of work with a progressively lessened expenditure of energy” (Joyce et al. 2). Or, as noted in a May 1948 memo to faculty, “We shall get properly written papers only if we will accept no others” (Faculty Committee 2). The impression from these reports is that the importance of good writing was clear to the committee members, but they needed to work hard to make it clear to the faculty as a whole. As they noted in their 1949 report, “Good English, in other words, should not be considered the fetish of a few academic perfectionists, but a means to an end, a means indistinguishable from education itself” (Joyce et al. 3). Attempts to enlist the cooperation of faculty in this effort were a consistent theme in the committee’s memos and reports: If the entire faculty will make a concerted effort to improve student English, we believe the standard of literacy will rise appreciably. Unless such effort is made, the work of this Committee or any

95

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

other agency is utterly futile. (May 1948 memo to faculty in Faculty Committee 3) The Committee believes there should be unanimous and persistent intolerance by the Faculty of slovenly writing. This will not only forestall backsliding from literacy but strengthen toward firmness the feebler grips upon it. (1953–54 Annual Report in Booth et al. 1) We hope that the Faculty understands that the Committee does not wish to set purist standards for student writing. Rather the Committee seeks to eliminate from student writing carelessness bordering upon illiteracy. (1953–54 Annual Report in Booth et al. 2) In the year ahead we ask the further cooperation of the Faculty in refusing to accept careless, slipshod work on student papers. (1954–55 Annual Report in Booth et al. 2) Many members of the Faculty remark about the deplorably quality of English used by students, but fewer teachers insist upon good English in papers submitted to them. (1956–57 Annual Report in Bailor, Elson, et al. 2) Amid these exhortations to get tough with student writing, the committee members’ increasing frustration over faculty’s lack of cooperation in this enterprise was clear. After all, the committee had identified the problem, faculty seemed to generally agree that the problem existed, but somehow making the next move to recommend or refer or force students to get help via the Writing Clinic was not happening. As the committee noted in its 1954–55 report, “Referrals to the Clinic were somewhat, though not materially, fewer in 1954–55 than in the years just preceding. Yet the Committee believes the Clinic’s help was needed by more students than received it, and the next year Faculty will again be urged to report to the Clinic all students whose deficient writing results not from their carelessness but from their need of remedial instruction” (Booth, Demaree, Kelly, et al. 1). Despite the committee’s suspicions, student usage of the Writing Clinic was relatively consistent in years for which numbers are available. On the whole, about 10 percent of the total undergraduates were “under the discipline of the Writing Clinic,” in the words of Committee on Student English chair Alexander Laing in a 1958 letter to Dean Arthur Jensen, and likely all the clinic could handle given its level of staffing. Still, the committee worked hard to keep these numbers up and wipe out slovenly language use at Dartmouth. One tactic the committee used in 1954 was to ask department chairs to adopt a policy in their courses 96

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

that would ensure “reasonable standards in the use of English” (Booth, Demaree, Kelly, et al. 1) and refer students to the Writing Clinic who were unable to meet those standards. In addition, committee members asked the department chairs to put some weight behind the talk of standards and print on all exams “warnings that reduction in credit will penalize answers marred grossly by faulty composition” (Booth, Demaree, Kelly, et al. 1). This strategy was largely ignored by faculty, according to the committee’s 1954–55 report. Fewer than half of the department chairs responded, and very few endorsed the idea of a warning printed on exams—despite the newspaper accounts quoted above. The committee’s hand wringing over the state of student writing was fine to listen to, offering all faculty a reminder that Dartmouth represented certain standards and that students, whether through sloth or ignorance, would always be challenging those standards. However, when it came to implementing policy or changing teaching practices, admonitions to “get tough” rubbed up against the reality of the classroom, a reality that has killed many a fledgling writing-across-the-curriculum program. The thought of scrutinizing student essays and exams for every written error must have been frightening for faculty, an expenditure of time and effort that must not have seemed—and has never seemed—worthwhile. Committee members could ask faculty to get tough, but it was still faculty who would have to be wielding those red pens late into the night. The Committee on Student English might have described a situation unfortunately familiar to Dartmouth faculty—students whose use of language was substandard—but no real path to “excellence” and clear reward were offered as well. The very presence of the Writing Clinic was evidence enough that the problem was being dealt with. Given their relative comfort with the status quo, faculty responded to the problem of student writing in a familiar way—they assigned less and less of it. In its 1957–58 report, the committee described the situation: “Testimony from a variety of sources indicates that the writing experience of Dartmouth students consists of a moderate stress upon composition in the Freshman year, followed by extensive writing in the Senior year, with little or no writing in the intervening years except under examination conditions” (Bailor, Guthrie, et al. 2). During its last year of existence, 1959, the committee tried to make its position clear in a memo to the executive committee of the faculty. In particular, they wanted to counter the views of Arthur Jensen, dean of the college, who felt that faculty already had the “time and talent” to help improve student writing. The committee reported that the “standard objections” to including more writing in courses that fulfilled students’ distributive requirement were 97

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

1. That sections are too large; 2. That more instructors would be needed; 3. That written work is not appropriate to the course. (Committee on Student English 1) Given this situation, the committee changed tactics. Rather than just make clinic services available and exhort faculty to be serious about student writing, committee members advocated for the creation of a writing program administrator to revamp writing instruction at Dartmouth. Following the recommendations of a 1957 Ad Hoc Committee on Student Writing, the committee offered the following resolution in its 1957–58 report: Whereas the Ad Hoc Committee on Student Writing recommended on May 9, 1957, “that the College appoint to the faculty a professionally-trained expert to conduct, as a full-time responsibility, the Writing Clinic and give direction to an eventually broadly-based writing program for Dartmouth, ‘with the further recommendation’ that this person be attached to the English Department and be given full faculty status and opportunity for advancement,” and Whereas the Committee on Student English, the Department of English, and the Executive Committee of the Faculty approved this resolution one year ago. (Bailor, Guthrie, et al. 1) The committee’s vision was commendable given contemporary struggles to create writing center director positions as faculty lines. However, Dean Jensen never acted on this recommendation, for a new well-funded initiative was about to bring a national spotlight on the Dartmouth writing program. The end was near for the Dartmouth Writing Clinic, an outcome much to the surprise of the members of the Committee on Student English. Closing Down the Clinic

In the school year 1958–59, Thaddeus Seymour stepped down as Writing Clinic director, and Robert Burger took on the job as an adjunct to the full-time position he had with Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. Because Burger would only be able to devote one afternoon a week to clinic duties, the Committee on Student English advised faculty colleagues “to send to [Burger] in the fall term only those students whose records indicate inability to communicate ideas and facts in writing” (Allen et al. 1). Burger, however, would not necessarily immediately start working with referred students. Instead, according to a 1958 letter to faculty, “Each referred student . . . will be interviewed by a member of the Committee 98

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

who will suggest measures for self-improvement and will warn him that a proficiency test must be taken at a later date. . . . Those who fail the test will be enrolled in clinical groups conducted by Professor Burger or by an assistant” (Allen et al. 1). It seems that the committee members had largely given up in their attempts to herd great masses of needy students into the Writing Clinic. They reminded faculty that “we have repeatedly stressed our conviction that the work to be done requires the equivalent of a specialist’s full time” (Allen et al. 1), but the college and Dean Jensen had yet to agree. This disagreement perhaps had at its root a difference in interpretation of the function of the Writing Clinic. In the final paragraph of an October 1958 letter to Dean Jensen, committee chairman Laing wrote: One final point. Several members of the committee expressed dismay when Professor Burger quoted you as having said that the Clinic had the function of a club. The committee rejects the simile. A clinic is a place of healing. We do not believe that anyone can be clubbed into health. Some people do need to be bullied into going to the hospital to find out what is wrong with them. In this sense the committee itself fulfills the function of a club, but it does not wish to have this unhappy connotation attached to its amiable device, the Writing Clinic. (3) This letter from Laing’s collection of papers in the Dartmouth archives includes a note handwritten on the top that reads “Letter not sent. Message delivered orally by A. L.” We thus do not know if Laing actually confronted Dean Jensen, but other events that year precluded discussion of the club: Dartmouth received a 60,000 Carnegie Foundation grant for a three-year study of its students’ writing. Albert Kitzhaber and Vincent Gillespie came from the University of Kansas to perform this task, and the Committee on Student English handed the reins of the Writing Clinic over to Gillespie. As chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 1959 (and later president of National Council of Teachers of English), Kitzhaber was a leader in the movement to make the teaching of first-year composition into a coherent academic discipline. His call for a “New Rhetoric” at the 1959 NCTE Convention (“Death—or Transfiguration” 372) was built on his extensive knowledge of the nineteenth-century struggles over rhetoric as a disciplinary subject, the focus of his dissertation (Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850–1900), and it is easy to imagine that the Committee on Student English members hoped he and Gillespie would bring a similar vision of college writing to their work at Dartmouth. 99

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

In a March 1959 letter, committee chairman Alexander Laing noted to Gillespie that he was “delighted to welcome” him as a new member of the committee and that, in terms of the Writing Clinic, “its procedures can easily be expanded in ways that make sense to you, or we may want to make a new start.” Well, the “new start” was indeed one of Kitzhaber and Gillespie’s first moves; they shut down the Writing Clinic. Dartmouth students had no need of such remedial services, Kitzhaber argued. Instead, “the overwhelming majority of Dartmouth students can write decent prose if they are convinced that it is important for them to do so” (emphasis in original, Kitzhaber, Report of the Dartmouth Study 219). Kitzhaber came to this conclusion by looking at the hard numbers. With Burger devoting only one afternoon a week to clinic tutoring, Kitzhaber reported that only four students attended in the fall 1959 term (Report of the Dartmouth Study 215). Kitzhaber also examined the firstyear composition grades of students who had attended the Writing Clinic in 1958 and found that 80 percent had earned average grades of C- or above. Kitzhaber concluded that “it seemed clear that the great majority of students referred to the Clinic for poor writing were quite capable of remedying their own deficiencies without special help from the Clinic” (Report of the Dartmouth Study 218). In this conclusion, Kitzhaber actually aligns himself with the committee’s consistent urging for faculty to send only the truly “ignorant” to the clinic. Ignorance, however, was relatively hard to come by among the “select” study body at Dartmouth, despite the committee’s belief expressed in its 1957–58 report that “experience seems to indicate that the quality of writing shown by incoming students is getting worse rather than better” (Bailor, Guthrie, et al. 2). It was instead a case of cranking up expectations and making the argument to students to take writing more seriously. Kitzhaber did allow that some small number of students might need extra help. For those, his recommendation was that “the English Department should certify a limited number of tutors in the community and set a standard rate of pay for their services. The cost of such special instruction should be borne by the students concerned, since it does not seem a proper responsibility of a distinguished college” (Report of the Dartmouth Study 239). Dartmouth, then, featured smart, capable students who simply needed a bit of a push to bring out those talents. Ne’er-do-wells would always exist, no different than those who failed Harvard’s entrance examinations in the 1870s (Haswell, email to the author); however, substantial reform was not necessary. Faculty could continue about their business without those annoying memos from the Committee on Student English. Kitzhaber’s appeal to Dartmouth faculty to recognize the talent of their students was 100

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

coupled with a suggestion that they, indeed, can raise their expectations for student writing. Go ahead, he wrote, students can take it: “Teachers in other departments can, if they wish, rebuke or penalize a student for poor writing and feel reasonably confident that the student can rewrite the offending paper and make it acceptable without the assistance of a writing clinic. This would not be a safe assumption at most other colleges, perhaps, for few other colleges have as select a student body as Dartmouth attracts” (Report of the Dartmouth Study 219). Kitzhaber also offered high praise for the teaching of writing that Dartmouth offered in first-year composition, English 1 and 2. After noting that many other institutions were struggling with maintaining class size and finding qualified teachers, Kitzhaber offered that at “Dartmouth, where classes of English 1 and 2 never exceed twenty students and where two 4-hour sections are a full load, the problem simply does not exist. Teachers can and do mark papers with care, check the papers when they are returned by the student to see that they have been satisfactorily revised, and schedule conferences with students who need additional help” (Themes, Theories, and Therapy 35). Furthermore, the English staff was “composed entirely of experienced highly educated teachers” who were “in substantial agreement on serious errors and principal virtues in student writing and, in general, on the over-all quality of particular papers” (Themes, Theories, and Therapy 35). In other words, the core components for a writing program were in place. If anything, the existence of the Writing Clinic was a barrier to developing a comprehensive writing program. Kitzhaber’s argument was that any broad-based program needed the cooperation of faculty across the college, not a safety valve such as a writing clinic to which faculty could send students with whom they didn’t want to deal. In Kitzhaber’s words, “The mere existence of the Clinic, ironically enough, appeared to have the effect of confirming many teachers in other departments in their belief that good writing is solely the business of the English Department, and that they themselves need to accept no responsibility for helping to maintain acceptable standards of writing in their courses, except to send the worst offenders among their students to the Clinic” (Report of the Dartmouth Study 217). That’s not to say that Kitzhaber believed that eliminating the Writing Clinic would ensure that faculty across the College would take responsibility for student writing. In the book version of the Dartmouth Study, Themes, Theories, and Therapy, Kitzhaber observes, “The blunt truth is that few faculty members outside of humanities really believe that good writing (correct, accurate, clear writing) is important. Some of them will 101

The Two Poles of Writing Lab History

voice pious acceptance of the principle but quail at putting it into practice” (129). Nevertheless, in Kitzhaber’s view, the Writing Clinic served few and clashed with Dartmouth’s identity as an institution filled with talented students. By 1961, the Writing Clinic “was suspended on a trial basis during the current year and now seems unlikely to be revived” (Report of the Dartmouth Study 215). While Kitzhaber’s decision seemed predicated on local context, he also had studied composition teaching nationwide and could easily align his decision with national trends. For instance, in a 1962 College English article, Kitzhaber noted that “at schools where the increase in quality of students has been marked, the writing clinics and laboratories are being abandoned, since students are seldom so poorly prepared as to require special remedial services of this sort” (“Freshman English” 477). For Kitzhaber in his work at Dartmouth and in his role as a leader in establishing composition and rhetoric as an academic discipline, reminders of “illiteracy” and obsession with student error, as represented by the writing clinic, defeated those long-term goals. Kitzhaber in his many publications of this era attempted to elevate the teaching of composition, offering to College English readers in 1962 the “notion that composition instruction offers a humane educational experience goes back more than two thousand years, to the birth of rhetoric as an academic discipline. . . . [C]omposition instruction belongs in the rhetorical tradition” (“New Perspectives” 443). This tradition had far loftier aims than the Committee on Student English’s reduction of good writing to correct writing. In another 1962 article, Kitzhaber laid out the problem: “Since its inception, the freshman course has been concerned far more to establish habits of correct usage—mere linguistic etiquette—than to convey a full-bodied theory of prose composition and to furnish suitable practice in applying this theory. In effect the course has been cu