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...