Teaching: Devising a Pedagogy-of-Activity

Over the course of my first years in the English Department, I have been fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to devise a series of new writing courses for undergraduates (majors and non-majors alike) at Rhode Island College. During the 2009/2010 school year, with the generous assistance of both the Department Chair and numerous members of the Department, I undertook to design two new courses at the 300-level: ENGL 378: Studies in Composition and ENGL 379: Studies in Rhetoric. During the 2010/2011 school year, again with considerable help from my colleagues and in collaboration with other writing faculty, I undertook a redesign of the writing minor (renaming it the Rhetoric and Writing minor), revised two existing courses (ENGL 230: Writing for Professional Settings and ENGL 231: Writing for Digital and Multimedia Settings), added two new courses (ENGL 232: Writing for the Public Sphere and ENGL 477: Internship in Rhetoric and Writing), and re-engineered the sequence of instruction within the minor. During the 2011/2012 and 2012/2013 school years, along with the director of First-Year Writing, Becky Caouette, I have, via these new courses and this new curriculum, begun the exciting work of introducing RIC English majors to the knowledge and practices of the field of composition/rhetoric, thus expanding their opportunities for learning about writing and about the full range of areas of specialization within the field of English studies.

Since arriving at RIC, my teaching, always focused on activities typical of writing classrooms (e.g.  explicit instruction in pre-writing, drafting, and revision strategies; peer- and large-group writing workshops; one-on-one student conferences, etc.) has turned increasingly towards a pedagogy focused on facilitating or orchestrating student activity. Even as I begin to embrace the opportunity to teach English students the content of my field, I resist the traditional orientation of many college faculty--that of content-deliverers of declarative knowledge (the what of learning)--and find myself drawn to more procedural matters (the how of learning). Of course, it's impossible to separate these two aspects of teaching and learning and silly to privilege one over the other, but I find, in my conversations with faculty across the disciplines, that I perhaps err on the side of procedural learning more than my peers. This may stem from the very activity-focused nature of my scholarly area of interest (writing) and it may stem from other factors, such as the two two-hour-per-week learning blocks that structure English classes and which force faculty to get creative in finding ways to keep students engaged over extended periods of time. In sum, I find that I spend most of my time in the classroom facilitating student activity--devising a set of experiences and activities that provide students with learning opportunities and the motivation to take advantage of them.

devising tasks and creating online environments in which those tasks can be carried out, modeling how tasks should be carried out, monitoring task-engagement (in the room, on the screen), and reflecting with both individual students and entire classes, in both written and spoken language, on the learning that the tasks were designed to bring about.

My evolving pedagogy--a pedagogy-of-activity, if you will--is built upon a series of beliefs or values that I have come to hold about teaching and learning:

1. Frequent student-to-student collaboration enhances student learning and builds classroom community. While the principal classroom collaboration is often thought to be that of faculty and student, informal and frequent student-to-student collaboration produces meaningful opportunities for learning and a stronger sense of community among students.
2. Communication technologies are tools for strengthening student engagement. Technological platforms (Blackboard, Google, Facebook, etc.) are not distractions from the work of learning; increasingly the seas in which we and our students live and work, they are, ideally, important locations where learning takes place.
3. Frequent low-stakes, usually public, write-to-learn (WTL) activities facilitate increased understanding. In many college classrooms, writing functions as yet another means of assessment, but it's most powerful use is epistemic--WTL activities are important tools that enable students to try on new ways of thinking, acting, talking, and being.
4. Frequent informal dialogue with individual students leads to increased learning and participation in learning. Dialogue with individual students often takes place, if it takes place at all, before or after class or in the margins of student papers. But frequent individual dialogue via one-to-one conferences and/or response to writing (i.e. via blog posts, discussion boards, etc.) is critical to both learning and building relationships which support learning.
5. Flexible assignments which encourage choice and ownership usually lead to better student work. Much, if not all, of the content students are exposed to in college courses originates outside of themselves. Providing opportunities for students to use that content for their own purposes and projects (within the scope of the work of the class) will lead to stronger end-products.
6. Opportunities for reflection should be built into the fabric of the semester's work. College courses often utilize the coverage-and-test model, thus leaving out the experience of the learner. If faculty don't build explicit so-called "taking-stock" moments into the semester's calendar and make these moments "count" towards students' grades, metacognition--thinking about one's thinking in relation to some endeavor--may not happen. Without metacognition, learning is rarely meaningful.
7. Organizing a semester, in part, around a significant project and sequencing the work of the term as a series of steps towards the completion of that project produces effective learning outcomes. College syllabi are typically organized according to a coverage-and-test or coverage-and-paper model. A different approach might be to embed the content one wishes to cover within some larger undertaking, thus more closely linking the acquisition of knowledge (i.e. what should I know?) with its application (i.e. what can I do with what I know?). 

How do these values or beliefs play out in my teaching? I'd like to provide several examples or scenarios to dramatize it.

Day 1: Organizing Class Discussion (200/300-level course)
Day 2: Organizing Peer-Group Workshops (100/200 level course)
Day 3: Work Days (?)

Example 1: Discussion of Course Content

In what follows, I take an exemplary class meeting from a section of ENGL 230: Writing for Professional Settings (spring 2012) in order to try to illustrate the significance of these three items and their interaction during a typical class meeting.

Activity 1: Daily Plan. A typical day begins with me asking students to power up their computers and login to the course LMS. In each of my courses, I post a document called Daily Plans which maps out activity for each class meeting. This document is posted as a link within the LMS and thus, is always live and interactive. Once the students are all assembled, I pull up the Daily Plans document on the screen at the front of the room and the students open it on their computers and together we preview the outline of the day's work. I have found that students appreciate having access to this "itinerary" because it provides them with a sense of what to expect prior to and during class. It serves as a reference point, connecting each class meeting to the one before it and the one to follow. Reviewing the Daily Plan usually takes no more than 5-10 minutes.

Activity 2: Quiz. On many days, there is some kind of assigned reading that students are asked to complete ahead of class. On each day that a reading is assigned, class begins with a short quiz, which students take in the LMS, using the "Test" function. The quizzes always consist of ten true/false questions and can be completed within a matter of minutes. Once they have finished the quiz, the LMS provides students with immediate results and a grade. We then take a few minutes to discuss questions or problems with the quiz. I think of the daily quiz as our first attempt to get into the day's reading and learning. Over the course of a typical class period, I try to bring students back to the assigned text in several different ways, at several different times. The quiz is the first such attempt. They usually take no more than 10-15 minutes.

Activity 3: Small Group Work. Once students have completed the quiz, we shift gears. On a typical day, I have constructed a set of tasks in regard to the day's reading that I want students to complete in groups. These tasks are contained within a google document that students can access and interact within (write in). There are usually about 4-5 different sets of tasks, one for each small group (the students pick their groups). The google doc is a wiki that allows multiple users to all write within one document (picture 20 people writing in a MS Word doc simultaneously, all having access to what the others are writing). Links to the day's google doc are contained within the LMS. As such, these docs become a kind of archive or record of our thinking during each class and a resource for later discussions and activities.

The tasks I ask students to complete usually consist of two kinds of work: summarizing/explaining key concepts and ideas and posing questions. So, for example, during one early class meeting in ENGL 230 we discussed Deborah Brandt's article "Literacy and the Knowledge Economy." The discussion of this article was spread out over two days with the first day devoted to an overview of the study itself and the second day devoted to an examination of Brandt's findings and conclusions. I assigned one of Brandt's findings to each of the small groups, asking them to do three things: 1) re-read the passage with their finding, 2) explain the finding in their own words (using 2-3 passages from the text as support or illustration), 3) pose two questions for the class to discuss in regards to their assigned section/finding. Students access or re-access the article itself within the LMS and then get to work in teams of 3-4. This activity represents a second attempt to focus carefully on the day's reading. I allocate 30-45 minutes, on average, for this kind of activity. Students read and then write together in the google doc. I move around the room asking and answering questions or sit at my computer, monitoring the development of the document and using the "Insert Comment" function to "talk" to the students in real-time about what they are writing (I praise them, re-direct, pose questions, ask for elaboration, ask for greater specificity, request that they edit particular sentences, etc., all of which can be seen on the screen behind me and which they can see on their monitor).

Activity 4: Large-Group Discussion.

Activity 5: Looking Ahead

Example 2: Writing Workshop

Tales of an Emergent Academic Technologist

In college, I somehow came to distrust technology. This was around the time of the Unabomber, in the early to mid-1990s, and I remember reading one of his manifestos in the newspaper and thinking--"This guy is crazy, but he's sure getting a few things right."

I'm not sure I would have seen it that way prior to my becoming an English major at the University of New Hampshire, but I think that studying English can cause you to distrust a lot of things, among them: organized religion, corporations, politicians, the military, and maybe, if you're like me (and the Unabomber), technology. These things somehow all get lumped into one wonderfully irrational religio-corporate-politico-military-techno complex and what your coursework all seems to add up to is a kind of Eisenhowerian warning: beware...the world. To be sure, being an English major gave me skepticism, distrust, and cynicism about the world in which I was living.

For some, a Thoreauian vision emerges as a kind of solution to a dim world-view. Get off the grid. Go out into nature. Bring a paper and some pencil. Write. Grow your own food. Whatever. I imagine I am not the first or the only English major to have lived some version of this dream--to have had his coursework seem to point him in this direction. 

But while I was holed up in Hamilton Smith Hall in Durham, New Hampshire, reading and discussing Raymond Carver and James Baldwin and Joan Didion, there was a whole other group of guys on the other side of campus, in Kingsbury Hall, tinkering around with this new thing called the internet and for them, the world must have been really opening up. Here was this relatively new invention that allowed you to talk to other people in sometimes distant places and share ideas and information across time and space. I didn't know those guys and I don't really know what that moment in history was like for them, but it had to be exhilarating--a whole new world of possibility emerging before their eyes. 

Despite the fact that I now teach English majors, I have only a slight sense of how such students view the world today. When I hear a student say, as one did in my rhetoric course the other day, that he would prefer to talk less about politics because he "fucking hates politics and all politicians," I begin to think that being an English major may not have changed a great deal. On the technological front, things are a bit more complicated. On the one hand, many of the English majors I teach embrace their smart-phones and their facebook pages with great vigor. On the other hand, I had a student last year who confessed her adoration and preference for the pencil. Another questioned why so much of what we were reading was posted online (she wanted to read more books). Each semester, a consistent minority of the English majors I teach seem to struggle with very basic technological operations and some, I think, take pride in this. I look around and see the obvious adoration of certain of our creative writing faculty and the popularity of certain literature courses and I think that things have, perhaps, not changed that much from the days when I was an English major. A certain kind of person is still attracted to the work--drawn, as I was, to the often romantic vision of the world and self that is sometimes still encouraged by the study of writing and literature. They sit on benches reading hard-cover books in the bright autumn sun on warm September afternoons. They carry journals in which they scribble quotes from their reading and questions about--well, everything. I was one of them. 

When it comes to issues of technology, English professors, not surprisingly, are sometimes like their students. We are forever forgetting (or refusing to remember) how to work the hardware in our classrooms. We carry around stacks of our students' papers and write comments assiduously in the margins with our favorite pens. We queue up at the photocopy machine, printing out, for example, massive packets of MLA guidelines that could just as easily be linked to online. Mention of the campus learning management system (LMS) elicits eye-rolling or nervous laughter in the hallways where I work. Complaints about students' texting behaviors never cease (in the 60s and 70s, when these professors were students, this same ire was directed at television). During the first week or so of classes each semester, an older colleague across the hall calls me over to his office to help him add the Discussion Board tool to his LMS site. He confesses that he can't remember how we did it last time and sheepishly asks if I can show him again. The first few times he asked, as I added the tool I pointed out that our campus IT support unit holds regular seminars and workshops on how to use the LMS. But since he's still asking for my help at the start of each term, it's hard not to conclude that not only hasn't he sought out help--he doesn't really even want to learn. Like our students, we English professors have always been and may always be conflicted about the machines in our garden. 

There is a passage in the book 1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition that has been following me around since I first encountered it a year or so ago. I'm using this passage in conversation with a research project about the history of composition teaching at the University of New Hampshire, but I'm finding all sorts of other uses for it and now, I think, I've found another one. Here it is:

Why do people teach composition as they do at any given moment? What determines their choices of textbooks, assignments, and daily classroom activities? Of all the possible approaches to the teaching of writing, why do teachers settle on particular ones? What accounts for the shape of composition programs--sequences of courses, testing and placement procedures, staffing and administrative practices? Individual preferences and personal styles are certainly involved; so, of course, are institutional values and constraints. But even more certainly, the teaching of composition is shaped by the available means of persuasion that are presented to us by intellectual and professional communities (broadly considered)--communities shaped, inevitably, by culture, circumstance, and history. (3)

In this first blog post, I've been trying to think about the communities and culture, circumstances and histories that have shaped my own orientation towards the use of technology in the classroom. My point, I think, is that for many who teach writing, the available means of (pedagogical) persuasion probably included some variation on this theme of skepticism/suspicion of the machine in the garden. We were not born with the impulse to roll our eyes, laugh nervously, or intentionally forget when issues related to technology come up--we were enculturated into these ways of knowing, we learned them while playing in the garden. 

I've managed to unlearn them. 

Today, in most of my classes, I strive to create the paperless classroom. I joke with my students that the paperless classroom is the penance I am doing for all the forests I killed in South America during my early teaching days. "You're papering them over," an older colleague and former professor once said as he stood in line, waiting for me to finish making copies. 

But the paperless classroom is more an ethos than it is a penance. I hope, through this blog, to share this ethos with you. Like those computer scientists discovering the internet back in the 1990s, my orientation towards technology in the writing classroom is one of possibility and opportunity. But as I say, it hasn't always been so. And that's why I decided to start this blog by looking back. To know where you're going, you've got to know where you've been. This is an important lesson I learned from being an English major, too. 

Notes on Research: Tales of an Emergent Fox

In the Introduction to his book, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States, Gordon Wood reflects on the nature of the work of the professional historian by drawing on the words of Isaiah Berlin, who drew on the words of the Greek poet Archilochus, who wrote: The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In summarizing Berlin's discussion of the knowledge of the fox and the hedgehog, Wood writes,

On one side of this chasm [a]re the hedgehogs, "who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle." On the other side [a]re the hedgehogs, "who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel--a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance." (1)

Wood points out that it was Berlin's purpose to try to organize great writers into the categories of hedgehog and fox, but suggests that historians, too, can be classified using these terms. A close colleague and friend, Wood suggests, is undoubtedly a fox, jumping from topic to topic, following his interests wherever they lead. "He knows many things and is interested in many things," Wood explains. As for himself, Wood claims to be "a simple hedgehog," preoccupied, throughout his career, with a single topic: "the American revolution and its consequences" (2).

Foxes and hedgehogs. Hedgehogs and foxes. I'm not sure we all fit so neatly into these two categories, but if forced to choose, I would have to identify myself, like Wood's colleague, as a fox. I'm not sure I planned for it to be this way, but this is the way things seem to be working out for me when it comes to my scholarship and academic interests. A common theme, if there is one, is that my scholarly projects tend to emerge from my teaching and then feed back into them. Let's take three examples:

1. Prior to pursuing doctoral study I worked for one year as a high school teacher and two years as an adjunct/lecturer in English. During those two years, I took every teaching assignment that came my way: I taught at a traditional public state university, a small private liberal arts college, a recently-turned for-profit community college, and a continuing education branch of a large state system (for whom, in 1999, I designed and taught several fully-online writing courses).

During this period, I worked with many students and many different kinds of students. I was frequently intrigued and inspired by the non-traditional or adult students with whom I worked. And I had lots of questions: What kinds of experiences with writing did such students bring to their coursework? What were their writing histories? What sense of themselves as writers did they carry around in their heads? And what did they want from a course focused on academic writing? To add to my curiosity, around this same time, my own mother had returned to school to earn a long-awaited bachelor's degree and so there was an odd sort of synergy where I was a teacher, new to the classroom, and frequently teaching adults like my mother and she was a student, new again to the classroom, and frequently learning from younger faculty members like me. We had terrific conversations about our experiences--she offering me a living example of the challenges that many adults face balancing school, work, and family and me offering her, where I could, advice on how to interpret assignments and write papers that would earn good grades.

Several years later, having completed my graduate coursework and now casting around for a dissertation project, my mind returned to those days teaching adults and trading stories with my mom. I could not recall reading, in my admittedly brief introduction to the field of composition and rhetoric, a single study documenting the experiences of non-traditional students mediating between the writerly worlds of school and work. I decided I wanted to try to understand that transition better--I wanted to try to understand and interpret what writers go through as they move back and forth between writing-for-the-boss and writing-for-the-teacher. I hoped my work would both advance knowledge in the field about the challenges writers face as they move between discursive contexts and instruct those who work with adult students, so that they might design curriculum and instruction to better meet the needs of returning adults.

To date, this project has lead to a half dozen or so conference presentations and four scholarly publications (one book chapter and three articles), each of which focuses on some aspect of adults' mediation between workplace and academic contexts of writing. One article looks at the issue of genres learning, trying to understand how adults sometimes draw on genre knowledge gained in one context when negotiating new genres in a new context. Another article focuses on the issue of identity, trying to understand the ways in which professional identities earned over many years in the workplace affect the choices adult students make when writing in school. A third article examines the writerly histories and current writing practices of all seven adult students who participated in the original study, attempting to paint a broad picture of the role of writing in adult students lives, past and present. In the years ahead, I hope to return to this work to find ways to organize it into a single scholarly monograph.

2. While the focus of my dissertation project was on adult students and their experiences with writing across multiple contexts, a secondary benefit of this project was an introduction to the field of workplace or professional communication. During the data-collection period of my research, I asked my participants to bring in writing artifacts from three contexts: work, school, and home/community. During our interviews, we discussed these artifacts in great detail, but we spent the greatest amount of time, it seemed, looking at workplace writing. My participants ranged from IT specialists to paraprofessionals, from administrative assistants to construction industry marketers. All were writing and doing research of one kind or another on the job and so I was able to see, firsthand, genres of professional writing and also to learn about the rhetorical contexts and situations that gave rise to and necessitated workplace genres. Thus began my initiation into the field of professional writing and my introduction to the pedagogical question that focuses much research within the field: given the differing contexts in which professional and academic writing are produced and the differing purposes of academic and professional writing, what can we do in academic settings to prepare students effectively for the myriad contexts for and types of workplace writing they will produce during their professional careers?

Around the same time that I was first gaining exposure to workplace writing via my dissertation project, a new movement was gathering steam within the field of composition/rhetoric, a movement that focused on the ongoing question of how to best teach first-year composition (FYC) courses so that what students learned about writing there might better 'transfer' to other academic contexts. Adherents of this movement argue that rather than focus FYC courses on students' personal experiences or general areas of inquiry for which the instructor may or may not have formal academic training (i.e. love, war, food, childhood, etc.), writing instruction in FYC courses should draw on the research and knowledge of the field of composition/rhetoric itself to help students develop transferable knowledge about writing itself--knowledge that they will be able to use in other courses and in the world beyond college. This movement, known as writing-about-writing (WAW), posits that, like other academic disciplines, the knowledge we convey to our students should be the accumulated wisdom that we, ourselves, have accumulated over the forty or fifty or so years that academics have formally studied writing.

I was an earlier adopter of and advocate for the WAW approach and a reviewer of the first WAW-based textbook. As such, I began to see other possibilities for applying WAW principles, one important one being that of the professional or workplace communication course. Like FYC classes, workplace writing courses are concerned principally with preparing students to write in other contexts--contexts beyond the walls of the room in which they are currently sitting. Like FYC classes, workplace writing courses are concerned with the issue of transfer--of what we can teach in one context that will be useful in another. Because I frequently teach both FYC and professional writing courses, I began to see parallels between the institutional functions of these two classes and began to experiment with devising and articulating a WAW pedagogy for professional writing classes. This work is very much in its early stages and, I am excited to say, is now collaborative. At the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in March, 2012, I presented work with my colleague Sarah Read (DePaul University), attempting to articulate a rationale for what we have come to call WAW-PW pedagogies for professional communication. Sarah and I also met with an editor from Bedford/St. Martin's during the conference to explore the possibility of a WAW-PW textbook. We are now at work on an article which furthers material we developed for our presentation at CCCC and which we hope to submit for publication this fall. The article, we hope, will lay the groundwork for the textbook we hope to begin work on in 2013.

3. As I have attempted to learn more about and experiment with the WAW approach to teaching FYC courses and begun to articulate a vision of WAW for professional communication instruction, I have found myself moving further and further from many of the core beliefs and practices I once held about writing and writing instruction. Or so it has seemed. This journey probably pre-dates my introduction to WAW and can be traced to my years of doctoral training, when my world, as regards the study and teaching of writing, was expanded considerably. As an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) during the early to mid-1990s, I had experienced what has come to be known as the "process" approach to writing instruction, an approach which emphasizes the importance of explicit instruction in pre-writing or invention, frequent and thoughtful feedback or response (from teacher and fellow-students), student-choice (in topic selection), ongoing revision, and a shared classroom community of writers. As a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) candidate at the University of Iowa in the late 1990s, the curtain was pulled back and I learned the rationale for and methods of implementing process pedagogies. But by the time I left UNH again, in 2007, having completed my Ph.D., writing and the teaching of writing no longer seemed as straightforward as they perhaps once had and my teaching had shifted in emphasis, focusing more on examining the contexts which shape writing than on writers themselves.

The cognitive dissonance I sometimes felt when attempting to balance approaches to the teaching of writing that seemed fundamentally at odds with one another came to a head two or so years ago, when I decided to revisit and adopt for a course on expository writing a book that had once been my bible, Donald Murray's The Craft of Revision. Murray was a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and founder of the writing process movement in the late 1960s. A prolific writer himself, Murray spent the better part of the 1970s and 1980s trying to document the "writing process" (as if there was just one) and teaching writing teachers how to, as the title of his 1971 manifesto argues, "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product." Murray was also a professor at UNH where his influence was very much still felt when I was there as an undergraduate and persists, to some degree, to this day.

I had always thought of myself as an adherent to the Murray approach and to what I've come to think of as the "UNH School" of writing instruction. But that semester when I revisited Murray's The Craft of Revision, I was confronted with the fact that I no longer believed in a good deal of what Murray was saying about writing and the writing process. First, I had come to accept that there were many, many writing processes and I had become suspicious of anyone attempting to extrapolate about how writing worked based a data source as limited as his or her own experience (Murray's primary source of evidence). Second, I had come to feel that the context in which the writer finds him or herself matters at least at much (if not more) to the writing process as what the writer went through while writing (the latter of which being Murray's primary pre-occupation). These two beliefs made it virtually impossible for me to sign on to what Murray was preaching and caused in me a feeling of crisis in the sense that I began to feel as though I was turning my back on what had been, previously, my primary professional identification with the UNH School.

Around this time, I decided to go back and start re-reading Murray. I skipped his textbooks and began to read his published scholarly articles. I read everything he published in our field's major journals and a good number of pieces he published in smaller, more obscure venues. I found, as I read, that while Murray missed some things and made some moves that caused me to now feel uncomfortable, a good deal of what he said about writing and the teaching of writing he got right. Perhaps more important, I found that underlying my concerns about certain of his methods were a core bedrock of principles that I still very much believed in and adhered to. I still believe, for example, that students should be allowed to use writing to discover what it is that they want to say. I still believe that it's important for students to feel invested in the topics about which they are writing. And I still believe that, as Murray wrote in his "Teach Writing as Process Not Product," "There are no rules, no absolutes, just alternatives. What works one time may not another. All writing is experimental." My re-assessment of Murray's work has shown me that it is possible to disagree and agree--that it is possible to argue with one's mentors and still maintain identification with the larger projects and affiliations you both share. It has shown me that I am still very much of the UNH School.

And it has done something more. Despite his considerable influence on the field of composition/rhetoric, Donald Murray's work has not yet been examined and assessed in a sustained, critical manner by the field's historians. UNH, as an institutional site of composition teaching, has not yet been studied or placed on the map of significant historical places as regards the development of the field of composition/rhetoric. My work re-reading Murray, which emerged out of my own evolving pedagogical orientation, has now turned into a larger project, as I have initiated detailed historical study of both Murray's life and work and of the various writing programs he helped establish and shape at UNH. To date, this work has lead me to conduct interviews with numerous UNH English faculty and alumni and to conduct archival research in three institutional sites: Murray's archive (Poynter Institute, St. Petersburg, FL), the Milne Special Collections and Archives (UNH) and the UNH English Department archives. While this research is still very much ongoing, I have begun to experiment with shaping narratives which articulate Murray's significance to the field of composition/rhetoric and which argue for the significance of UNH as a key institutional site shaping the emergence of the field of composition/rhetoric in the 1970s/80s. I will share this work with the community of composition/rhetoric for the first time at the 64th Annual Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (March, 2013), via my participation on a panel entitled “Archival Research and the Origins of Composition," where I will present a paper called "'Now I’ll Tell You About the Great Revolution': Donald Murray and The Transformation of Freshman English at the University of New Hampshire. I anticipate that this paper will turn into the first of several publications, including a scholarly monograph, on Murray and the writing programs at UNH.

What draws all this together? Connections...back to hedgehog and fox...

The Rhetoric of Prophets

A course on the rhetoric of prophets:

Jesus Christ
Ghandi
MLK
Malcolm X
John Lennon
Bob Marley

ENGL 379: Planning

Rhetoric: An Overview (Keith and Lundberg)
Rhetoric: How To (Hart and Daughton)
Rhetoric: Critical Texts (Aristotle?)