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

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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

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Introduction: In Search of Experimentation in the Teaching of Writing

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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

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Works Cited Index

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1 Acknowledgments

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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.

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The Idea of a Writing Laboratory

Introduction: In Search of Experimentation in the Teaching of Writing

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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

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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)

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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.

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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

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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:

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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(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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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“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).

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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)

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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,

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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

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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,

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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

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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 cut off from the main stream of the rhetorical tradition” (“Freshman English” 481). Standards of etiquette might have been a value that the Committee on Student English thought would resonate with Dartmouth faculty. Kitzhaber, however, rejected this image and offered the positive approach that “Dartmouth students, and their counterparts on other campuses, can write well enough if they are shown how, are given adequate practice, and are expected always to write to the best of their ability no matter what the course” (Themes, Theories, and Therapy 117). The order created by Kitzhaber at Dartmouth must have been welcome, for I did not come across any angry letters of protest over the Writing Clinic’s demise. Kitzhaber had taken the rhetorical high road, appealing to Dartmouth’s image of excellence and assuring faculty that they could

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expect more from students, that students were capable of that challenge. He removed the punitive stigma that was the Writing Clinic and thus removed an irritating reminder that the defense of high culture was no easy matter. While the Committee on Student English consistently reminded faculty of the difficulty in getting students to write “acceptable” English, it also admitted in many of its reports, memos, and articles that the need for vigilance was necessary-but-regrettable work. For instance, in his 1951–52 report, Writing Clinic director Eric Kelly ended, “One does resent the necessity of such work in an institution of higher learning but realities seem to demand it” (4). The problem—not just for Dartmouth but for any setting where one hears this message over and over—is that who wants to hear it? When it comes to student writing, faculty have always had at least two clear temptations: (1) don’t read it; (2) don’t assign it. Judging from the increasingly strident annual reports of the Committee on Student English, these two responses were increasingly frequent. Kitzhaber’s appeal to Dartmouth’s identity—extolling the high standing of its students and the hard work of its faculty—was far more effective than the committee’s admonitions for faculty to work harder and be tougher. As any savvy writing-across-the-curriculum director quickly learns, getting faculty to complain about poor student writing is relatively easy. Helping faculty create meaningful opportunities for students to write and receive response is not. Writing Clinic director Thaddeus Seymour (a future dean of the college) was not even convinced of the efficacy of the enterprise. In a 1958 CCCC workshop report, Seymour is quoted as saying, “It is in the lonely editorial process that men learn to write—not in the classroom and not in the writing clinics” (“Proficiency Beyond the Freshman Year” 148). I’m not sure Kitzhaber would have agreed with this romantic, writer-in-agarret attitude, but they came to similar conclusions—the Writing Clinic was expendable. The Writing Clinic Is Dead—Long Live the Writing Clinic!

Not only was the image of undergraduate writing offered by the Committee on Student English and the Writing Clinic rejected by Albert Kitzhaber and the Dartmouth faculty, it was rejected by Dartmouth undergraduates, at least according to Robert Worthington, class of 1959. In response to my request in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine for accounts of Writing Clinic experiences, Worthington wrote that he had been remanded to the Writing Clinic while taking English 2 in the spring of his freshman year:

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I do not recall the clinic as really doing much to improve my writing skills nor did it take up any real amounts of time. My only recollection is meeting with Thad [Seymour, clinic director] and being told there were no deficits in my ability to write and most likely I was not a real candidate for the clinic. But due to the threat of being flunked it was deemed best for me to stay in the clinic and get good reports. For whatever reason the teacher had, I was placed in the writing clinic. I believed at that time it was due to his not liking me for some reason because it sure was not due to deficient writing skills; probably I’ll never know, and I guess I never really cared one way or the other as I was confident in my writing abilities. It was just another minor educational hoop to jump through, no big deal. I got along fine with Thad as he was a nice guy and also my frosh, heavyweight, rowing coach. Fifty years later, Worthington acknowledged some degree of sting remaining from that mischaracterization of his writing skills and ended his note to me with the following: Remember that the Dartmouth English prof said I couldn’t write (and in his opinion never would)? I have four degrees (BA, 2 Master’s, and a PhD) with the 1st MA being with honors, the PhD with an “A–” GPA and a perfect 4.0 (straight “A”) for the 2nd Masters. In 1967 I wrote my first article and since than, as a professional writer, have written over 1700 publications (articles, scientific journal articles, books, and book contributions) of which several have received professional recognition and awards. All of this for a country boy who couldn’t write. That Dartmouth Writing Clinic could instill these long-standing feelings is testament to the power of writing instruction and everything it represents. That power can, of course, be turned toward the ways that writing can enable students to make meaning, and writing instruction is essential to that activity. At present-day Dartmouth, the idea of writing support is quite different than in the past, and the ghost of the Writing Clinic exists in the form of multiple “Writing Support Services.” The lead description on the program’s website reads, “The Writing Support Services have one goal: to help all Dartmouth students become better writers. Student who use our services come to us with a variety of questions and concerns. Some are excellent writers who have discovered the importance of a second reader. Others are stuck on a particular writing assignment. Still others have persistent writing problems that they hope 104

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to clear up” (Dartmouth Writing Program par. 1). Consistent with contemporary writing center theory and practice, the approach is positive, inclusive, and developmental. And the existence of comprehensive writing support at present-day Dartmouth is testament to the strong need for such services at all institutions, no matter how select. Lessons Learned from Minnesota and Dartmouth It is perhaps an indication of the current climate of “excellence” that the General College no longer exists, while Dartmouth provides a full range of writing support services to its students. In their quest for high annual rankings in U.S. News and World Report, many institutions are casting off remedial instruction and the underprepared students who fill those classrooms, remaking themselves in a Lake Wobegon-ish way with students who are all “above average.” James Twitchell of the University of Florida notes that such strategies represent “the intersection of getting the brand out and the contributions in, and daily it becomes more crucial” (52). In a climate of rising costs and tight-fisted legislators, alumni donations are increasingly vital to the day-to-day functioning of these institutions. To attract those dollars, words such as “flagship,” “excellence,” and “signature” and the elimination of reminders of sub-par performance—such as remedial instruction—carry significant weight. As Twitchell points out, “Americans donate more money to higher education than to any other cause except religion” (49). Competition for those dollars requires strategic branding. In a recent College English article, Richard Miller points out that many elite institutions such as Princeton and Stanford have realized that attending to students as “our future donors” includes offering writing courses and programs that ensure solid learning experiences. Miller notes that state institutions face a climate of diminished funding, and as a result, “public institutions of higher education will live or die based on their ability to attract voluntary support” (375); “the case can be made that it is now crucial to the long-term financial well-being of public institutions of higher education to improve the working conditions of writing instructors, precisely because writing programs have access to all those impressionable and invaluable future donors” (378). Miller urges writing programs to assert themselves as part of the new brand, as essential to key revenue streams. I support Miller’s call for a realization that institutional identity is represented at many levels and by many audiences. As I have shown in this chapter, an institution’s approach to writing instruction can be an key element of that institutional identity, whether experimental and 105

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progressive or reductionist and punitive. Literacy instruction holds great power in that way and as such is always hotly contested. We periodically learn that “Johnny can’t write” and that a crisis in students’ literacy skills means that civilization as we know it is going to hell. Bring in new technologies and the literacies they spawn—think instant messaging, blogging, and email—and the hand-wringing over standards and the maintenance of the status quo seem to threaten any hope of substantial reform, of experimentation, and lead to events such as the closing of the General College. However, Minnesota’s decision makes it clear that the idea of the “classroom as laboratory” is needed now more than ever. Just as Malcolm MacLean and his staff were able to create an institution and a writing laboratory that responded to social problems and focused on educating the “common” person, we can expect just as much from our current efforts. It is a continuation of the experiment started some seventy years ago in Minnesota, but with a contemporary twist that offers laboratory methods as a new brand or signature, one as befitting elite institutions such as Dartmouth as it does non-elite institutions. Of course, branding can be expensive as can any attempt at educational reform. Dartmouth’s efforts to reform its writing program could only come about with the infusion of Carnegie grant money. Minnesota’s experiments in teaching were reeled in largely as a result of a lack of funds. This quest for the resources necessary to enact laboratory methods is perennial, and one significant benefactor is the federal government. In the next chapter, I take up one moment in the history of educational reform, when a climate of national emergency followed the Soviet launching of the satellite Sputnik in 1957. Very quickly, science education received a large infusion of funding from the federal government in an effort to win the “space race.” Shortly thereafter, leaders in English composition were clamoring for their share of the federal pie, an effort that resulted in the funding of Project English, a seven-year experiment in educational reform. It is likely that few have heard about it, given its lack of impact, another episode in the narrative of reform of the teaching of writing in higher education.

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5 Project English and the Quest for Federal Funding

W

hile I was working on this book, a new chancellor of one of the University of Massachusetts campuses was announced. He gave up his position representing Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives to take the job; he has no real educational administrative experience but was chosen because of his promise as a fund-raiser. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, “So it goes.” This never-ending search for scarce resources often seems to define higher education. It can be expensive, of course, to realize the ideals of the laboratory, and educational reform efforts—whether in science or in writing—often live or die based on the ability to keep the funds flowing. Resources alone, however, are not the sole criterion for success, and in this chapter I turn to the history of a particular effort to attract federal dollars in order to change the shape of English teaching from kindergarten to college. The relative failure of the reform is a case study in what elements are vital to attend to if change is to have any possibility of success. For scientists working in college or university settings, the scramble for federal grants from the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation is constant. In its history, English studies has sought some piece of this action, some assurance that innovation, research, or reform would have support on the federal level, that English studies were vitally important to the national interest. Compared to other efforts, the federal role in supporting curricular reforms and research activities is a relatively recent one, only a half-century old. It took a dramatic international event for the federal government to take significant responsibility to fund educational activities in higher education, an arena previously controlled on the state and local level. And while that event created the contemporary climate for funding of scientific research, English studies had its own taste of that pie (or perhaps drank that Kool-Aid, to use a more cynical metaphor). The results were mixed, and the seven-year life of the federally funded Project English offers a cautionary tale of what experimental reforms to the teaching of English, infused with significant federal funding, might turn into.

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Washington, We Have a Problem On October 5, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik, and for scientific research and science education, nothing would ever again be the same. On October 12, one week later, the New York Times offered the reaction from the classroom in a page 3 news piece titled “Satellite Called Spur to Education”: Education as usual can no longer be accepted in this country, leading college and university spokesmen said here today. The Soviet satellite, they insisted, has shattered the nation’s “smug complacency” about its schools and colleges. It is no longer possible, the educators agreed, to maintain a top-notch school system on a “starved” budget. (Fine 3) This reaction from the American Council on Education was a call for a major shift in funding and organization of education, from a system largely controlled on a statewide and local basis to one in which the federal government would lead with dollars and energy to compete in the “space race.” As expressed at the time to the council by the chancellor of the University of Kansas, Franklin Murphy, “The little satellite says that our schools are no longer a luxury, but are as important as the food we eat, the cars in which we ride, the clothes we buy” (quoted in Fine 3). The reaction to Sputnik transformed American science education at all levels, mostly in terms of funding and curricular focus, but also raising the visibility of research and the university faculty conducting that research. As summarized by historian John Douglass, The translation of Sputnik from a scientific into a political event changed the dynamics of policymaking. A sense of urgency elevated to new heights the importance of the research university as a national defense tool. . . . Sputnik did not determine the evolving role of the federal government in higher education. But it did alter the way that Americans viewed the importance of advanced training and research, generating a blitzkrieg of media attention, and compelling the President and lawmakers to quickly pass judgment. Post-Sputnik jitters results in unprecedented levels of federal funding to schools, colleges, and universities. (328) While the language of these statements would seem to encompass all areas of education, post-Sputnik funding was primarily directed to science and engineering, mathematics, and foreign languages, fields deemed essential to fighting the Soviet threat (Douglass 342). Congress passed the National Defense Education Act in 1958 to marshal resources for fields it 108

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saw as vital. According to the act, “Assistance will come from Washington to help develop as rapidly as possible those skills essential to the national security” (quoted in Douglass 342). In terms of numbers, between 1955 and 1965 research funding grew from 5 percent to 15 percent of the total federal budget, and total federal funding for research and development grew 200 percent (Douglass 346). As reported by Douglass, “By 1970, an estimated 75 percent of all engineers and scientists who entered the field of scientific research had gone into federally subsidized undertakings in both public and private sectors” (346). The federal response to Sputnik included the creation of a web of agencies to disburse those funds and promote research efforts: NASA was launched in 1958 and the NIH budget grew from 8 million in 1947 to over 1 billion by 1966 (“A Short History”). In short, the U.S. government’s reaction to Sputnik was remarkably focused, remarkably fast, and relatively far reaching—if you were pursuing activities that were clearly in the interest of national defense, that is. Where’s Our Share? While the federal reaction to Sputnik resulted in a rapid infusion of funds into science research and science education, other fields expressed no small measure of jealousy and demands for attention. Leading figures in English studies called for their share of the federal pie by arguing for the importance of English in a post-Sputnik world. As expressed in a 1960 NCTE resolution, that body should “direct its Executive Committee to inform the Congress of the United States and the United States Office of Education of the compelling need for an extension of the National Defense Education Act of 1958 to include English and the humanities as a vital first step toward improving instruction in English and of stimulating program development in this important area” (National Council iii). For leaders in English studies, the struggle to assert their importance in a general culture fascinated with all things scientific must have been formidable. Consider the climate as described by historian Scott Montgomery: “The 1950s and early 1960s were a time of vast popularity for scientific effort and accomplishment, a time when enrollments in technical disciplines increased enormously, when chemistry sets and microscopes sold by the millions, when ‘the wonders of nature’ and ‘science for tomorrow’ appeared as common motifs on television, in magazines, in advertisements of all sorts” (193). The leverage English studies had was to argue for the role of the humanistic studies in a cold, technocratic world. Following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, science presented awesome possibilities but also terrifying power (Montgomery 193). As expressed by Senator Joseph Clark in a 1961 legislative hearing 109

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on expanding the NDEA to include English studies, “From where I sit, we need a lot more people competent in English. We may need some more musicians and poets and philosophers, just as much as we need people to advance scientific achievement” (quoted in Strain 519). This science-versus-humanities rift had become a common theme in the English-teaching literature following World War II. These feelings were perhaps best summed up by John Gerber, NCTE president, in his lead article in the February 1956 College English: “Our eagerness to appear scientific, especially in teaching the verbal skills, has become almost pathological. We have opened Reading Clinics, Writing Laboratories, and Speech Clinics. When we get into these antiseptic areas we call ourselves clinicians, and the students become cases. We keep fever charts of their attempts with the comma, and plot their reading rate improvement on graph paper” (249–50). For Gerber and others, the linkage with science was a potential loss of the humanities basis—and the study of literature— that motivated many English faculty to pursue their profession in the first place. As Gerber described, In this indiscriminate use of the terminology and techniques of science we can destroy ourselves professionally. For if we come to believe that charts and graphs and coefficients are all that are necessary for the teaching of English we give evidence of the most abysmal ignorance of what human expression is and what its potentialities are. What is more, we deny the essential integrity of the student, who is ever and always a person and never a statistic, an abstraction, a hypothetical average, or a case study. (250) By the end of the decade, Gerber and other NCTE officers along with colleagues at the Modern Language Association chose to argue not that English needed to be more scientific but that study of English generally and writing specifically were just as vital to the national defense as was the study of science. It is important to note that leaders in English studies had previous experience in asserting their vital role in the defense and future of the nation. In the 1930s, English departments were trying to establish a toehold in the academy as the Great Depression wore on, and many institutions were cutting back on course offerings and departmental faculty. By the late 1930s, the war in Europe and debates over the United States’ potential involvement offered college English teachers an opportunity to assert the importance of their field. In his opening address to the 1939 NCTE convention, Louis Mumford noted that an “honorable desire to defend

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democracy has led many teachers to stress the democratic spirit in English and American letters” (quoted in “The New York Convention” 452–53). Similarly, Winfield Rogers pointed out in 1939 how far the function of required English classes could extend from merely preparation for success in future courses: “A democracy under present world-conditions cannot survive without persons who can read and write—read and write accurately as a mirror of intellectual integrity—and who have the humane values of tolerance, understanding, and sympathy” (405). These debates over the function of college English can be found throughout the literature of the 1930s. Wilbur Hatfield asked, “Must we not adapt education, especially education in that congeries of social arts known as English, to the sweeping changes now occurring in our social, political, and intellectual climate?” (536). As a result, English instruction could focus on the preparing the students flooding college campuses in the 1930s to be productive members of a democracy. As described by Warren Taylor, “The only hope of democracy is to bridge the gap between the wise and the ignorant, to realize the values of education in political actions. Its citizens need means which will enable them to know and to evaluate what they, as a nation, are doing politically and why they are doing it” (858). English teachers played a “noble” role in this scenario: “We are beginning to see that something more than hospitalization for the weak is necessary; the majority of young people will not acquire incidentally through assignments in history, physics, and literature the reading skills they will need in their civic, vocational, and leisure activities. Someone— English teachers, or the whole school corps in co-operation—must teach the higher reading skills, as well as cure the reading cripples” (Hatfield 539). The need to remediate and ensure the literacy skills of undergraduates became an essential task of the university, and, as I showed in chapter 1, is the birth and legacy of writing as a laboratory subject. While in the 1930s English faculty seemed largely to be arguing among themselves in the pages of the journals in their field, by the time of Sputnik, these arguments could be recycled and taken up by a new generation of reformers, ones who cast an envious eye on their lab-coated cousins on the other side of campus and asked an external audience, “Where is our share?” George Winchester Stone of the MLA and J. N. Hook of the NCTE took advantage of a Ford Foundation grant to hold four conferences on the state of English teaching in America and the need for a federal commitment (Shugrue, “Project English and Beyond” 1). The final document from this effort, “The Basic Issues in the Teaching of English,” was first published in PMLA in 1959. The authors of that document took

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a rhetorical approach that must have seemed familiar to its readership: the power of English studies in its “civilizing” function or as a mark of high culture. Consider, for example, these statements: • More than any other subject, English offers the possibility of selfeducation and development outside the classroom and beyond the years of formal schooling. . . . But to profit from this opportunity, the habit of reading and a love of good literature are necessary. (“The Basic Issues” 2) • Are we teaching English in such a way that it truly has a civilizing value, or have we watered down the subject so much, in an attempt to fit it to the supposed interests of many whom we teach, that we have deprived them of the opportunity to become acquainted with and to experience the best thought and expression of their own time and the cultural heritage which is rightfully theirs? (“The Basic Issues” 3) • A still graver question is whether we have succeeded in inculcating in our students a permanent love of good literature and a pride in the ability to use their language with clarity and grace. (“The Basic Issues” 3) Evident in these statements is a certain “back-to-basics” sensibility when that basic would have been primarily be the study of the literary canon. The curricular assumptions inherent in this argument would come to haunt the federal efforts that followed. In other words, the long struggle over the curriculum of English classes—particularly the struggle over the study of literature versus composition on a much broader range of topics—would overtake this effort, culminating in a clear rift between the American and British representatives at the Dartmouth Conference in 1966. That was all to come, however. First, the federal government would need to respond to the demands of English studies and open up the federal funding spigot, if only to a relative trickle. Project English Is Born At its November 1960 meeting, the NCTE would issue several resolutions calling for renewed funding of the Defense Education Act and the inclusion of English in this next round. These materials were gathered in a 1961 publication, The National Interest and the Teaching of English (National Council), which was distributed to each member of Congress during the DEA re-authorization hearings (Strain 517–18). The authors described the problem as follows:

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In this country more pupils spend more time more continuously throughout their entire schooling on the subject of English than on any other subject. Competence in English is almost universally acknowledged as basic to quality in education. Two of the three R’s are included in the subject. Yet the teaching of English in this country is far less effective than it should be. Too many students are struggling to learn English under gravely inferior conditions—in crowded classrooms with inadequate books; from teachers ill-prepared and insufficiently helped; in schools unable to attract and to retain teachers with the vision and experience to develop strong English programs; sometimes with skills, especially in reading and writing, that have been insufficiently developed at earlier educational levels. (Committee on National Interest 15) While building a space program to defeat the Soviets and win the space race was a laudable goal, offering attention to the essential English profession was no less important. The federal authorities who were seemingly the audience for this report were reminded of this unfairness: “In the fields of science and mathematics, where the cultural lag was less acute, the spectacular appearance of Sputnik provided the impetus for re-examination and for such developments as the re-education of leading high school science teachers. In English the disparity between what specialists and research scholars know and what the schools teach is even greater than it was in science, but no dramatic orbiting of a linguistic satellite draws public attention to this disparity” (Committee on National Interest 75). This report and its calls for reform centered on three areas: (1) the need to increase the numbers of English teachers at the elementary, high school, and college levels to address shortages and an anticipated enrollment boom; (2) the need for better preparation of English teachers, including higher and more consistent standards, which could vary by state and locality; (3) the need for improved teaching conditions, particularly in terms of workload, which was already untenable but would become even more so if students were to be given more writing instruction. Issues of workload were not new, of course. As I pointed out in chapter 1, in 1913 a committee commissioned by the Modern Language Association and the National Council of Teachers of English and chaired by Edwin Hopkins of Kansas issued a Report on the Cost and Labor of English Teaching. After roughly twenty years of teaching writing as “chiefly a matter of laboratory practice and of individual instruction” (3), the result was grim: “Of the colleges, some of the very best testify that it is more difficult to retain instructors in English composition than in other subjects” (Modern

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Language Association 7). By the early 1960s, this situation had not necessarily changed much (Connors, “Rhetoric”); however, English studies had a new impetus and a potential for far more resources than they had previously known. The National Interest and the Teaching of English was a manifesto of sorts, and the reaction to this effort was an infusion of funding and the birth of Project English. The victory for English teachers was announced in the February 1962 issue of College Composition and Communication (CCC): “Project English is an undertaking by the U.S. Office of Education, with budgetary support from the Congress, designed to make a key contribution to raising the quality of English instruction” (U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare 39). However, while the previous statements of the MLA and the NCTE focused on improved preparation and working conditions for English teachers, from the get-go Project English had a much more curricular focus with a secondary focus on research. As described in the CCC announcement: The office will sponsor an increasing amount of research and experimentation in the area of English instruction. Specifically, it will contract with universities for the establishment of centers to develop curriculum materials and methods, will provide for dissemination of new knowledge, materials, and other resources for the improvement of instruction, and will otherwise seek to facilitate the growth of a vigorous quest for quality in English on the part of our schools and colleges. (U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare 39) In its first year with a budget of 400,000, six “curriculum study centers” were established at Carnegie Institute of Technology, Hunter College (CUNY), the University of Oregon, the University of Minnesota, the University of Nebraska, and Northwestern University with five-year contracts to “develop and test a sequential curriculum for specified grades and with particular emphases,” according to J. N. Hook, Project English’s first national coordinator (Hook, “Project English” 33–34). By the second year, the budget was 900,000, and centers were added at Florida State, the University of Georgia, Columbia Teachers College, and the University of Wisconsin (Hook, “Project English” 33–34). By the time funding ran out in 1967, a total of twenty curriculum centers had been established. The overriding focus on developing curriculum—as opposed to improving working conditions, conducting evaluation research, or ensuring professional development—grew from several factors. One was the climate at the time toward creating a coherent curricular philosophy, 114

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particularly as influenced by Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner. Bruner’s notions of the “spiral curriculum” —that the inherent structure of disciplinary knowledge could be translated into a sequenced course of study—was awfully appealing to those in English studies who were survivors of the “life-adjustment” curriculum that was adopted in many English classrooms throughout the 1950s. When John Dewey’s notions of progressivism and student-centered teaching mutated into a mixed bag of curricular choices and a lack of coherence for the overall English teaching scene, leaders in the field yearned for order. As described by Albert Kitzhaber, Project English’s focus on developing a sequenced curriculum was “a reaction against curricular chaos, against a philosophy of education that assumed that more than half of our children had to be adjusted rather than educated” (“A Rage for Disorder” 1216). By creating tightly prescribed curricula, developers were, in Robert Parker’s summary, “proceeding on the assumption that this organized knowledge would somehow be transformed into improved writing” (34). Three years before Project English was born, the authors of “Conference on Basic Issues in the Teaching of English” wrote in a PMLA article that “an articulated English program” laid out what sequence of literature would best be followed in K-12 classrooms. For these authors, the “values of the literary component of English are sequential and incremental” (“An Articulated English Program” 13). When it came to writing, the authors allowed more leeway in subject matter and offered as outcome measures for high school graduates the ability to “express a point of view well, organize a judicious book report, write an interesting autobiography, and show some knowledge of various stylistic achievements (such as the different pungency in the prose of Lamb and Hemingway, the balance of Pope and the tangential approach of Browning and Eliot)” (“An Articulated English Program” 17). Thus, Project English’s focus on curriculum could appease the traditionalist English teachers who were on the defensive about the place of literature in the English curriculum (and were just as fed up with readings about popular culture in the classroom as were the compositionists). The big tent of the curriculum study centers would approach the study of English, primarily on the K-12 level, with a coherent curricular philosophy and could include the latest developments in linguistics and language study, all with a nod toward tradition. This approach is perhaps best described in Harold Allen’s account of the intent at the University of Minnesota curriculum center: “We believe that within the five years set by Project English as the duration of our grant there can be produced a school-tested six-year sequential curriculum, with the work in composition and literature based upon and related 115

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to the solid foundation of language content” (232). Traditional, too, was the development and dissemination plan: curriculum developed by college and university researchers would then be distributed to K-12 teachers for implementation (after some degree of testing/evaluation in those settings). The seeds for failure, then, were sown early, particularly in that last move. Treating K-12 teachers as misguided practitioners eager for the results of university brainpower—and thus with no significant role in the development of those solutions—has sunk many an educational reform effort (Tyack and Cuban). I jump too far ahead in this story, however. In the early years of Project English, the enthusiasm for the effort and predictions of its success were prominent features in the words of those involved. Some prognostications include the following: If a comprehensive history of English teaching is ever written, the past year or two may well be known as one of the few times in this century when the nature and direction of our professional effort actually changed. —James Squire, NCTE executive secretary, (“English” 381) My mission now is to tell you quite simply that with your support and with the growing involvement of the English scholar, Project English will long endure. —Ralph C. M. Flynt, associate commissioner for educational research and development, U.S. Office of Education (30) I predict that as colleges and universities increasingly find their freshmen already possessed of a sound basic awareness of language and with some skill in its use to communicate and, furthermore, possessed of a much more comprehensive and sounder knowledge of language then that enjoyed by their freshman English instructors, they will be confronted with the awareness that their traditional freshman course has been rendered obsolete. —Harold B. Allen, past president of CCCC and NCTE (232–33) If every Center were really to succeed in bringing its hopeful plans to a wise and just fruition, Project English could lead us into the Promised Land. —Robert C. Slack, a faculty member and director of the Project English site at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (686) These hopes and dreams are perhaps best countered by the dire scenario proposed by Robert Hogan, associate executive secretary of NCTE, in a 1966 English Journal article: “The worst thing that could happen would be 116

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for the results of this work done so far to lie quietly in the archives of 100 or so university libraries which now stand as repositories for curriculum and research reports” (536). Given the debatable impact and relative obscurity of Project English in contemporary English studies (and the need for me to dig up information on it through university libraries and archives in order to write this chapter), the worst case seems to have won the day. Nevertheless, it is fair to ask, what did the American taxpayers of the early 1960s get for their contribution to the reform of English studies? The answers are well documented, as periodic accounts of the activities of the curriculum centers appeared in PMLA and English Journal. These detailed descriptions of the justification for and development of curricular materials provide less than stimulating reading (in my opinion, at least). Many accounts are troubling, such as this report from Florida State in 1964: “A test of ability to read poetry has been developed. The test is composed of multiple-choice items on seven short, complete poems. As a result of tryout of the test, a reliability coefficient of .87 has been established and item analyses have been run” (Steinberg 61). We also learn from Florida State that “test construction and planning of evaluation will be major activities during the next two years. After a survey of the tests presently available, the Center staff agree on the necessity to construct tests in reading of poetry, reading of fiction, and English linguistics” (Steinberg 61). In the same year, we learn that Indiana University is developing an English curriculum for grades 7 through 12 that looks as follows: The composition program will progress from the writing of short paragraphs in grades seven and eight to the organization and development of 500-word themes which will require students to solve problems of writing on different subjects, for different purposes, and for different audiences. Although composition assignments will, for the most part, stem from the study of literature and language, provisions will also be made for theme assignments that will give the individual an opportunity to express his interests and to discover how much is involved in describing adequately his own activities. (Steinberg 67) This curricular experimentation seems little advanced from the approaches to teaching writing that had dominated the first half of the twentieth century (what James Berlin has labeled current-traditional rhetoric [Rhetoric and Reality]), and subsequent reports do not reveal much more in the way of reform. For instance, a 1964 “Report on Project English” by Robert Slack, the head of the Carnegie Institute of Technology’s Curriculum 117

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Study Center, offered this summary of his work: “The Carnegie Center has built a core literature program which stresses World, American, and English literature in the three [high school] years; a second movement in the literature program proceeds from a study of characterization and certain universal themes (10th grade), through the relation of the literature to the culture that produced it (11th grade), to a concern with literary genres and themes (12th grade)” (684–85). Or consider this 1966 account of the accomplishments at the Northern Illinois University Curriculum Center: “Audio-visual materials have also been developed. Most interesting are slide sets illustrating the production of phonemes, a combination slide set and continuous tape set illustrating stress, pitch, and juncture, and a cardboard ‘computer’ which identifies, at one and the same time, a phoneme, its most frequent spellings, and an example of its occurrence” (Shugrue, “New Materials” 29). The bulk of these accounts are unfortunately more of the same—highly structured curricula with an emphasis on teaching literature, language, and composition in highly controlled ways. The pendulum certainly had swung away from the supposed curricular excesses of the 1950s, but the stultifying boredom that surely resulted when these curricula were implemented is an unfortunate legacy. Still, some bright spots in these accounts do exist. One occurred at Northwestern, where, under the direction of Wallace Douglas, the center had little to do with developing curriculum and much more to do with challenging prevailing orthodoxy. As described in a 1964 account, at Northwestern the goal was to go “back to a classroom situation that can be kept informal and unstructured. What activities does a pupil need to engage in to use the written dialect to communicate his thoughts, his feelings, his imagined motions?” (Steinberg 73). Two years later, the report on Northwestern’s activities contained this provocative assertion: “Young people who are being asked to write need, first of all, to be taught how to do what writers do as they develop their writings from an original idea for a piece to the completed and complete whole” (Shugrue, “New Materials” 30). The focus on the writing process and on students as writers is refreshing given the plethora of descriptions of curricular sequence and final testing. Another center that embraced the experimental quality of the enterprise far more than most was at New York University, under the direction of Neil Postman. In the NYU “linguistic demonstration center,” a series of eleven public television programs were produced “in which teachers and students from cooperating schools simulate on television the activities of the classroom. . . . The programs are spontaneous, ‘live’ classroom lessons, each focusing on some linguistic principle or methodology” (Shugrue, “New Materials” 28). 118

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As I have pointed out, the relative experimentation at Northwestern and NYU stand in stark contrast to the traditional approaches taken at the other university sites. It is important to acknowledge, however, that research on writing did occur as a result of Project English funding and did offer the opportunity for new knowledge that the curricular centers could perhaps put into practice. The language of published accounts of Project English generally conflated curriculum development and “research and experimentation,” such as the statement that “the Office [of Education] will sponsor an increasing amount of research and experimentation in the area of English instruction. Specifically, it will contract with universities for the establishment of centers to develop curriculum materials and methods” (“Project English” 39). However, by 1963 twenty-nine genuine research projects were being conducted on a variety of teaching-related topics. For example, we learn that “well aware that many research studies have indicated only slight correlation between students’ knowledge of grammar and ability to write, Roy C. O’Donnell, Mount Olive Junior College, Mount Olive, North Carolina, questions the validity of the conclusion” (Brett 292), that “Joseph T. Sutton and Eliot D. Allen of Stetson University, De Land, Florida, also are studying the effect of frequency of writing upon composition, but at the college freshman level” (Brett 293), and that “Wisconsin’s Professor William McColly looks askance at the one-learns-to-write-by-writing proponents” (Brett 293). While these studies intended to produce sound results to be implemented in classrooms nationwide, the reality is that research on the teaching of English was fraught from the start by uncertain methods and suspicion from the community of English teachers, many of whom mistrusted the “scientific” methods that federal funders favored. Perhaps the best-known effort from Project English’s research strand is the book Research in Written Composition, published in 1963 by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer. While this text is considered groundbreaking in the way it proceeded on the assumption that written composition was a discipline in its own right with a body of knowledge and a research agenda (Goggin 68), the work also revealed just how far the profession needed to go in order to conduct quality research. Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer reviewed a thousand research studies on written communication but could only recommend five as good models, leading the authors to note that “today’s research in composition, taken as a whole, may be compared to chemical research as it emerged from the period of alchemy” (quoted in Goggin 77). As described by James Squire in a 1962 English Journal article, “Research in teaching English, long dominated in English departments by the tradition of Germanic 119

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scholarship, long handicapped in education departments by the restrictions of precise statistical measurement, has not been remarkably influential in shaping our programs and our teaching. Seldom has research been able to give us the really important answers to the truly important questions” (“English” 387). The research intent of Project English also revealed a culture clash. A consistent theme in the original accounts is that the federal evaluators of research proposals were trained in scientific methods and did not know what to make of the classroom studies proposed. As described by Erwin Steinberg of the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the second coordinator of Project English, “Although the [research] proposals themselves were examined and ranked by a hastily gathered English sub-panel, the real decision on them was made by the Research Advisory Council, made up of people generally characterized rather indiscriminately as ‘educational psychologists.’ No representatives of our subject sat on this Council” (50). This lack of representation was perhaps a result of the English profession’s lack of comfort with the kinds of research valued by the funders. G. Melvin Hipps of Furman University characterized these reactions in a 1964 article: Awakened in a world where value must be scientifically demonstrable, many tried feebly to justify our existence to a cold and hostile world, using the traditional humanistic arguments. Others, feeling that we had to become scientific if we were to survive, threw themselves into “research” with wild abandon, often with disastrous results. Some have been content to give lip service to research and to pretend thereby to be using only the most up-todate methods. (36) In an account of a workshop on Project English held at the 1963 CCCC meeting and attended by many heavy hitters of the time (including Kellogg Hunt, Louise Rosenblatt, James Squire, Richard Braddock, and Erwin Steinberg), the unease with research methodology was palpable, as indicated by the opening two sentences: “What will the future English department look like if literature moves out of its central place? What contributions will research make to the teaching of reading and writing?” (“Project English” 182). Still, the emphasis on rigorous and systematic research that would be funded via Project English was groundbreaking in a way and established the careers of many of those involved. While English studies continues to have an uneasy relationship to empirical research (see, for example, Haswell “NCTE/College Composition and Communication’s Recent War”), it is easy to trace the significant research 120

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findings that led to the “revolution” in teaching writing as a process, such as Janet Emig’s 1971 The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, to the momentum created by Project English. Recall that another intent of Project English was to offer summer institutes for English teachers in which they would learn about the latest developments in research and curriculum. The aim was to counter the dilemma described by James Squire in 1962: “The National Interest report revealed the deplorable poverty of subject matter background of many teachers” (“English” 385). There were 105 English Institutes held nationwide in 1965 and 126 in 1966 (Shugrue, English in a Decade 47), so certainly lots of K-12 teachers came to college and university campuses to improve their teaching. Curiously, the accounts of these institutes at the time and retrospectively contain very little description of their actual work or any systematic study of their impact. I did come across this 1977 reflection by J. N. Hook as he looked back on his long service to the teaching of English: In each of the many summer institutes held for English teachers, supported by the Project, there was a tripartite emphasis—on language, composition, and literature. Unfortunately, most of the linguistics professors in these institutes taught nothing but algebraiclooking phrase structure rules and the drawing of sentence trees too big to fit on a sheet of paper; what they mainly accomplished was scaring the hell out of teachers and reducing rather than increasing the attention to language in English classes. (“The Profession” 17) Vonnegut comes to mind again: “And so it goes.” Project English, We Hardly Knew Ye As far as addressing the initial problems as described in The National Interest and the Teaching of English—the need for more teachers, for better teachers, for better teaching conditions, and for more research—Project English, then, had disappointing results. As I noted earlier, the overwhelming focus on curriculum development became a top-down, highly structured effort that was outdated by the time it was being implemented in some schools in the tumultuous late 1960s. So why did Project English expire in 1967 without much of a whimper from those involved? One person who played a leading role in the effort—Albert Kitzhaber—has offered his analysis and captures the intent of the initial reformers and the project’s uneven legacy. We met Albert Kitzhaber in chapter 4 of this book in his role to close down the Dartmouth Writing Clinic in an effort to move the Dartmouth 121

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Writing Program into the 1960s. Kitzhaber was also highly involved in Project English, first as chairman of the CCCC and then as the director of the Curriculum Study Center established at the University of Oregon. When Kitzhaber looked back at the effort in his 1967 CCC article, “The Government and English Teaching: A Retrospective View,” he was critical of the start of Project English and the lack of expertise from English studies in making those original decisions. As he described, The amount of money available for the first year was pitifully small in view of the size of the problem. . . . Toward the middle of that summer (1961) about a dozen of us were invited by the Commissioner [of Education] to a meeting in Washington, where we were informed of the birth of “Project English.” At this state we were not so much asked for advice as told what had been done and what was planned. I like to think that some of the early troubles of Project English might have been avoided if people in the English teaching profession had taken part in the planning from the first. (137) Kitzhaber contrasted the lack of a reform role for English scholars with science and math faculty, who were strongly involved in efforts to reform their fields. As Kitzhaber described, “We have seldom been able to get sustained help from the best scholars in our profession. Nobel laureates worked on the new science courses; we have staffed our projects mainly with people who, able and devoted though they are, usually have not been in the profession long enough to have achieved wide recognition for scholarship. Nor are any of us professional writers” (138). Finally, Kitzhaber described the Byzantine bureaucracy that dictated how and when curricular materials would be distributed, striking a paranoid note: For the first three years, in fact, our contracts expressly forbade us to send copies of any of our units to anyone outside the project unless we had the permission of the Commissioner of Education or his deputy. A conspiratorial atmosphere developed in some of the Centers, with book salesmen prowling furtively around the corridors like rather inexpert CIA men, and the staff of the Center guarding its units as jealously as though they were the blueprints for a secret weapon. (138) The terminal symptom for Project English, however, was not merely these structural impediments. In 1966, American leaders in English studies, including Kitzhaber, had an opportunity to showcase the curriculum developed through Project English at a four-week meeting with lead122

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ing British scholars at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1966. The Dartmouth Seminar, as it has come to be known, has been cited as the starting point for contemporary composition studies (Dobrin 693; see also J. Harris, “After Dartmouth”) and for the sensibilities we now hold dear about student-centered learning and writing as a process. Those outcomes, however, were the decidedly British view of the way writing should be taught and learned. The American view, as represented by Kitzhaber and colleagues and embodied in Project English materials, was structured and relatively conservative. Michael Shugrue, a key player in Project English in his role as assistant secretary for English of the MLA, distilled the thousand-plus pages of reports that emerged from Dartmouth and concluded that establishing sequence in the English curriculum provoked some of the most interesting debate during the four weeks. While the British looked “for the principle of order in the psychological development of the child,” Americans tended to look “more to subject matter or objective principles of knowledge.” Although the vigorous discussion was never really along national lines, it raised serious questions about the validity of the work of the Curriculum Study Centers in English. (English in a Decade 76) In summarizing this distinction, Joseph Harris wrote, “I see it as a point where two opposing ideas of English—one centered on a loyalty to a certain kind of knowledge, the other rooted in a certain view of the classroom—met head on and found that they seemed to be talking about different subjects” (“The Idea” 640). In Harris’s view, this distinction hasn’t been necessarily resolved (one that he labels as an adherence to texts versus an adherence to growth), and perhaps continues to offer a key binary that hinders the development of English studies as a whole. By the early 1970s, Kitzhaber seemed embittered by the whole experience. As he described in “A Rage for Disorder,” published in English Journal in 1972, the curricular disorder of the 1950s led directly to the Project English attempts to impose structure and coherence. Yet the British view of these materials as stultifying won the day, and “disorder” of sorts was back in fashion. Kitzhaber seems awfully curmudgeonly in this article, noting, “One does not have to be more than an armchair social critic to see a plausible connection between certain recent developments in the teaching of English in the schools and what is generally known as the Youth Rebellion. The present generation of young Americans has grown up in a time of unprecedented national affluence. It has also been a time of unprecedented permissiveness, especially toward the young” (1200). 123

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Discordant views about what should be taught in the English classroom coupled with the population boom of the late 1960s and the resulting teacher shortage (Shugrue, English in a Decade 83) made the work of Project English fade quickly to black. For Kitzhaber, this outcome was troubling, coming at a time when his desire for order seemed primary. He closes “A Rage for Disorder” with the following: “The discovery of order is an act of affirmation, providing reassurance that one part of our world is comprehensible. For at least the rest of this troubled century, there will be few of us who will not need this reassurance” (1219). Project English as an attempt to impose that order, to offer reassurance, fell short. Will There Be More Pie? As I noted in the start of this chapter, the reality of higher education today is that multiple sources of funding, external and internal, need to be secured for reform efforts to succeed. Thus, one lesson to learn from Project English is not that federal funding for reform efforts should be abandoned, but that this funding is not enough. James Squire took aim at one myth in a 1964 article: “For every chairman who suggested a problem in securing cooperation from departments of Education, three mentioned difficulties in securing such cooperation within their own departments” (“The Profession” 39). Albert Kitzhaber also took aim at his English department colleagues as less-than-change agents in a summary of Project English work: I have become conscious of what I now call the college English department syndrome. . . . As I have sat through these meetings over the past quarter-century, the characteristics of the syndrome have been brought home to me—the endless nit-picking, the deep distrust of new ideas outside one’s own narrow specialty, the sweeping and indiscriminate contempt for outgroups such as linguistics and professors of Education, the serene obliviousness to all the problems of education below the college level, and above all the unshakable conviction of virtue. I have often thought that if this is what a lifelong association with humane letters really leads to, we had better hedge the claims we make to our students for the study of literature. (“Reform” 340) While difficult colleagues are a particularly easy target, they are only one barrier to realizing the ideals of the writing laboratory. Critical to the reform of teaching is close involvement and decision making by the teachers themselves, whether those are laboratory instructors, peer tutors, graduate student TAs, or faculty. A sophisticated argument to a 124

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potential funder is one requirement, but once that funding is secured, implementation and success are dependent on ownership by those most affected. Students, teachers, tutors—all have much to benefit from the idea of the writing laboratory, co-learners in a rich teaching and learning environment. I can’t help but wonder what the contemporary communications teaching landscape might look like if those principles had been the driving force behind Project English.

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6 Drawing to Learn Science: Lessons from Agassiz

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n a sophomore molecular biology laboratory class at MIT, students study the development of zebra fish embryos with and without mutations. A key pedagogical technique is to have students draw pictures of the developing embryo at several time points. Invariably, some students complain about this seemingly low-tech and elementary technique. Why can’t they instead take digital photos, they ask, and assemble a slide show? And what is the value in the tedious process of drawing? This isn’t an art class, after all! While I found it refreshing to hear students complain about relevance of what they were studying (or how they were studying it) in a class other than first-year English, the lament seemed particularly ironic given what I have learned about the history of drawing to learn in science as a key feature of laboratory methods. What students did not realize is that they were taking part in a tradition of teaching science—and studying the natural environment—that can be traced back to Aristotle, one of the first “naturalists,” according to Louis Agassiz (1). As I pointed out in chapter 2 on the history of writing to learn laboratory science, Harvard zoology professor Agassiz was a key figure in science education with his belief in the power of inductive methods. In his classroom and laboratory, Agassiz, in his words, “taught men [and women] to observe” (quoted in Cooper 1), and these observations were accompanied by the admonition to “study nature, not books” (quoted in Gladfelter 7). From these observations, usually accompanied by drawings, Agassiz implored his students to make connections and develop general principles, for, according to Agassiz, “Facts are stupid things . . . until brought into connection with some general law” (quoted in Scudder 370). Drawing, then, was both to render scientific “facts” and to help students generalize from those facts, a process concrete and abstract at the same time, the essence of inductive learning. While drawing in the teaching of science might seem old-fashioned to MIT undergraduates, in the teaching of composition, particularly in the first year, the introduction of digital technology has brought forth a relatively recent “turn to the visual” (Hocks). Students’ analysis of nonprint material is certainly not a new feature of composition classrooms

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(George); however, having students produce visual “texts” rather than merely work at being more critical consumers of such texts is gaining importance. In justifying her use of having students create “visual arguments” in composition classes, Diana George writes, “For students who have grown up in a technology-saturated and an image-rich culture, questions of communication and composition absolutely will include the visual, not as attendant to the verbal but as complex communication intricately related to the world around them” (32). In the world of the Internet, the visual reigns supreme, and for many composition scholars, the classroom needs to reflect (and better equip students to deal with) that reality. In these ways, the first-year composition classroom has become an experimental space once again. This turn is in line with composition teachers’ periodic relationships with popular mediums such as magazines, popular song lyrics, television, and movies as primary texts in the classroom. The latest use of technology and the visuals that are so easily produced by that technology once again moves the field. Such a move, of course, rubs traditionalists the wrong way. The high-versus-low culture binary has also long been the substance of composition debates as some believe that it is only through exposure to the finest models of writing that students will learn to emulate those forms (and by extension, reading in low mediums will only cultivate low forms of writing). The use of visuals (and many other non-print texts) represents a threat to those who hold this view, but tradition has often been trumped by justifications for using materials that would appeal to students who come from literacy contexts far different than the professoriate (as George does in the quote I offer above). When those justifications can be situated in a current climate of the need for multiliteracies (Kress) and not merely the skills required by essayists, the traditionalists manage to shut up, at least for a while. The tradition of using visuals to teach science does not seem, at first, similarly burdened by this old-versus-new struggle. After all, trying to understand the natural environment would seem to first involve capturing it in all of its details, whether the technology for making those observations is the pencil and tablet, microscope, or digital camera. However, it has not always been smooth sailing for the use of visuals in the teaching of science. As has been true for the teaching of writing—whether in science laboratories or composition classrooms—most colleges and universities are not set up for the kind of time- and resource-intensive teaching that true inductive learning entails. More important, the task of—and resistance to—drawing to learn science reveals a long-standing tension between the need for students to master a body of scientific facts versus the creation of 127

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laboratory environments in which students construct knowledge through social interaction, inductive learning, and opportunities to do the work of real scientists. The use of visuals in the composition classroom can also be caught in this binary. A pedagogy built on the belief that writing or visuals are largely a rendering of experience and not socially situated artifacts influenced by the context in which they are created does not get us much farther than five-paragraph themes describing “My Summer Vacation.” The creation of “texts” in these instances (whether print based or visually based) are little more than students’ attempts to demonstrate textual features, whether proper spelling, grammar, and paragraph development or proper alignment, use of white space, and perspective. What is valued in these contexts is students’ mastery of certain types of content or certain modes of representation, not students’ engagement in rich rhetorical situations in order to find and express meaning—the essence of the laboratory methods that I am proposing in this book. The form-content relationship privileges mastery of form, what a past mentor described to me as the “march-through-the-modes” curriculum in first-year writing. This pedagogy continues to dominate composition textbooks (Patterns of Exposition is now in its seventeenth edition), and it is not difficult to imagine the addition of visually oriented assignments in contemporary textbooks, but ones that offer little more than the print-based assignments that have dominated composition classrooms for a hundred years. In this chapter, I explore the pedagogical history of drawing to learn science as the efforts embodied in that history tell us a great deal about the struggle to create the classroom as laboratory—whether the subject is science or writing. The struggle is both old and new and old again. Old is the long-standing tendency of science education to fall back on cramming students full of scientific facts and figures, even when visual communication is the method for students to convey those facts and figures. Also old, as shown by Agassiz’s example, is the realization that science and the scientific method are about learning processes, ways of thinking, and problem solving. New, however, is a return to visual forms for students to learn science. In the area of biochemistry, Schonborn and Anderson argue that “the pedagogical importance of visual literacy and visualization in the education of biochemists has been ignored for far too long” (101). However, in science education the struggle continues between learning as mastery of facts and learning as understanding processes, between drawing to render and drawing to learn. Agassiz’s legacy points to the possibilities of learning as a dynamic, meaningful process, but also to the conflicting forces that have prevented his ideals from being enacted. 128

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Louis Agassiz and Learning by Observing Born in Switzerland in 1807, Harvard professor of zoology from 1848 until his death in 1873, founder of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, Louis Agassiz embodied an approach to studying nature in his classroom and laboratory and later at his summer institute on the island of Penikese that would influence many subsequent leaders in science and science teaching (E. Rudolph 664; Gladfelter 8–9). For Agassiz, science was not necessarily a discipline to be learned by close study of texts and mastery of static knowledge. Instead, science was to be experienced firsthand in order to counter a problem with prevalent teaching methods: “The pupil studies nature in the schoolroom, and when he goes out of doors he can not find her” (quoted in J. Campbell 119). Agassiz was not formally trained in these teaching methods but offered his students the evidence from his own experience as testament to the powers of observation and drawing. Agassiz biographer Edward Lurie describes Agassiz’s childhood in Switzerland as filled with experiences in nature (8). Even when Agassiz had started formal schooling at age ten, according to Lurie, “Vacations at home were spent adding to collections of insects, birds, fish, and small land animals. . . . He wanted to know the underlying reasons for the phenomena he observed, to discover relationships, to understand general concepts. In this quest, young Agassiz proceeded to educate himself” (8). Essential to this method of self-education was recording his observations. As Lurie describes, From the age of eleven until he was nineteen, Agassiz kept minute and detailed accounts of his natural history observations, set down in fine script in a series of notebooks, with subjects classified and divided carefully under proper subject headings. The importance with which he regarded this activity is revealed by the fact that Agassiz carefully preserved these notebooks, treasuring them as intellectual landmarks of his first scholarly efforts in natural history. (9) Agassiz’s influence as a teacher has been recounted by many former students. What is repeated in these accounts is Agassiz’s strict adherence to having students learn on their own, rather than to be passive recipients of what Agassiz already knew. As noted by William James Beal, a leading naturalist of the nineteenth century, “It has seemed to me that the work with Agassiz helped me more than that of any other teacher with whom I came in contact, and yet no teacher ever told me so little” (quoted in E. Rudolph 664). So what did Agassiz’s teaching look like? In chapter 2, I offered the views of Samuel Scudder, who published the year after Agassiz’s death an essay about his experience as a student of Agassiz in 129

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the 1850s. Scudder recounts his first encounter with Agassiz’s methods: “‘Take this fish,’ said [Agassiz], ‘and look at it; we call it a haemulon; by and by I will ask what you have seen’” (Scudder 369). Scudder initially makes short work of this task, noting that in “ten minutes I had seen all that could be seen in that fish” (370). However, Scudder discovers that Agassiz is not to be found to hear his report. Thus, Scudder finds himself with nothing left to do but look at the fish some more: “At last a happy thought struck me—I would draw the fish; and now with surprise I began to discover new features in the creature. Just then the Professor returned. ‘That is right,’ said he; ‘a pencil is one of the best eyes.’” (370). Scudder’s initial report to Agassiz based on these drawings, however, was met with what Scudder describes as “an air of disappointment.” Agassiz tells him, “You have not looked very carefully; why . . . you haven’t even seen one of the most conspicuous features of the animal, which is as plainly before your eyes as the fish itself; look again, look again!’ and he left me to my misery” (370). After several more rounds of this activity and the passing of a day, Scudder gave another report of observations to Agassiz: “‘That is good, that is good!’ [Aggasiz] 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). For Scudder and many others, by observing and drawing to learn, students would not merely be passive repositories of information but active participants in the creation of meaningful knowledge, the essential task of laboratory learning. Key to this meaning making was not merely observing, drawing, or recording, however, but making inferences from those observations. In Agassiz’s words, “the ability of combining facts is a much rarer gift than that of discerning them” (quoted in Cooper 67). The naturalist’s project of classification, then, of making connections between natural objects, was to guide the work of Agassiz’s students. Agassiz saw a powerful simplicity in this process, noting about his own research, I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg—that is all. It chanced to be a result that was found to apply to other groups and has led to other conclusions of a like nature. But, such as it is, it has been reached by this system of comparison, which, though I speak of it now in its application to the study of Natural History, is equally important in every other branch of knowledge. (L. Agassiz 8)

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Thus, Agassiz was teaching his students to learn about nature as he learned about nature, from his childhood observations in Switzerland to his mid-nineteenth-century explorations in the Brazilian Amazon. As Agassiz told his students gathered on the island of Penikese for a summer of study in 1873, I do not wish to communicate knowledge to you, you can gather that from a hundred sources, but to awaken in you a faculty which is probably more dormant than the simple power of acquisition. . . . I am therefore placed in a somewhat difficult and abnormal position for a teacher. I must teach and yet not give information. I must, in short, to all intents and purposes be ignorant before you. (quoted in Teller 73) Accounts of Agassiz’s teaching take on a mythic quality, particularly given the often unrealized vision of hands-on learning. Many writers look back at Agassiz as a pioneer, with a not-so-subtle indictment of current teaching practices. In 1947, James David Teller engaged in this Agassizian process of observation and comparison: To Agassiz, the laboratory was not a place (as it has become in our schools today) for the verification of generalizations which the teacher suggests to the student. It was a place where the student would observe and compare and generalize for himself. Agassiz was a firm believer in the pedagogical principle of activity: we learn to observe by observing; we learn to compare by comparing; and we learn to generalize by generalizing. Merely observing the objects to which our eyes are directed; merely comparing facts which we have been instructed to compare; merely verifying the generalizations which the teacher has explained—are not methods of true observation, comparison, and generalizations in the sense in which Agassiz uses these terms. (72–73) Agassiz’s teaching practices have become an idealized goal against which the failings of contemporary practice could be contrasted. It is odd, in a sense, to read claims such as Donald Peattie’s, offered in 1933: “It is safe to say that no American scientist has ever has as much influence on scientific education as Agassiz” (quoted in Teller 138). The historical record of cycles of unhappiness with prevalent teaching methods in science classrooms that I described in chapter 2 would seem to indicate that Agassiz’s influence has been minimal. Instead, looking back to Agassiz is a kind of longing for mythic days of yore. Such longing and its recurrence, however, reveals the conflicted nature of science teaching and

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learning in higher education: the real work of a real naturalist versus the artificial conditions that classroom and laboratory contexts often demand. While the hands-off nature of Agassiz’s teaching might seem courageous by today’s standards, at the time the approach was revolutionary. As I described in chapter 2, the history of science as an accepted course of study in higher education—and the attempts to realize active learning techniques such as observation and drawing—more often than not succumbed to these conflicts. Nevertheless, the late nineteenth century was a time of experimentation in teaching and learning, and science study in the field and laboratory could draw on new ideas that placed high value on student experience, just as Agassiz did. Drawing was a natural process of this technique, and many writers of the late nineteenth century and curricular materials from that era, particularly in biology and its associated fields, reinforced this message. For example, in 1894 the influential Harvard Committee of Ten made several recommendations for high schools to be more in accord with college-level science study. Among them for the study of botany was the following: “Careful examinations of specimens is secured best by careful sketching. Too much importance cannot be given to drawing, as it is not only an excellent device for securing close observation, but it is also a rapid method of making valuable notes. A very few verbal descriptions may accompany the sketches to make their meanings clear. These sketches and notes should be made in a permanent note-book, for future use” (Report of the Committee of Ten 152). For the college-level study of zoology, William Locy of Wake Forest University recommended in 1889 an approach that could have been directly distilled from Agassiz’s notebooks: The value of drawing, in giving directness to observations, is recognized by all teachers, and additional points of structure and relationship of parts will be noticed by the students as soon as they begin to sketch. These laboratory sketches should be viewed, not as artistic efforts, but as a means of expressing observations and conclusions in lines, and of value in proportion to the accuracy with which they represent characteristics actually observed and intelligently interpreted. (675–76) Drawing to learn science, then, was a key technique in larger attempts to have students learn inductively, as opposed to memorizing textbook explanations and faithfully regurgitating those points in recitations and exams. As I pointed out in chapters 1 and 2, the late nineteenth century seemed a golden era for experimental approaches to learning, for hands132

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on educational laboratories that held great promise as the United States geared up to face the challenges of a new century. John Campbell surveyed the scene of biology teaching in U.S. colleges in 1891 and declared, “Perhaps the most striking point by which the educational methods of the present are distinguished from those formerly in vogue is the great prominence which is given to inductive methods, and as a consequence, the little attention that is now paid to mere facts, as contrasted with the great stress laid on the processes by which those facts are acquired” (7). That the reality of what students produced fell far short of this standard is a recurring theme in the histories I have described—whether in writing or science classrooms. As archival examples of students’ drawing to learn science show, achieving the Agassazian ideal has been elusive. Drawing to Learn Science—Examples from the Field In terms of curricular examples of drawing to learn, the archival evidence that I have seen at institutions with strong undergraduate science programs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—the University of Kansas, Mount Holyoke College, Yale University, MIT, and Dartmouth College—often succumbs to the same limits as the examples of student writing about science that I presented in chapter 3. In other words, laboratory instruction from this period was not quite pure inductive learning as practiced by Agassiz. Common examples, particularly in botany, biology, and zoology, were students’ meticulous renderings such as that shown in figure 6.1 from the biology laboratory notebook of Helen Feagiu of the Florida State College for Women: a plant or other natural object is drawn in detail with careful labeling of particular parts and, in the rare instance of instructor comments, an evaluation of the correctness of that drawing. Whether the subject for these drawings came from observations of the actual object or from copying textbook illustrations (which in and of itself has a long tradition in scientific drawing—see Topper 226), I don’t know. What I also don’t know is if the student created any text to accompany this drawing or what the pedagogical context might have been. As an artifact of science teaching and learning, however, Feagiu’s notebook is a striking collection of beautiful illustrations. In the Mount Holyoke College archives, I found many similar examples of drawing to learn science, spanning the years 1890 to 1940. For example, figure 6.2 shows Sarah Quimby’s (class of 1907) finely detailed drawing of a sea urchin, along with the accompanying typed key/description, from a Zoology 1 and 2 class. Figure 6.3 shows Lorna Stockdale’s (class of 1923) drawing from comparative anatomy. Her depiction of the “Arteries of the Cat” is annotated in several places by her instructor, who 133

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offers corrections (for example, “No—the aorta turns to the left instead of to the right as you have shown it”) and a final summary: “This work looks as if your observation had been hurried.” Finally, Frances Goodrich’s (class of 1934) drawings of a pig’s kidney show the consistency with which this practice was used over time: Once again the goal was accurate drawing and labeling, and instructor comments reinforce the need for that accuracy (see figure 6.4).

Figure 6.1. Biology laboratory notebook of Helen Feagiu of the Florida State College for Women, no date

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Additional archival evidence does shed some light on the classroom/ laboratory contexts for drawing to learn science. The vast majority of assignments I have seen were tightly prescribed directions with a few more open-ended tasks. For instance, at the University of Kansas in 1914, professor of physiology Ida H. Hyde included the following instructions in one of her physiology class lab assignments: Experiment . Microscopic Examination of Blood. (a) Place a drop of your own blood on a clean slide, cover quickly, and examine under the high power of microscope, 1. Draw several red corpuscles as seen flat or suface [sic] view and edgewise (both singly and rouleaux) 2. Find and draw a white corpuscle. Compare the number of red and white corpuscles. Compare their size, shape and structure; name all parts. (Note:- Sterilize your skin and the lance or needs, in 95 alcohol before obtaining the blood) (b) Examine the frog’s blood under the microscope and draw as directed above. Draw to the same scale. Write a note of comparison between frog and human blood as to size, shape, and structure. Which are nucleated? (emphasis added, Hyde, Laboratory Outlines 25–26) At the KU Extension School in the same year, a final examination in a physiology correspondence course contained similar open-ended assignments: “Assignment XII. Laboratory Work: Get a sheep’s or pig’s heart from the market. Draw” (Hyde, Laboratory Guide). The same exam also asked students to perform the following specific tasks: Final Exam Questions over Physiology I: Laboratory Work 1. How would you prove that saliva changed starch to sugar? 2. Illustrate the path and name the parts of a reflex action. When an object touches the eyes. 3. Illustrate a section of the heart, name all the chief parts, showing the vessels that enter and leave the heart. 4. Illustrate and name the parts of the whole digestive system. 5. Illustrate an epithelial cell, the different parts of the eye, red and white corpuscles, naming all the parts. (Hyde, Laboratory Guide) At Yale University in the 1920s, Sheffield Scientific School students could expect to find similar kinds of drawing activities, a mix of instructions pointing to specifics to be observed and general admonitions to draw. For example, in 1923 Harry W. Cofrancesco (class of 1926), completed the following assignment in his “Anatomy, laboratory sketchbook”:

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Figure 6.2. From Sarah Quimby’s Zoology 1 and 2 notebook, Mount Holyoke College, 1907 (courtesy of Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

Figure 6.3. From Lorna Stockdale’s comparative anatomy notebook, Mount Holyoke College, 1923 (courtesy of Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

Figure 6.4. From Frances Goodrich’s zoology notebook, Mount Holyoke College, 1933 (courtesy of Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

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SPERMATOGENESIS 1. Examine, with the low and the high power, a permanent microscopic preparation of Mouse testis. Note that it consists of a great number of tubules (seminiferous tubules) in the walls of which the male germinal cells (sperm) develop. The tubules are greatly convoluted, and, consequently, in the preparation, they are sectioned at various angles. At one side of the testis is a section through the coiled epididymis, which constitutes a portion of the conducting tube which carries the mature sperm from the testis to the exterior. Draw the entire testis in outline and fill in a portion with careful detail. 2. Select a seminiferous tubule which has been sectioned approximately transversely and study with the high power. Note the arrangement, size, and structure of the spermatogonia, spematocytes, spermatids, and mature sperm. Draw the entire tubule in outline and fill in a portion, showing, with careful detail, the germinal cells in various stages of maturation. 3. Examine the epididymis under high power. Note that the tubules are filled with mature sperm. Draw a tubule to show the structure as observed. (emphasis added, Cofrancesco) As these examples show, the kind of pure inductive learning as practiced by Agassiz was not quite fulfilled. Students were rendering observations by drawing and being led fairly strong-handedly to conclusions based on those drawings. In other science laboratory classes such as chemistry and physics, students were often asked to draw experimental apparatus or illustrate experimental results (as seen in the examples in chapter 3). Drawing was a key, long-standing pedagogical technique, not necessarily needing justification for its use or clear criteria as to its assessment. Despite this tradition, the great mass of facts to be mastered and the structure of schooling into discrete blocks of time and discrete units of learning were soon to challenge student-centered approaches as science classrooms entered the twentieth century, whether the technique was drawing or writing. Certainly drawing to learn science did not disappear; indeed, examples can be found in contemporary science texts. However, what is largely unresolved is getting past the reliance on drawing as merely another way for students to demonstrate mastery of content. This relationship between mastering content and learning the thinking processes of scientists has vexed many a science education reform. Those reformers who promote an idealized version of a drawing-to-learn process as practiced by Agassiz and his followers would eventually court scorn.

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George DeBoer sums up his history of inductive approaches in science education with the following: “It is questionable, then, that we will make better observers (and thus better scientists) out of students by having them carefully examine some object and telling us everything they observe. Likewise it is important for us to realize that not every observation leads inevitably to a sensible inference, especially if the student does not have an adequate conceptual background in that area” (232). As a result of these conflicts—the need for “adequate conceptual background” versus the use of inductive learning to acquire that background—the potential for drawing to learn science as expressed by Agassiz and his followers has largely been unrealized. Contemporary Drawing to Learn Science Whether the justification is to better prepare students for the contemporary visually oriented world of science or as an effective learning technique, most contemporary uses of drawing do not necessarily make explicit the assumptions about teaching and learning that underlie these approaches. As is true in many educational practices, the logic is largely based on anecdotal evidence, whether it worked for the author of the materials or because it is the way instruction has always been done. Dominant, however, is drawing as a way of communicating what students might know, particularly in exam situations, rather than as a generative way of learning content. In anatomy and physiology classes—both graduate and undergraduate—the long-standing appeal of drawing as an assessment tool continues to hold sway. For example, for a midterm examination from Harvard Medical School, students need to fill in identifications in pictures or drawings supplied. However, one question asked students do some drawing as well as labeling/identification. As shown in figure 6.5, this kind of assignment is remarkably similar to those assigned at the University of Kansas in 1914, reinforcing the use of drawing as a means for students to demonstrate their content knowledge: A variation on this approach is a series of popular scientific “coloring books.” In one, Robert D. Griffin offers students a way of mastering biology by coloring in detailed drawings of bodily systems. In his preface to The Biology Coloring Book, Griffin describes coloring as an approach to serve memorization and focus: The coloring activity is not some sort of happy playtime but an integral part of what has proved to be a highly effective learning method. . . . Not only does this physical activity make it much

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more difficult for your mind to wander to some other topic, but it also requires the activity of the parts of your brain that are involved in movement and in perception of color and shape. . . . As you probably know, the more areas of your brain you involve simultaneously in trying to learn something, the more easily you will understand and remember the material. (n.p.)

Figure 6.5. Midterm examination from Harvard Medical School, HST-010 (Lee Gerhke; used with permission)

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In addition to the justification of mastery of content, some authors argue for drawing to learn as essential to the development of science students’ “visual-spatial thinking” (Mathewson). This strategy centers on replicating the processes of scientists. As described by James Mathewson, “Science and technology develop through the exchange of information and much of this is presented as diagrams, illustrations, maps, plots, schematics, etc.” (37). Perhaps the best known proponent of these approaches is Edward Tufte, a Yale statistician and sculptor who offers readers ways of “visualizing data” in order to more effectively communicate and argue for scientific content. Other contemporary approaches to having students draw to learn science focus on ideas of multiple modes of learning. For example, a pilot solid state chemistry class at MIT used “picturing to learn,” which asked students to “create drawings from the concepts they learn from lectures and texts” (Brown 1). According to cocreator Felice Frankel, this technique can be effective because “visual thinking is one of the keys to a holistic understanding of any concept” (quoted in Brown 1). In an interview on the subject, Frankel added, “It is how I learn” (Brown 1). Perhaps the most common use of visuals in contemporary science teaching is to have students create illustrations to be part of laboratory reports or articles. This activity would seem to be a highly professionalizing act, mirroring the representation of data that working scientists and engineers need to do in most publications. However, it is an act that represents a point of contention. As David Topper describes, it is linguistic representations—or words—that have been most valued in the representation of science, a way of thinking that is “symptomatic of the common belief that in human consciousness there is a cognitive hierarchy: from visual perception, which is at the ‘bottom,’ to language (and this would include mathematics and, today, computer ‘language’), which as at the ‘top’” (218). Or, in Kathryn Northcut’s view, scientific illustrations have largely been seen as “necessary evils” (254) in the process of rendering scientific findings. As a result, scientific illustrations escape a kind of critical inquiry that is essential to understand how knowledge is created, argued for, and received in any field (see also Brasseur, ch. 1). For the teaching of science, such thinking feeds into student beliefs that scientific articles are a simple rendering of truth as shown in scientific results, rather than an argument for particular findings that are situated in particular contexts. Agassiz long ago told us that “facts are stupid things . . . until brought into connection with some general law” (quoted in Scudder 370). Northcut is particularly critical of the common textbook representation of scientific illustrations as relatively value free. As she describes this 143

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view, “Transcending differences of language, culture, and ideology, such images are merely instruments, free from the cultural and ideological baggage of language” (256). Instead, Northcut calls for a critical theory and pedagogy of visual communication, one in which “illustrations can be conceived of as cultural and technological artifacts, deployable for humanistic ends” (258). Such an approach can applied as well to drawing as a mode of learning (whether science or other subjects), in which the representation itself is a product of myriad factors the learner brings to bear on the act of learning—as well as the particular classroom or laboratory contexts in which this learning occurs. Whether these representations are primarily in words or images, they are socially situated and act as windows on the teaching and learning that has taken place. The Future of Drawing to Learn Realizing the Agassizian ideals of the writing classroom or science laboratory in which student experience is the fulcrum for learning is an ongoing challenge. As I have shown in the use of drawing to learn science, the mastery of content holds sway as a pedagogical force; in composition classrooms, it is the mastery of form (though content wars have certainly raged over whether that content should be writing about literature or about expository topics). In both contexts, the teacher’s role in a class based on inductive learning is frightening territory for many educators, the vast majority of whom did not themselves learn in such environments and have not learned the strategies or skills needed to succeed in these environments. Nevertheless, the idealist in me holds out great hope for this experimental vision. In science education, McGinn and Roth assert that a “strong curricular focus on visual re-presentations and visually re-presenting information would help students to construct arguments that would be more convincing to peers, teachers, and the wider community” (21). Composition’s embrace of visual forms for student expression is an encouraging trend, particularly given the realities of the communication contexts in which students will find themselves and need to succeed as we roll into the twenty-first century. During the fall 2006 semester, I had one small taste of such an environment in a first-year writing class I taught. My freshman students in Introduction to Technical Writing wrote in service to the LAM Treatment Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy organization for research on and treatment of rare diseases. Course content included rhetorical analysis for communications involving illness and disease as well as analysis of audiences—patients and families, funders, and researchers—for medical communication that would be conducted 144

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completely online. My students’ work would be on the LAM Treatment Alliance Web site (http://www.lamtreatmentalliance.org), and thus they needed to learn about the rhetoric of online environments (and all of its essential visual elements) as well as the specific context of communicating medical information to varied audiences. That this composing was done for a real sponsor (who offered frequent feedback and a great deal of encouragement) within a limited timeframe made the exigency of the work that much more powerful. For my students and for myself, the class was a laboratory for learning about communicating with new media and in a particular rhetorical context. I can imagine that such opportunities would be available to students at many institutions. Of course, cycles of educational reform in all fields demonstrate that novel pedagogical techniques—whether grounded in theory or a person’s experience—will rarely meet the reality and challenges of implementation. For educators who ask their students to draw to learn, success will depend on recognizing and countering these challenges. A starting place is certainly Agassiz’s vision of student learning. Shortly before his death, he offered the following advice to his natural history students on the island of Penikese, many of whom would go on to illustrious careers as scientists and science educators: “You can take your classes out, and give them the same lessons, and lead them up to the same subjects you are yourselves studying here. And this mode of teaching children is so natural, so suggestive, so true” (quoted in E. C. Agassiz 348). Drawing to learn science and visual approaches to composition certainly have that appeal, but their future success as instructional techniques will require more than replication. Essential to success are a justification thoroughly grounded in sound theory and a recognition of the potential barriers— both historical and current.

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7 The Laboratory in Theory: From Mental Discipline to Situated Learning

I

n his article “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” James Berlin writes that “a way of teaching is never innocent. Every pedagogy is imbricated in ideology, in a set of tacit assumptions about what is real, what is good, what is possible, and how power ought to be distributed” (492). Certainly, the historical examples of laboratory methods to teach writing and science that I have described in previous chapters were all situated in the ideologies and assumptions of those doing the curriculum development and teaching, as well as in particular times and places. However, all examples share a common frustration for those reformers to change teaching and learning in significant ways. In this chapter, I describe the history of one particular theory cum ideology of student learning—mental discipline—which strongly shaped early justifications for the study of both writing/composition and science, but which also limited the success of laboratory methods through its lack of explanatory power and essentially conservative hold. In other words, persistent beliefs in mental discipline have strongly limited the possibilities for writing as a laboratory subject. As opposed to mental discipline, the possibilities for laboratory methods of teaching—the explanation for how and why those methods potentially work—are best found in theories of situated learning, ideas that have recently been influential in writing studies and, perhaps even more so, in science education. I turn to situated learning in the second part of this chapter, to offer a theoretical foundation for the kind of reform I call for and also to offer a framework for the contemporary study of writing in a biological engineering class that is the subject of chapter 8. Part of my motivation in this chapter is my belief that the major theoretical frameworks offered for the teaching of writing are not adequate to explain the practices and foundations for laboratory methods. An additional problem is that most conceptualizations of the influences on the teaching of writing do not necessarily take into account the strong influences on all teaching. I pointed out in chapters 1 and 2 that enrollments have been a key factor in shaping the working conditions and classroom practices for both writing and science—when enrollments go

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up, student preparedness usually goes down, and laboratory methods are offered as an intervention of sorts to remediate this population. In terms of intellectual framework and epistemology, the theory of mental discipline arose in the nineteenth century to shape college instruction in general (Kliebard, “Curriculum Theory” 11) and has, I believe, been a major influence in writing classrooms and writing laboratories/centers, one that continues to hold sway despite periodic rebukes. I start this chapter by tracing this influence first in higher education generally and then in composition and science teaching more specifically. Mental Discipline in Higher Education The theory of mental discipline has ancient roots, starting with Aristotle’s conception of the mind as consisting of several “faculties” (Veysey 22). In this view, the brain is a muscle of sorts with discrete parts that require development in the interest of students achieving a “balanced, reasoning mind” (Urofsky 59). Educational historian Herbert Kliebard explains the great power of this theory, remarking that the “arcane mysteries of memory and imagination appear somewhat more comprehensible when seen through the lens of the visible and palpable muscles of the body” (“Curriculum Theory” 12). In historian Laurence Veysey’s words, “Taken together, the faculties constituted the divine recipe for a successful human being. If one or more of the elements were stunted, the results would be grotesque” (23). Kliebard makes a distinction between “mental discipline” as a “curriculum theory” and “faculty psychology” as a mental theory. In Kliebard’s words, “Faculty psychology was a theory of how the mind works; mental discipline was a theory about what we should teach” (“Curriculum Theory” 11). While that “what to teach” would be rigorously debated throughout the nineteenth century, the “how to teach” seemed widely agreed upon. If mental discipline or mental strengthening was the goal for student learning, then memorization, recitation, and repetition were the key pedagogical techniques and were also the particular school activities that laboratory methods rose up in reaction to in the late nineteenth century. Several disciplines laid claim to their subject matter as most fitting for the development of the mind as muscle. An original justification for the study of science in the late nineteenth century was its role, in the words of historian George DeBoer, “as a body of useful knowledge, as a way of thinking, and as a tool for disciplining the mind” (62). It is easy to see how a pedagogy of daily recitations in classical subjects would enact this mentally disciplined a view of learning, but when science began to make its way into the higher education curriculum, its study was 147

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offered as a superior subject matter for developing the mind. In a series of influential late-nineteenth-century lectures, T. H. Huxley weighed in, noting that “the great peculiarity of scientific training, that in virtue of which it cannot be replaced by any other discipline whatsoever, is this bringing of the mind directly into contact with fact, and practicing the intellect in the completest form of induction; that is to say, in drawing conclusions from particular facts made known by immediate observation of Nature” (126). Additionally, the study of science could bridge a gap between notions of education as a constant mental drill in key facts and then-contemporary goals of education as a way of teaching students to become independent thinkers. The problem, however, is that this bridge is unstable at best. In a system of discrete disciplines, subjects, and classes—combined with the early-twentieth-century attempts to make schooling (and American industry) more efficient—the goal of acquiring content knowledge would often supersede the goal of becoming a powerful thinker. In other words, mastering content has always been easy for education to strive toward, but such a goal has been a constant source of frustration for science educators interested in students’ learning as would-be scientists. The rapid growth of content knowledge seems to always call for an approach rooted in mental discipline as a way of offering some control (if only illusory) of that knowledge. As was true for science educators, for composition teachers in the nineteenth century, getting on the mental discipline bandwagon was essential. As University of Virginia English professor James Garnett offered in an 1886 article, “The object of this paper is to ascertain what is practicable to teach in a full course of English, and what results for mental discipline are likely to follow from such teaching” (61). The role of mental discipline in the teaching of writing, particularly in the areas of invention and grammar study, have been traced by several composition scholars. James Berlin describes “faculty psychology” as a key element in his conception of current traditional rhetoric, a belief system that he describes as a long-standing influence in the teaching of writing (and one I will explain in more detail in the next section). In Berlin’s words, faculty psychology is the belief that “the mind is made up of a set of faculties that correspond perfectly to the data of sense, enabling the individual to use the inductive method in arriving at the immediate perception of self-evident truths—truths that are always external to the individual” (Rhetoric and Reality 26). Sharon Crowley traces the origins of exposition, description, narration, and argumentation—the dominating modes of college student 148

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writing—to British rhetorician George Campbell’s model of discourse with “its historical roots in a long tradition known as ‘faculty psychology,’ wherein minds were thought to consist of a collection of faculties or powers, of which there were usually five: the reason, the understanding, the imagination, the passions, and the will” (“Response” 88). Classifications of texts, then, draw from one of these faculties in turn; for example, a text intended to appeal to the will of the reader will have certain formal properties that others would not. Crowley offers the mid-nineteenth-century influence of Alexander Bain along these lines, noting that Bain’s three aims for texts were to “inform, persuade, and please” and that these aims “correspond to the three departments of the human mind, the Understanding, the Will, and the Feelings” (Bain quoted in Crowley, “Response” 89; see also Crowley, “Invention” 54; D’Angelo 32–33). As I have noted, the privileging of the mastery of form that the “march through the modes” represents still circulates (if not dominates) throughout contemporary composition classrooms. During my eight years as an adjunct English instructor in community colleges and private and public four-year universities, I was usually handed a syllabus and textbook certified by a WPA or a faculty committee. In these materials, it was form that dominated. Students wrote narratives, then descriptions, and, finally, an argument essay (which, depending on the institution, might have to be supported by sources). Somehow these were to be discrete forms, expressions of Understanding, Will, and Feelings in Bain’s terms. While these classification schemes have had remarkable authority in shaping the practices of composition classrooms from the nineteenth century until now, containing even stronger power has been grammar and usage drill, a legacy that still haunts many writing centers (see Lerner, “Drill Pads”). Historian William Woods describes the “mentally disciplined” appeal of this technique: “For centuries, teachers had been drilling their classes in the rules of Latin grammar as a foundation for higher learning; the ‘faculty’ thinking suggested that disciplined work in Latin grammar, or perhaps English grammar, improved not only the memory but a variety of other practical and marketable abilities as well” (“Nineteenth-Century” 23). In 1886, James Garnett offered a comment that seems to describe a good deal of contemporary thinking about the role of English teachers as drill sergeants: “It is the general experience of teachers that it is difficult to interest boys in the formal study of English grammar, but this is, nevertheless, a necessary discipline and should not be abandoned on that account” (69). The characterization as dull but necessary, a kind of bitter medicine, captures the legacy of grammar instruction in higher education, and theories of mental discipline provided 149

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a justification and an alignment with contemporary theory (see also Glau; Woods, “The Evolution”). Theory was not the only driving force here. The persistence of grammar drill was determined in large part by the working conditions of most composition instructors in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. As I described in chapter 1, the burgeoning enrollments of the 1890s coupled with the turn to composition as a “laboratory subject” in which students practiced frequent writing resulted in an overwhelmed teaching staff. As described by Robert Connors, The standard practice during the period 1880–1910 was for teachers to be assigned writing courses that were lecture-sized. Most teachers were responsible for teaching between 140 and 200 students. Leaving aside the question of the worth of abstract lecture material to the struggling writer, the large class sizes of lecture-organized sections meant two things: first, that the teacher could give little individual attention to students, even if a large course was split into smaller classes; and second, that the number of papers each teacher was expected to read and grade was staggering. (“Mechanical Correctness” 66) According to Connors, one result of these conditions was the reduction of “good” writing to “correct” writing, for instructors had little choice but to act largely as error hunters. Once the “avoidance of error” became the goal for student writing, the use of drill pads and grammar worksheets as an easily gradable form of practice would easily follow (Connors, “Mechanical Correctness” 67). That such activities seem to provide a visible manifestation of a mentally disciplined approach made justifying them even easier. The perseverance of drill-and-practice grammar worksheets today is testament to the survival of mental discipline as a kind of “folk theory” (Gee, Michaels, and O’Connor), or one completely removed from any evidence of its soundness. Writing in the mid-1980s, Frank D’Angelo sums up this critique nicely: There are a number of objections that can be raised against the notion that the mind is divided into faculties and that these faculties are responsible for certain kinds of mental activities . . . The principal objection . . . is that there is simply no evidence to indicate that the mind is divided into faculties. Research on hemisphericity suggests, rather, that the brain is divided into hemispheres, each of which is responsible for certain kinds of mental activities. The left

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hemisphere processes information analytically, sequentially, and logically. The right hemisphere processes information holistically, simultaneously, and intuitively. These are, of course, relative rather than absolute since the corpus callosum integrates the activities of the two hemispheres. (39) The persistence of mental discipline and the activities in composition classrooms that seem to act as mental aerobics certainly are rooted in the control they offer to classroom instructors. In a sense, then, mental discipline equals social discipline in classroom sites that heavily regulate “correct” student speech, writing, and behavior. Richard Boyd notes the strong influence of Harvard professor A. S. Hill’s 1878 Principles of Rhetoric on the teaching of college composition, particularly Hill’s ideas of “purity” as an instructional goal. In Hill’s words, “foundations of rhetoric rest upon grammar; for grammatical purity is a requisite of good writing” (quoted in Boyd 447). Boyd’s subsequent comment on this attitude is meant to describe late-nineteenth-century classrooms, but his description certainly resonates in the contemporary landscape: To define mechanical correctness as a function of “purity” was surely an exclusionary gesture, since those who did not speak or write in the prescribed manner—the laboring classes, non-native speakers, the poor—became, by implication, the impure, the polluted, threats to a presumably homogenous elite cultural order. The evocation of “purity” suggested the need for a cleansing, an expurgation of those foreign elements in the language students brought to university classrooms. (447) While the attempt at language purification is a key legacy of composition’s history and a persistent actor in its contemporary role, the control offered by drill-and-practice worksheets is a powerful element that works to resist reform. Herbert Kliebard identifies “keeping order” as a key impediment to educational reform and the use of worksheets as a central element in this quest. In Kliebard’s words, “Worksheets are damnable pedagogically, but they persist because they are reliable instruments of control” (“Success and Failure” 150). Control is a key term in the teaching and theorizing of college writing instruction. Several theorists have offered a historical reading of the ideas that have dominated composition, usually with a certain epistemological control as a driving force. In other words, controlling the flow of knowledge and its production—whether a student’s role is to act as faithful renderer of external knowledge or counterhegemonic actor in

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producing and negotiating new knowledge—has controlled these theoretical treatments. As I describe next, however, the explanatory power of these theoretical treatments when applied to the history of laboratory methods of instruction leaves one searching for something more. Theory and the Teaching of Writing Most treatments of the theories that have shaped the history of teaching writing and research on students’ composing offer a progression that moves from writing as rendering an external truth to writing as constructing truth. For example, Faigley describes the history of research on composing as starting with the “expressive view” in the 1960s when writing development was tied to personal development and the task of the writing classroom was for students to discover their “personal voices” and individual responses to societal problems. Faigley then describes a “cognitive view,” in which researchers looked for cognitive explanations for why writers acted as they did and assembled cognitive models of composing behavior (the best known of which was offered by Linda Flower and John Hayes). Finally, Faigley sees a third generation encompassing a “social view” of composing, in which researchers view students’ acts of reading and writing as essentially social and fully informed by various social worlds at every moment of the process.1 James Berlin, quoted at the start of this chapter, posits a taxonomy similar to Faigley’s: cognitive, expressionistic, and social-epistemic rhetoric, with the last a context in which “the real is located in a relationship that involves the dialectical interaction of the observer, the discourse community (social group) in which the observer is functioning, and the material conditions of existence. Knowledge is never found in any one of these but can only be posited as a product of the dialectic in which all three come together” (“Rhetoric and Ideology” 488). In another key article in the identity of writing/composition studies as a discipline with a traceable theoretical foundation, Nystrand, Green, and Wiemelt offer an “intellectual history” with the 1940s as a starting point when new ideas in literature and linguistics influenced the teaching of writing. For Nystrand, Green, and Wiemelt, the first period in this history is defined by “formalism,” in which “writing instruction focused on features of good (‘model’) texts, and much time was spent teaching students to avoid common, egregious text errors” (274–75). The next stage, starting in the late 1960s, they describe as “constructivism,” during which the interest was in how students actually construct texts (thus encompassing Faigley’s “cognitive” period). By the 1980s, they see composition studies most informed by ideas of “social constructionism,” 152

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akin to Faigley’s “social view” and Berlin’s “social-epistemic rhetoric,” in which an emphasis on the social elements of composing led to ideas of schools and classrooms (and any writing context, for that matter) as discourse communities in which students needed to negotiate membership, using writing as a membership badge of sorts. Finally, Nystrand, Green, and Wiemelt offer “dialogism” as a fourth-generation stage in composition studies when the influence of Russian language theorist Mikhail Bakhtin would make central “situating language and meaning in the everyday social context in which it unfolds” (emphasis in original, 295). This dynamic between context and composing is such that “the context of writing is not somehow exterior to the writer but rather is created and justified while writing. In writing, the writer constructs and continuously justifies a unique social world” (299). Finally, a key influence on the conceptualization of composition’s history is offered by James Berlin in Rhetoric and Reality. Berlin largely focuses on the teaching of writing, not necessarily research on composing, and thus is perhaps more aligned with the project of this book. For Berlin, the teaching of writing is intertwined with instructors’ beliefs about knowledge making or epistemology, which, in turn, has been influenced by dominant social theories of the time. Berlin’s starting point is the nineteenth century, when the teaching of writing in higher education was dominated by “objective” theories of how students learn. In this view, truth is largely external to the writer, and the task of writing is to render that truth as faithfully and accurately as possible so that “it can be reproduced in the reader” (7). Berlin’s label for the teaching practices that grow from this belief is “current-traditional rhetoric,” and Berlin offers that such teaching practices—largely focused on writing products, whether whole essays or atomized kernels of writing that might come from worksheets and drill, and the practices that will ensure maximum polishing of those products—held sway until the 1970s (and some might argue that such practices continue a tenacious hold at all levels of writing instruction). What I find particularly interesting and troubling in this historicaltheoretical landscape is how little it is situated in pedagogical theories that have dominated higher education overall, such as mental discipline, and how little it accounts for the rise and use of laboratory methods of teaching writing. Certainly the socially situated theories and teaching practices that might be grouped under Berlin’s social-epistemic rhetoric or Nystrand et al.’s dialogic phase are well represented in the theories of situated learning that I turn to next. However, these theorists have based their ideas on theorizing classrooms as teaching sites and on teacher153

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student relationships (or, more abstractly, on whole schools as larger units of analysis). Learning in science or writing laboratories and in the intensive peer-to-peer interaction that often characterizes such sites is not represented.2 As I have noted earlier, in Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality, although subtitled Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985, early writing laboratories or clinics rate barely a mention (once on page 64 and once on page 65), and the rise of contemporary writing centers in the 1970s gets no coverage at all. While some early writing laboratories might have been the polishing stations for those rough texts that students created in current-traditional classrooms, others were far more emblematic of what Berlin hopes the post-1985 landscape will look like, one he describes at the end of his book as a “writing course that empowers students as it advises in ways to experience themselves, others, and the material conditions of their existence” (189). Most of the theoretical work I have described up to this point was produced in the 1980s and early 1990s, a period during which composition studies was asserting its identity as a discipline worthy of graduate programs and external funding (a quest which continues to this day). The theorizing about student writing has taken a variety of turns since that point, although most of it is not based on actual studies of student writing (see Haswell, “NCTE/CCC’s Recent War”). Nevertheless, the particular theoretical angle that I find most powerful to describe laboratory methods of teaching has gained a good deal of currency, building off Berlin’s socialepistemic theory and Nystrand et al.’s dialogism as a fourth-generation theory. I next describe this theory of situated learning and its application to writing classrooms and writing and science laboratories. Situated Learning in Writing and Science Situated learning as a theoretical construct encompasses many ways of describing learning, including learning as a “cognitive apprenticeship” (Brown, Collins, and Duigid), as “situated social practice” (Lave, “Situated Learning”), as “legitimate peripheral participation” (Lave and Wenger), and as action within larger “activity systems” (Russell, “Rethinking”). Literacy theorist James Paul Gee classifies situated learning among fifteen oftenoverlapping theories, including “modern composition theory” (“The New Literacy Studies” 180–83). What all of these strands have in common is, in Gee’s words, a “‘social turn’ away from a focus on individual behavior (e.g., the behaviorism of the first half of the twentieth century) and individual minds (e.g., the cognitivism of the middle part of the century) toward a focus on social and cultural interaction” (“The New Literacy Studies” 180). Thus, just as Berlin, Faigley, and Nystrand et al. in composition studies 154

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and Ede and Lunsford in writing center studies (among others) assert a move from the individual to the social, literacy theorists offer a similar trajectory—one, however, that finds a powerful relationship between the cognitive and the social. Gee defines situated cognition as follows: Knowledge and intelligence reside not solely in heads, but, rather, are distributed across the social practices (including language practices) and the various tools, technologies and semiotic systems that a given “community of practice” uses in order to carry out its characteristic activities . . . Knowing is a matter of being able to participate centrally in practice, and learning is a matter of changing patterns of participation (with concomitant changes in identity). (“The New Literacy Studies” 181) The connection between identity formation and learning is a central concept to situated learning, in which identity is socially constructed through a person’s interactions with others, with knowledge, and with “tools, technologies and semiotic systems.” This process reverses the standard educational equation of what-you-know equals who-you-are, or the “banking” approach to education in which facts are neatly deposited into students’ heads (Freire) to be withdrawn in the form of multiple-choice tests. Jean Lave asserts that crafting identities is a social process, and becoming more knowledgeably skilled is an aspect of participation in social practice. By such reasoning, who you are becoming shapes crucially and fundamentally what you “know.” “What you know” may be better thought of as doing rather than having something—“knowing” rather than acquiring or accumulating knowledge or information. “Knowing” is a relation among communities of practice, participation in practice, and the generation of identities as part of becoming part of ongoing practice. (“Teaching” 157) “Communities of practice” is another key term for situated learning theorists. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger offer particular examples and definition of the term in their book Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Through studies of Yucatec (Mayan) midwives, West African Vai and Gola tailors, naval quartermasters, meat cutters, and nondrinking alcoholics, Lave and Wenger explore the idea that “participation at multiple levels is entailed in a community of practice . . . [or] participation in an activity system about which participants share understandings concerning what they are doing and what that means in their lives and for their communities” (98). 155

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James P. Gee, however, critiques the term “communities of practice” because of the implied cohesion that such a group might have. Gee believes that “the key problem with notions like ‘community of practice’ is that they make it look like we are attempting to label a group of people. Once this is done, we face vexatious issues over which people are in and which are out of the group, how far they are in or out, and when they are in or out” (Situated Language 78). The concept of community has also been critiqued in composition studies more generally (see, for instance, Joseph Harris, “The Idea”) and writing center studies in particular (Boquet, Noise). Elizabeth Boquet writes, “I have been puzzled over the years by the continual reassertion of community in those regional and national writing center forums as I have learned that we can agree on virtually no characteristics that could identify us as a community—not a name, not status for directors, not status of staff, not practice” (Noise 30). Gee’s alternative to the idea of community is the concept of an affinity space in which “knowledge is often both intensive (each person entering the space brings some special knowledge) and extensive (each person entering the space shares some knowledge and functions with others)” (Situated Language 98). This collaborative concept offers far more fluid notions of who is expert and who is novice. Gee describes the participants in these spaces cohered through “affinity groups,” a powerful concept when applied to the learning that potentially takes place in laboratory settings: For members of an affinity group, their allegiance is primarily to a set of common endeavors or practices and secondarily to other people in terms of shared culture or traits. Of course, they need these other people (as well as discourse and dialogue of certain sorts) for these practices to exist, but it is these practices and the experiences they gain from them that create and sustain their allegiances to these other people. (“Identity” 105) By this point, it is hopefully evident that science and writing laboratories as teaching and learning sites potentially enact many of the concepts of situated learning: access to more-experienced members of communities of practice or affinity groups, overt attention to “tools, technologies, and semiotic systems” that make up writing in school settings, understanding of the interplay between identity and language use, distributed and dispersed knowledge among the highly varied mix of participants. Still, some situated-learning theorists view schooling as one of the least favorable environments to bring about learning. Jean Lave writes that “apprenticeships deploy many resources for effective learning, but in most cases teaching is not the defining or most salient of these, and rather 156

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often it appears to shape learning little or not at all” (“Teaching” 150). Furthermore, Lave believes that “teaching is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce learning, and that the social-cultural categories that divide teachers from learners in schools mystify the crucial ways in which learning is fundamental to all participation and all participants in social practice” (“Teaching” 157). While that statement might seem to offer little hope for science laboratories, writing classrooms, and writing centers as sites for literacy learning, not all theorists take that point of view. For instance, Mike Rose offers the following criticism of those who question the authenticity of school settings: “Something happens rhetorically in some of this literature that has a narrowing effect on our understanding of teaching and learning. There is a sometimes implied, sometimes explicit critique of mass education and any procedures commonly associated with it . . . But the critique tends to be quickly executed, a single-hued portrait of mainstream classrooms that has the unintended effect of stripping instruction from its setting” (“Our Hands” 155). Jean Lave does allow for a teaching ideal that is easily applied to laboratory methods of teaching writing: Teaching . . . is a cross-context, facilitative effort to make high quality educational resources truly available for communities of learners. Great teaching in schools is a process of facilitating the circulation of school knowledgeable skill into the changing identities of students. Teachers are probably recognized as “great” when they are intensely involved in communities of practice in which their identities are changing with respect to (other) learners through their interdependent activities. (“Teaching” 158) A key element in enacting this possibility is the concept of apprenticeship. In terms of situated learning, ideas of apprenticeship offer attractive ways of envisioning a teaching-learning environment that is in contrast to traditional schooling. As described by Collins, Brown, and Newman, “Apprenticeship is the way we learn most naturally. It characterized learning before there were schools, from learning one’s language to learning how to run an empire” (491). For Barbara Rogoff, apprenticeship is not merely one master teaching his/her craft to an eager novice. Instead, “apprenticeship as a concept goes beyond expert-novice dyads; it focuses on a system of interpersonal involvements and arrangements in which people engage in culturally organized activity in which apprentices become more responsible participants” (4). Collins, Brown, and Newman use the term cognitive apprenticeship in contrast to traditional apprenticeship in order to highlight two key differences: (1) apprenticeship in 157

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school settings emphasizes an expert’s processes of problem solving in which “conceptual and factual knowledge are exemplified and situated in the contexts of their use” (457), and (2) cognitive apprenticeship “refers to the focus of the learning-through-guided-experience on cognitive and metacognitive, rather than physical skills and processes” (457). In other words, the intellectual work of schooling is the subject matter of cognitive apprenticeship, and it is through the activities of observation, coaching, and independent practice that students develop as successful learners (Collins, Brown, and Newman 456). Gee offers an example of the apprenticeship process in a detailed description of how people learn to cook: How, for the most part, have people learned to cook in human cultures? Usually not via cooking classes. The process involves “masters” (adults, more masterful peers) creating an environment rich in support for learners. Learners observe masters at work. Masters model behavior (e.g., cooking a particular type of meal) accompanied by talk that helps learners know what to pay attention to. Learners collaborate in their initial efforts with the masters, who do most of the work and scaffold the learner’s efforts. Texts or other artifacts (e.g., recipes, cookbooks) that carry useful information, though usually of the sort supplied “on demand” or “just in time” when needed, are often made available. The proper tools are made available as well, many of which carry “knowledge” learners need not store in their heads (e.g., pans made of certain materials “know” how to spread heat properly). Learners are given continual verbal and behavioral feedback for their efforts. And, finally, learners are aware that masters have a certain socially significant identity (here, “cook”) that they wish to acquire as part and parcel of membership in a larger cultural group. (Situated Language 12) Of course, the connection between learning to cook and learning to write is tenuous at best. Indeed, some learning theorists call into question the applicability of the apprenticeship metaphor to school contexts in which so many components seem far less immediate and valued. For instance, the “larger cultural group” that students wish to join might be “expert writers,” but that concept seems awfully abstract, contentious, and removed from settings such as first-year composition. In questioning the applicability of apprenticeship models for writing instruction, David Russell notes that in first-year composition, “students are exposed to many genres, drawn from many academic fields and wider social practices, 158

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rather than focusing on the writing of one. Brief exposure to the writing or social practice of the kind common in formal education is potentially very useful, . . . but it is emphatically NOT apprenticeship, except in the loosest metaphorical sense” (“The Limits” para. 8). Rather than apprenticeship, Russell urges an understanding of learning in college as a process of “involvement with various social practices.” Essential to learning is for students to develop the ability to critique these social practices at the same time as they participate in them. Thus, “learning to write is not so much an apprenticeship but a complex set of expanding involvements mediated by writing various genres” (Russell, “The Limits” para. 13). Nevertheless, concepts essential to Collins, Brown, and Newman’s notion of “cognitive apprenticeship”—observation, coaching, independent practice, and reflection on that practice—can occur within the kind of situated practice and scrutinizing reflection that Russell calls for. Collins, Brown, and Newman note that learning is best situated within “an environment that reflects the multiple uses to which [students’] knowledge will be put in the future” (487). Essential to this learning are the following: First, students come to understand the purposes or uses of the knowledge they are learning. Second, they learn by actively using knowledge rather than passively receiving it. Third, they learn the different conditions under which their knowledge can be applied. . . . Fourth, learning in multiple contexts induces the abstraction of knowledge, so that students acquire knowledge in a dual form, both tied to the contexts of its uses and independent of any particular context. (487) Learning to write via laboratory methods would seem to satisfy many, if not all, of these conditions. Indeed, Gee’s description of learning physics in school environments, a modification of his description of learning to cook, is easily adapted to writing instruction as I substitute the word writing for the word physics in the following passage: What does it mean to learn [writing] as a cultural process? . . . Much the same as what it meant to learn cooking as a cultural process. Master [writers] allow learners to collaborate with them on projects that the learners could not carry out on their own. Learners work in a “smart” environment filled with tools and technologies, and artifacts [such as handbooks and guides] store knowledge and skills they can draw on when they do not personally have such knowledge and skills. Information is given “just in time” when it can be put to use (and thus better understood) and “on demand” 159

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when learners feel they need it and can follow it. Extended information given out of a context of application (thus not “just in time”) is offered after, not before, learners have had experiences relevant to what that information is about. Learners see learning [to write] as not just “getting a grade” or “doing school,” but as part and parcel of taking on the emerging identity of being a [writer]. (Situated Language 13) Key to this instruction is the need to provide “scaffolding,” which “enables a child or novice to solve a problem, carry out a task or achieve a goal which would be beyond [her/]his unassisted efforts” (Wood, Bruner, and Ross 90), and the expert needs to make visible the thinking and problem-solving processes underlying her performance. In the view of Collins, Brown, and Newman, novices do not learn from merely watching expert musicians or artists perform; instead, “if expert modeling is to be effective in helping students internalize useful conceptual models, experts must be able to identify and represent to students the cognitive processes they engage in as they solve problems” (488). In a study of one-to-one conferencing between an adult Vietnamese nonnative English writer and her instructor, Young and Miller describe the relationships between participants—and the role of the instructor—that led to student learning: In the case of the situated practice of revision talk, the instructor and student jointly construct the changes in participation that we observe as the student develops from peripheral to fuller participation. It appears that the student is the one whose participation is most dramatically transformed, but the instructor is a co-learner, and her participation develops in a way that complements the student’s learning. In fact, the effectiveness of the instructor is precisely in how she manages a division of participation that allows for growth on the part of the student. (533) Several writing center scholars have also taken up notions of apprenticeship learning. Perhaps most notably, Linda Shamoon and Deborah Burns created a stir within the field when they published “A Critique of Pure Tutoring” in Writing Center Journal. Shamoon and Burns called into question a practice orthodoxy, or “bible,” that dictates “minimalist” tutoring approaches (following Jeff Brooks’s use of the term in a 1991 Writing Lab Newsletter article). Instead, they called for the use of “directive and appropriative” (134) master/initiate practices common to music and art instruction as more productive alternatives for successful tutoring. In the authors’ words, “The social nature of directive and emulative tutoring serves to endorse the student’s worth as an emerging professional. Simi160

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larly, directive tutoring of writing presents more than a demonstration of steps in the writing process. It models a writer’s attitudes, stances, and values. In so doing, it unites the processes of writing with the subjectivity of being a writer” (145). Note that many of the elements described by situated-learning theorists are present in what Shamoon and Burns offer, particularly notions of expert practice, emulation, and identity formation. However, simply watching an expert play an alto saxophone or having one’s performance critiqued by an expert—no matter the student’s eagerness to be a member of that professional world—does not necessarily bring about learning. Instead, scaffolding and reflective thinking are essential to the learning process. While the applicability of situated learning to writing classes and writing conferences has received some degree of exposure in the professional literature (see Russell’s “Writing and Genre” for a review of this work), in science education these ideas seem to have strongly taken hold. Much of this impetus comes from studies of the production of scientific knowledge or studies of scientists’ actual communication practices, all of which “reveal that scientific knowledge is far more complex and tenuous than implied by myths of the scientific method and heroic scientists” (37), as described by McGinn and Roth in a review of that work. While “cultural-historical activity theory” (or CHAT) is often seen as the all-encompassing term, another useful way of describing these approaches is that they are “constructivist.” As a philosophical principle, constructivism has its roots in the ideas of nineteenth-century educational reformers such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Johann Frederich Hebart. Both Pestalozzi and Hebart believed in the study of natural objects (as opposed to merely texts) and in the necessity to structure classrooms so that children could pursue what was of interest to them through a process of discovery (DeBoer 21–30). The Progressive movement of the early twentieth century is another foundation for these theories (Cremin). A more recent influence (though the work itself is not more recent) is Soviet educational theorist Lev Vygotsky’s belief that “the true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the socialized, but from the social to the individual” (20). Whether called laboratory-based learning, project-based learning, inquiry methods, or constructivism, reform efforts in science education have attempted to make the learner’s needs central. Essential to constructivist belief in science education is that one learn from the natural world, just as Louis Agassiz promoted in the mid-nineteenth century, rather than merely from texts or lectures. As described by Wolff-Michael Roth, “Constructivists recognize that, rather than being 161

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transferred from one individual to another, knowledge has to be constructed by each individual through his or her active engagement with the physical and/or social environment” (146). Science study, with its vast assemblage of principles and details to be learned, can easily succumb to the sort of knowledge transfer that constructivists decry. Instead, according to Tobin and Tippins, constructivism in science learning holds true the following: “Science does not exist as a body of knowledge separate from knowers. On the contrary, science is viewed as a set of socially negotiated understandings of the events and phenomena that comprise the experienced universe” (4). In this view, however, content is not necessarily sacrificed for the sake of process. Instead, according to Tobin and Tippins, “Making sense of science is a dialectical process involving both content and process. The two can never be meaningfully separated. The process skills can be thought of as thinking processes, such as using the senses to experience; representing knowledge through language, diagrams, mathematics, and other symbolic modes; clarification; elaboration; comparison; justification; generation of alternatives; and selection of viable solutions to problems” (9). As I pointed our earlier, a central debate in the overall literature on situated learning is whether school settings offer “authentic” sites for learning. On the whole, constructivists in science education do not seem burdened by this question. In a variation of Willie Sutton’s response to the question of why he robbed banks (“Because that’s where the money is”), researchers of science education strive to understand the activity that has taken place in school settings for the last hundred-plus years and that will continue to take place there. Nevertheless, studying the ways students learn to write in classrooms and laboratories does present challenges as far as the goals of that instruction are concerned. In Mike Rose’s words, “In an attempt to counter classroom instruction that is unengaging, acontextual, or detached from real-world practice, there has been a call to create educational settings that are built around practices drawn from the activity of real readers, mathematicians, scientists, city planners, and so on” (“Our Hands” 153). In other words, if the idea is to enculturate students into the discursive practices of professionals, it would make sense to offer discursive activities that are as close as possible to those engaged in by professionals. That is, essentially, why the cookbook laboratory reports that have dominated writing in school science result in very little learning applicable to the writing of a scientific research article. Arthur Wilson describes this challenge: “Authentic activity . . . requires that learning and knowing always be located in the actual situations of their creation and use, not the simulations artificially constructed in 162

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schooling practices. Thus, learning and knowing are a process of enculturation, not simply a matter of acquisition” (77). The “situatedness” of situated learning becomes the challenge, then, since school contexts are always going to have some degree of artificiality. In science laboratory classes, however, the elements for replicating the actual research and communication practices of professionals in the field are tantalizingly available. As students conduct what is new research to them and then strive to persuade a reader of the fidelity and importance of the results of that research, the work of enculturation looks a great deal like the process of learning to be a scientist in any research lab. Enacting the Idea of Situated Learning The path from mental discipline to situated learning/constructivism is indeed a long one in terms of time and distance. Nevertheless, while the legacies of mental discipline can be found in science and writing classrooms and laboratories, the great promise of laboratory methods is easily found in the elements of situated learning. The histories I have presented in the previous chapters—whether they were about the teaching of writing or the teaching of science—offered hands-on learning, student inquiry, social activity, and discovery as essential processes for learning. These essential elements of situated learning, unfortunately, have been in short supply due to overcrowded classrooms, reductive notions of teaching and learning, and the association of writing with punishment. The theory of situated learning is not reality, of course, but just an approximation of reality, and any worthwhile theory is continually enhanced by subsequent evidence (a process sociologist Michael Burawoy labels “rebuilding theory”). In the next chapter, I offer a study of two students learning to write in a biological engineering class. One of the challenges for those designing this class was to create an environment for authentic learning, and the resulting class shows the many complications encountered on the way to achieving this goal. The study that follows describes the idea of a writing laboratory as expressed in students writing in biological engineering and also explores situated learning as a theoretical foundation.

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8 The Laboratory in Practice: A Study of a Biological Engineering Class

M

oving from the idea of a writing laboratory to enacting that idea— whether in a classroom, laboratory, or writing center—is by no means a simple task as demonstrated by the histories that I have presented in the previous chapters. Many reform efforts have failed for a variety of reasons, whether insufficient resources or a lack of grassroots/teacher support or a fear of change from the entrenched status quo. However, many reforms were also based on shaky theoretical foundations or displayed a chasm between theoretical underpinnings and on-the-ground implementation. As I described in chapter 7, an essential foundation is one that offers the resources to conceive of laboratory sites as contexts for situated learning to occur. In their notions of “cognitive apprenticeship,” Collins, Brown, and Newman offer the following as essential characteristics of such sites: First, students come to understand the purposes or uses of the knowledge they are learning. Second, they learn by actively using knowledge rather than passively receiving it. Third, they learn the different conditions under which their knowledge can be applied. . . . Fourth, learning in multiple contexts induces the abstraction of knowledge, so that students acquire knowledge in dual form, both tied to the contexts of its uses and independent of any particular context. (487)

The MIT class I describe in this chapter, Laboratory Fundamentals of Biology Engineering, offers these sorts of learning opportunities to students, while the contexts, student experiences, and outcomes—as far as student writing is concerned—demonstrate the complexity of writing as a laboratory subject. In other words, in this class the laboratory conditions for learning as cognitive apprenticeship or as preprofessional experience are certainly present, but the mixed experiences of students show the relatively uncertain route towards these goals, hazards that must be recognized and attended to if writing as a laboratory subject is to be successful. A key factor in this kind of learning, particular in the class context I present in this chapter, is the role of students’ identity formation and how 164

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writing tasks contribute to that development. As Deanna Dannels points out in reviewing the literature on engineering communication, “Knowledge construction is a process tied directly to issues of disciplinary identities, values, and rhetorical purposes” (7). Brown, Reveles, and Kelly use the term “discursive identity” to explore “the relationship between language, identity, and classroom learning” in science classrooms (781). These authors note that “science learning involves learning to construct one’s discursive identity in order to participate in science and its associated discourse. The appropriation of a scientific identity is demonstrated through students’ engagement in the classroom conversations, as well as the broader discursive practices that lead to the development of new conceptual knowledge” (790). Furthermore, in science and engineering laboratory contexts in which students are engaged in the kind of knowledge making that they would do as professionals (albeit under far more controlled conditions), this identity formation is closely tied to professionalization. The notion of students as novice professionals learning to write and speak successfully in their chosen fields leads to the need for writing and speaking tasks that are grounded in the real work of those fields. In Dannels’s words, “This social conceptualization of the technical disciplines has led to instructional objectives that focus on educating professionals instead of training technicians” (8). In many classroom and laboratory situations, such authenticity is certainly difficult to come by—as it was in Dannels’s study of student groups in mechanical engineering in which the context of the classroom itself, rather than the professional goal, strongly determined students’ actions. Nevertheless, as students develop identities as professionals in their fields, opportunities to engage with the actual practices of those professionals are essential. Maria Jose Luzon describes this view as one in which students are being enculturated into a technical field through the kinds of texts and tasks they encounter: “It is necessary to teach technical communication not only from a textual or ‘composing process’ orientation but also by incorporating concepts of initiation and considering writing as cultural adaptation. This model emphasizes the importance of positioning the texts in their social contexts, in relation with other texts used in the discipline” (291). Learning these disciplinary cultures through their texts leads to what learning theorist Etienne Wenger calls learning as “a matter of engagement,” which “depends on opportunities to contribute actively to the practices of communities that we value and that value us, to integrate their enterprises into our understanding of the world, and to make creative use of their respective repertoires” (emphasis in original, 227). Laboratory classes in science and engineering will often provide a research setting 165

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that is akin to the work of professionals, particularly in terms of the repertoire of communication tasks, the use of teams, and the emphasis on processes of discovery and problem solving. In each of these areas, students are trying on professional identities, and as a result often make important choices about the kind of work they imagine themselves doing in subsequent classes and after graduation. In the study I describe next, my intent follows Brown, Reveles, and Kelly’s call for research to focus on the relationship between identity and “scientific literacy.” In their words, “Research exploring the relationship between language, identity, and classroom learning can provide insights about how students learn to become literate members of a scientific community” (781). For the students I describe in this chapter, notions of their developing identities as professionals or as biological engineers were a driving force in both the creation of communication tasks and the students’ relative success with those tasks. This learning, of course, occurred in a variety of nested contexts, one of which is a communications-intensive class requirement at MIT. The MIT Context for Writing in Laboratory Classes The current implementation of communication across the curriculum at MIT is a relatively new development. Reform of the previous competency-based requirement was initiated when a 1997 survey revealed that while MIT alumni felt that they had received top-notch technical educations, they believed that their lack of writing and speaking training were significant hurdles to their professional success. By 2000, MIT faculty passed a communication requirement, an institute-wide faculty initiative with the intention to integrate “substantial instruction and practice in writing and speaking into all four years and across all parts of MIT’s undergraduate program” (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Communications Requirement”). More specifically, MIT undergraduates are required to take four classes designated as “Communications Intensive,” or CI. Two of those are classes in the humanities, arts, and social sciences (CI-H), and two are classes in students’ majors (CI-M). The class that is the context for this case study, Laboratory Fundamentals of Biological Engineering, is the first of two CI-Ms that biological engineering majors will encounter. The class is an introduction to the laboratory techniques and intellectual framework of biological engineering while also an introduction to the discursive practices (writing, speaking, visualizing) of professionals in that field. In other words, it is an ambitious undertaking in which experimentation is essential, whether it is the experiments students are doing in the lab, the experimental nature of the class itself for 166

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the teaching staff (they change the content of the lab work and the writing assignments considerably from semester to semester), or the experiment in writing that students will encounter as they work towards communicative competencies that are often unfamiliar and challenging. As with Laboratory Fundamentals of Biological Engineering, many of the current classes designated as CI-M at MIT have been mapped on to existing laboratory classes. On one level, this decision makes logistical sense as students have long presented their laboratory work in written or oral forms; the CI requirement offers a structure and instructional support for these established practices. On another level, the tying of communication activities to students’ laboratory work represents the ways professional practices are a driving force in curriculum and teaching. In other words, the ideals of research—and the ways to inculcate students into those ideals—have long shaped the undergraduate curriculum at MIT. And these competencies—the ability to undertake independent research or solve problems through sustained inquiry and the ability to communicate the results of those endeavors—are essential to the success of professionals in any science or engineering discipline and, in particular, for undergraduates in this biological engineering class. Contexts for Laboratory Fundamentals of Biological Engineering Biological Engineering is the newest major course of study at MIT, welcoming its inaugural class in the fall of 2005, and it has proved to be a popular option, with the number of applicants in 2005 exceeding the number of available slots by 50 percent (MIT Biological Engineering). Laboratory Fundamentals of Biological Engineering (course number 20.109) is the first of two required laboratory classes for students in the major and offers among its explicit goals to help prepare students for subsequent laboratory work, whether in classes or in research labs. Also explicit is the goal of preparing students to be professional biological engineers. For example, in the first of four content modules for the semester I studied the class, the students saw the following intent: One major goal we have for this module is to establish good habits for documentation of your work, in your lab notebook and on the [class] wiki. By documenting your work according to the exercises done today, you will • be better research students (in 20.109 and in any research lab you may join) • be better writers since a clear record of what you’ve done will improve your data analysis 167

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• be better scientists, since you’ll eventually train others to document things this way, too. (20.109 wiki) This consistent framing of the work done in 20.109 in terms of larger professional preparation makes the activities key to students’ development of professional identities. Along these lines, the class is structured so that students will have some exposure to the “hot” areas of research in biological engineering. The four content modules for the spring 2007 semester were genome engineering, biophysical signal measurement, expression engineering, and biomaterial engineering. Each module was led by a biological engineering faculty member or department researcher, and the lab activities were essentially an opportunity for students to see what it is like to work in that particular lab on that particular topic. What made this class a particularly good candidate for studying students’ communication activities is that a significant writing or speaking assignment was tied to each module and that students’ grades on those two papers and two oral presentations constituted 80 percent of their overall class grade. In other words, the message is, If you can’t convey your laboratory work well in written or spoken forms, it’s not worth much. The strong view projected in this class is that learning to be a biological engineer is far more than mastering a body of static knowledge, or, as McGinn and Roth describe, the view of “scientific knowledge as competence in scientific discourses rather than as bodies of facts and theories” (19). For both writing assignments, the intent was to offer students an opportunity to experience the key discursive activities of biological engineers. In her interviews, Natalie Kuldell, the primary architect of the course, consistently talked about this future outcome and framed her language in terms of students’ identities as researchers. In describing the ideal outcome for students learning to write up their research, she noted the need for students “to critically evaluate data and to pull loose ends together in a story they can argue—that they can make an argument, an articulate idea that they can express and try to make sense of the work that’s in front of them.” Key elements for this learning in 20.109 are lab experiences that approach “authentic” activity, working on new and relevant issues in a new and relevant field, as well as ample opportunities to write up this research, to receive feedback, and to rewrite. Another defining aspect of the context for this class and for its assignments is the emerging disciplinary identity of biological engineering itself. The particular focus for much of the student research is in the field known as “synthetic” biology, a line of research that the New York Times characterized as “an effort by engineers to rewire the genetic

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circuitry of living organisms” (Wade). In more fundamental terms, the approach in synthetic biology is based on using what is known about the genetic code of particular organisms—how particular elements of that code function, what happens if a sequence is missing or is altered—and building organisms from the ground up, from the nucleotides that make up DNA. Such ability has immense potential but also immense dangers, given threats of bioterrorism or the possibility that a lethal virus might be manufactured in a synthetic biology lab and unleashed on an unsuspecting population (Wade). These potentials and threats growing out of the tools of synthetic biology provide a key context for the writing students are doing in 20.109. The following accounts of two students’ experiences with 20.109— Maxine and Noel—come from a semester-long research project in which I examined students’ experiences with learning to write in 20.109.1 Based on a start-of-semester survey, two rounds of interviews, observations of class and lab interaction, and examination of student- and instructor-generated written materials, I formulated an overall question about the students’ experience in the class. What does it mean to write in 20.109, particularly in the relationship between their developing professional identity and the research and writing tasks they were asked to perform?2 Maxine At the time of this study (spring 2007 semester), Maxine was a sophomore at MIT, part of the second cohort of biological engineering majors. She chose to pursue biological science while in high school after rejecting physics and computer science as possibilities and after reading a great deal on the research in bioinformatics that was being done at MIT. However, both at the start and at the end of the semester, Maxine stated that her future goal was not necessarily to be a research scientist but to work in finance or with a venture capital firm that funds biomedical research. She felt that this type of work would fit well with her self-described attributes: “I really like giving presentations; I love talking. . . . I’m more of a thinker than a hands-on experience [type]. . . . [Laboratory work] is interesting, it’s fascinating, but I couldn’t do it for a living.” This class was also Maxine’s first real scientific laboratory experience. In her answers to a start-of-semester survey on writing experiences and expectations and in her first interview, several responses indicated that Maxine had a fairly sophisticated understanding of what scientific writing entailed and ample experience as a scientific writer. For example, she describes her experiences with writing up scientific content in high school: “As part of my high school International Baccalaureate program,

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I was required to write a 22-page mathematics paper. I have also written numerous physics lab write-ups for this same program.” When she gave more specifics on a paper that she identified as a “significant” writing experience, she easily offered technical language: “I wrote a paper about the Halting Problem of Turing’s Thesis. I took a very mathematical approach to this problem and solved it using Godel’s Proof by Falsification theorem.” Maxine’s sophistication also shows in her response to why she believed 20.109 had been designated as a communications-intensive class: “Biology has a lot of ‘holes’ in it and thus requires the students to constantly question the validity of their research. I think this class has been made a CI to teach students how to properly do that.” In terms of writing goals for the class, Maxine offered the following: “I hope to analyze large amounts of data and draw logical conclusions, which I can then concisely put down on paper. I hope also to learn to think more creatively, especially in areas such as re-engineering viruses.” Maxine described a fairly ordered approach as typical to her writing process, one that involved being a “logical writer” but that also met with difficulty getting started (as she searched for a logical framework) and a tendency to be brief or not descriptive enough. In Maxine’s words, “I don’t like writing a sentence and then describing it for three sentences. I’m not a fan of that.” Noel Like Maxine, Noel was a sophomore at the time of this study and chose to major in biological engineering after rejecting computer science as a possible direction. Noel was attracted to biotechnology as a potential career site, and for him, “the biotech movement was shifting to a more molecular basis. So that really interested me.” In terms of identity, Noel stressed in our first interview his sense of himself as an engineer rather than a research scientist, particularly in terms of life after MIT. In his words, “I’m an engineer, and I like making things. I like seeing products that can impact people, so going more along the business route where things are more developed, more concrete, I think I’d fit in better there.” This desire to have an impact on people’s lives can also be seen in Noel’s initial survey response to why he thought 20.109 had been designated communications intensive: “A key part of research is presenting your findings. Doing the research is one thing, but for it to have an impact on society, you must convince other people of your success in the form of writing.” While Maxine identified her writing process as one in which the big picture dominated and the details were harder to muster, Noel saw 170

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himself as detail-oriented and much more attuned to evidence and data, sometimes to the detriment of seeing the big picture. In his initial survey, he wrote, “I tend to be long-winded, so I have trouble finding a concise and clear way to get my point across sometimes. Also, I tend to get caught up in details, and lose sight of the big picture.” In terms of writing process, Noel describes spending a good deal of time gathering evidence and conducting background reading, leading to “just in a random fashion scribbling down a bunch of concepts. Later, the secondary stage is trying to take all of these little details and make a significant idea out of it.” Reaching that secondary stage, the need to put the work in a larger context that will be meaningful for a reader, is what Noel saw as his greatest struggle. Big Picture Role Reversal, Writing about M The first of two writing assignments in 20.109 asked students “to write a thoughtful, researched essay exploring how a foundational engineering concept . . . can be applied as a design tool for biological engineering” (see appendix A for the complete text of the assignment). The research for this essay came from students’ laboratory work in which they were applying these “foundational” concepts to a bacterial virus, known as M13, in an attempt to modify it and build a simplified synthetic version (for an example of this line of research, see Chan, Kosuri, and Endy). Thus, the laboratory work acted to generate evidence to support the argument as presented in the essay—an argument that was given to the students, as they worked from a prewritten abstract and a proscribed structure. The key moves for students in this assignment were to grasp the “bigger picture” of synthetic biology and why the technique known as refactoring a genome from the sequence level up was ultimately more effective than ad hoc approaches to reengineering a biological system. Gaining this view was a challenge for all students, as their M13 laboratory work was not exactly a rousing success, but all could testify as to the potential of refactoring as this essay asked them to do. Success in this assignment, then, depended on how well students could embrace these larger ideas and communicate them to a fairly general reader, one who needed to be convinced that synthetic engineering was a viable research methodology. If students were to become spokespersons for their chosen field, this essay was an initial attempt at seeing how well they could muster the arguments that needed to be made if the field was to carve out the resources and attention necessary for success. In other words, students needed to write in an identity as researchers convinced that the field and the laboratory techniques they were learning were viable. 171

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Given this ambitious goal, one issue for Maxine was that the assignment itself, though highly structured, left little room for her to formulate an argument that she was comfortable with and could build on or onto which she could map her emerging identity as a biological engineering student. Despite Maxine’s self-conception as a writer not drawn to details, her first effort at this essay was bogged down in details, and she struggled to connect them to a larger argument. In an interview after she submitted her draft of the first essay, Maxine described her struggle to conform to the expectations of the assignment within the time allotted to complete it: “I was crunched for time and had to just turn something in and hope for the best.” Below is Maxine’s first draft introduction. 3 At the start of her essay, it is difficult to imagine who her intended audience might be. She starts with one of the many quotes the assignment offered as a starting point, one that draws analogies between engineering biological systems and computer programming, and then she uses very specific language—genetic programming, evolutionary algorithms, human-designed algorithms—without much explanation of what those abstract terms mean or how they connect to the opening quotation. In paragraph 2, she attempts to draw out the analogy to computer programming and introduces two more terms—synthetic design and abstraction—that are key to this topic, but she offers little explanation and thus simply piles them on the previous terms. Paragraph 3 does take up the definition of abstraction and makes the appropriate move to indicate that the concept is one of the challenges of engineering biological systems, and this move nicely leads to paragraph 4 and standardization as another key element to be resolved. By her last paragraph, however, in which she introduces the lab work on M13 as an example, she does not speak back to what had come previously in this introduction, and the reader is left wondering what point the M13 work is intended to prove or support. In sum, this introduction lacks a controlling focus or argument and a logical development evolving from that focus that leads to Maxine’s research on M13 as evidence. Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary. —Anonymous

In genetic programming, evolutionary algorithms are used to evolve programs with precise functions. These new “evolved” algorithms almost always exceed the performance of the human-designed algorithms, yet are

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exceedingly difficult to understand and manipulate, thus making them only practical for one specific task. Alternatively, programs built via structural design are much easier to understand and edit even though they are not as efficient as the evolved algorithms. Evolved algorithms only advance the program’s strengths instead of first removing its weaknesses. Today computer programming has been abstracted to things like object-oriented programming. Today programmers do not even see the 0’s and 1’s that make up the binary code that computers use to perform all their functions. Unlike computer programming synthetic design has not been fully abstracted yet. The four levels of abstraction for synthetic biology, that exist today, are DNA, parts, devices, and systems. Unfortunately, direct manipulation of DNA bases is required for the process of DNA synthesis; DNA parts cannot simply be modified and pieced together to create a new DNA construct. One of the most fundamental problems causing the breakdown of abstraction in biology is the lack of standards. Standard parts allow engineers to step back a level and not have to work with individual base sequences. Standardization in biology has been a rather gruesome task because biology is an evolving science. Newly assembled organisms are constantly, in different ways, mutating their chromosomes forcing engineers to look at each organism’s individual DNA sequence. Another key issue is the uncertainty associated with how two different parts will interact. Standardized parts require insulation to prevent them from incorrectly interacting with other external factors. For example placing a strong promoter in front of a protein gene might boost the expression of the protein but if the promoter is homologous to a region on the protein’s gene, it might just be deleted though homologous recombination. Other factors, such as a bacterium’s environmental conditions might cause incorrect expression of a protein though unwanted regulation of engineered genes. We selected the M13 bacteriophage to reengineer. This bacteriophage is relatively small and consists of 11 proteins. Although it seems like such a simple phage, it has within it multiple overlaps in DNA coding regions and even a few proteins whose functions are not yet known clearly. Such complexities and unknowns make this phage hard to work with and manipulate. In order to better understand of the M13 phage, we decided to reengineer it in two different ways, the first though classical laboratory manipulation of the phage’s DNA and the second though modern refactoring and synthesis.

Students’ first drafts were graded by the writing across the curriculum lecturer assigned to the class (who responded in depth to all student

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writing produced), and Maxine’s received a C–, the lowest grade of all students. The lecturer in his comments to Maxine noted that “in revision you need to work on the presentation and logical structuring of the material.” In particular, he points out that her draft lacked a clear focus, and her examples to frame her argument seemed only loosely connected to the larger issues. He urges Maxine to “reread the assignment and your abstract” so that she might “work on developing context for the work [on M13] and for your concepts.” In an interview after she had submitted the draft, Maxine described that she had shown the draft to her father, a mathematician, who “couldn’t get past the first page. When I was rereading it, I couldn’t believe I wrote it. It had no argument to it. It just flowed here and there, and wasn’t a very focused argument.” In her revision to this essay, Maxine completely recast her introduction (see below). She dropped the opening quote and used the subheading “Abstraction of Biological Systems” to open her essay (and she used subheadings throughout this second draft while her first draft had none). The concept of abstraction does indeed become her controlling focus, as she moved from a first paragraph on early computer programming and the development of programming languages “to abstractly represent a set of tasks on syntactic structures.” She uses abstraction as a bridge to paragraph 2, noting in her first sentences, “Unlike programming languages, biological engineering has not been abstracted.” Nevertheless, one difficulty as indicated in this sentence is that she is still largely targeting an insider audience, assuming a reader’s knowledge of biological engineering to a larger degree than she perhaps should have. She does move well from abstraction to the need for standardization in the next two paragraphs, including “insulation” as an example of what those standard parts might look like. In paragraph 5, she moves back to a more general level, however, framing the bulk of her essay in terms of two approaches: ad hoc adjustments versus refactoring. These approaches were the frame offered in the assignment itself, so addressing them in this revision was certainly a good idea, but with the exception of the term of abstraction in the final sentence of this paragraph, there is little connection to the argument she has been building up to this point. In the next two paragraphs, Maxine introduces the M13 lab work as a test case of ad hoc versus refactoring approaches. In a sense, she has offered two different introductions, one about abstraction and standardization as applied to biological engineering and the other about her M13 research as a test case of which approach (ad hoc versus refactoring) makes more sense.

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When computers were first designed, every task was coded using the machine language; an entire program was composed of a long single strand of 0’s and 1’s. These programs lacked syntactic structure, and so they were difficult to debug. Machine independent languages were developed in order to abstractly represent a set of tasks based on syntactic structures. Unlike programming languages, biological engineering has not been abstracted. As a result, it is still at the “machine language level”. Direct manipulation of DNA bases is required for DNA synthesis; programs cannot modify and piece together DNA parts to create a new DNA construct. The breakdown of abstraction, in biology, is caused by the lack of standards and unreliable insulation techniques. Standardized parts allow engineers to step back and work with structural representations of genes, rather than individual base sequences. A set of syntactic rules can be developed to define standard parts, such as promoters or transcription terminators (Registry). These parts can then be pieced together to create devices such as an inverter or an amplifier. Because biology is an evolving science, standardization has become an arduous task. The chromosomes of newly assembled systems are constantly mutating, forcing engineers to reevaluate each system’s chromosomes. The concept of insulation can then be applied to make standardized parts behave as expected when they are connected. Two functional parts can be connected guaranteeing the functionality of the final product. For example placing a strong promoter in front of a gene’s open reading frame might boost the gene’s expression, but if the promoter is homologous to a region on the protein’s gene, it might be deleted though homologous recombination. Reengineering the DNA construct of an organism can be carried out though two methods, ad hoc adjustment and refactoring. Present day laboratory techniques only allow for ad hoc adjustments. These adjustments allow for modification of DNA but are unreliable. Multiple tests must be performed in order to test the success of every experiment. The success rate for ad hoc reengineering is rather low. Alternatively, refactoring is extremely reliable with a high success rate. The purpose of refactoring, as pertaining to biological systems, “is to improve the internal structure of an existing system for future use, while simultaneously maintaining external system function” (Endy et. al.). Abstraction of DNA allows researchers to work at the parts or even device level, thus DNA can be easily refactored.

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In our laboratory, we reengineered the M13 bacteriophage using the two reengineering methods. This bacteriophage is relatively small and consists of 11 proteins. Although it seems like such a simple phage, its DNA has multiple overlapping coding regions and even a few genes whose functions are not yet known clearly. Such complexities and unknowns make this phage hard to work with and manipulate. In order to better understand the M13 phage, we reengineered it in two different ways, the first though laboratory manipulation of M13’s DNA and the second though modern refactoring and synthesis. Though the laboratory techniques we added a Myc-tag to the M13 genome in order to check the phage’s tolerance for manipulation. Through refactoring techniques, we tried to convert M13 into a more easily manageable phage.

Maxine did feel that her revised essay was much improved. She noted that “once my dad was able to follow the entire essay, it was okay,” and she received a final grade of B. Nevertheless, in both drafts the professional move of culling an argument from the data itself was lost on Maxine. She did feel strongly about the point she wanted to make in this essay, that completely refactoring a genome was a better method for achieving the promise of synthetic biology than other ad hoc approaches to genetic manipulation. However, she admitted that the “problem with arguing for refactoring is that technology hasn’t caught up to that yet; it’s kind of primitive.” This writing task presented several challenges, then: (1) The need to argue for a relatively abstract concept based on laboratory work that was not going particularly well; (2) the final reader and evaluator (Drew Endy) is a pioneer in this type of research though the imagined reader was to be fairly broad (as Maxine said, “Anyone with access to PubMed should be able to read it. There’s a lot of scientific information in there that may not be clear to someone who’s from a purely mathematical background, but they should still be able to follow through and logically understand what’s going on”); (3) an assignment that was very specific in terms of how to structure the essay and what to include. That detailed structure did not work well for a writer like Maxine who needed to figure out a particular focus before she could proceed in a “logical” manner. According to Natalie Kuldell, one of course’s teachers, “The nature of the assignment wasn’t polished initially; it was just an awkward assignment where the voice wasn’t really all that clear. They just weren’t ready to say something.” Endy noted that the assignment “was too proscribed ahead of time; the coupling of that structure to the newness of the [lab work] 176

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led to essays and a writing experience that . . . I don’t know how exciting it was; I know it wasn’t that exciting for me [to read].” With the logic of organization already given and the material itself relatively abstract, creating a focused argument was difficult. The content-form relationship was predetermined, unlike a professional scientific writing situation in which the two elements ideally work together. Kuldell described the challenges she saw in this task and the problems revealed by students’ approaches to it: Students struggled with things that aren’t that important, and I wish they had struggled with the more important things. I think the learning outcomes were good; I think by the end of the writing and the rewriting, students had come away with many of the lasting ideas that I’d hope they’d keep. [However,] the writing assignment itself was a little disjointed. Some of it was a lack of clarity in making sure they knew they didn’t have to report stuff they were accustomed to reporting from high school labs. They came in with their understanding of what they had to tell, and I came in with my presupposition of what they would want to say. In Maxine’s words, “I haven’t written a paper like the first one before. It was very structured but at the same time it was kind of make up your own ideas and we want to know what you think. I’ve actually never had to write such an abstract paper. You don’t have very much data backing your arguments in the first place, so your arguments have to be very concise, very precise.” Noel, on the other hand, latched on quite easily to the bigger picture— despite his comfort with detail—and his essay received high marks from all readers and needed very little revision from first to final draft. In Noel’s description of his writing process for this essay, he noted, “Honestly, I didn’t do a ton of planning out beforehand; it was one of those papers that just kind of write itself.” The big picture move that was necessary to complete this assignment—seeing oneself as a biological engineer who needed to justify the work itself to a potentially skeptical reader—was more successfully negotiated by Noel than by Maxine. Perhaps it was his more extensive research experience or simply a greater ability to take on a proposed identity in his writing, but whatever the source, Noel had few difficulties with this task. Below is Noel’s introduction to this paper (which he did not change from first to final draft). In an interview about the paper, Noel said, “I really focused on the abstraction and making it an understandable system, basically, and then wrote from there.” Abstraction, indeed, is the central 177

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concept in his paper, but rather than start there, as Maxine does, Noel starts in a more general way and thus makes a more general argument. He opens by tracing the evolutionary development of genetic complexity in organisms and then points out that this complexity itself is a “problem” for research, hindering “complete component-level understanding of the system.” By the end of his first paragraph, he offers the following focus: “Presented with these challenges surrounding naturally evolved biological systems, we might consider it useful to ‘refactor’ the genome of organisms, that is, to disassemble, redesign, and reconstruct it in a way [that] facilitates more powerful and intuitive genetic programming.” Thus, Noel has framed the issue in terms of the larger purposes and payoffs of synthetic engineering, ones that an audience outside the field would comprehend. He justifies this focus on refactoring, drawing the analogy to computer programming, and then in paragraph 3 narrows further to introduce the key concepts for refactoring to be successful: abstraction and standardization. When he introduces the M13 lab research in his final paragraph, it works in service of this larger focus as indicated in his last sentence of the introduction: “In an effort to evaluate the feasibility of utilizing refactoring and abstraction techniques to propel the field of biological engineering into a new era of productivity, we chose the bacteriophage M13 as a platform for testing and comparison.” Evolutionary forces drive biological systems to compete with opposing organisms by developing new functions and better adapting to their surroundings, thus improving their efficiency and ability to replicate. Natural selection has shown to favor evolutionarily superior organisms that have undergone beneficial alterations to their genome that, in many cases, appear to arise randomly and in a disorderly fashion. As a result, many biological systems naturally evolve into a convoluted web of functional elements and interactions whose details cannot be fully understood by humans, and thus prove to be quite difficult to manipulate and utilize for novel purposes. When exhaustive studies on the intricacies of a biological system fail to deliver a complete componentlevel understanding of the system, any effort to re-engineer its genome is largely “shooting in the dark,” and is likely to produce unpredictable results. Presented with these challenges surrounding naturally evolved biological systems, we might consider it useful to “refactor” the genome of an organism, that is, to disassemble, redesign, and reconstruct it in a way facilitates more powerful and intuitive genetic programming. In the words of Martin Fowler: “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”1 Just as a well organized computer program allows

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for faster and more powerful enhancements, an elegantly structured genome is considerably more “engineerable” than wild type genomes that have evolved without regard for human interpretation. As engineers faced with the task of designing novel biological systems, we must embrace the idea that truly influential engineering projects are most always empowered by large teams and possess the prospect of scalability. Accordingly, our re-engineered organisms must not only meet basic functional requirements, but also at a deeper level maintain a simple and efficient design that lends itself to straightforward modifications for future applications. Applying these refactoring techniques in the context of complex biological systems, we might imagine a world someday in which biological engineers will not need to understand or manipulate the genetic sequence of an organism, just as computer programmers need not bother with the ones and zeroes of binary code. This idea of masking the details of a biological system’s genetic code is the first step towards abstraction, a key foundational concept in the field of engineering. In the context of biological engineering, abstraction can be used as an approach for classifying a wide range of biological functions such that an engineer can understand their behavior through a conceptual representation rather than a specific DNA sequence. One approach would be to arrange these representations, or “parts,” in a hierarchy of low to high level functions based on the complexity of interactions between individual parts.2 An abstraction scheme such as this would prove to be an excellent tool for breaking down the complex design of a biological system, identifying its component parts, and developing a logically organized, human-readable description of its functions and how they interact at higher levels to form a viable organism. In contrast, current practices in genetic programming are expensive, unreliable, and can only be done on an ad hoc basis because no effort has been made to untangle the exceedingly complex designs of naturally evolved biological systems. Unexpected interactions between many unidentified components make it quite difficult to use current practices to engineer organisms for a specific purpose with consistency on a large scale. In an effort to evaluate the feasibility of utilizing refactoring and abstraction techniques to propel the field of biological engineering into a new era of productivity, we chose the bacteriophage M13 as a platform for testing and comparison. Notes 1. Fowler, Martin. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. Addison-Wesley Professional, 2000. 2. Endy, Drew. “MIT 20.109 Module 1 Class 2 Notes.” 13 February 2006.

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For Noel’s first draft, the writing across the curriculum lecturer commented, “Very Good. Clear, logical movement of ideas that easily weaves matters of context and significance into the discussion. Your explanation of abstraction is lucid and your argument is strongly stated.” For his final draft, Noel received an A. In an end-of-semester interview, Noel noted his relative ease with this assignment as compared to the second one, a laboratory report, and how this comfort related to his emerging professional identity. He commented that “I connected more with paper 1 than paper 2. . . . I really enjoy all of this stuff and it’s really interesting, but it made me realize I’m not geared toward research but toward design and implementation. . . . I’m going to take some courses that integrate business with biological engineering and see if I like that.” Thus, the wider view necessary for his intended direction was a comfortable fit for Noel and enabled him to succeed with his first assignment. Assignment : From Lab Report to Research Article The second writing assignment in 20.109 (see appendix B) was a much more conventional write-up of students’ laboratory work on the manipulation of the protein complex SAGA in yeast. This writing task followed the IMRD pattern (introduction, methods, results, discussion), and its familiarity provided a welcome counterpoint to the first writing assignment, one that most students had not encountered previously. However, the perceived familiarity of the genre was not an ally for all students as the template form of the laboratory report that they have followed in previous laboratory experiences is not the expectation in 20.109. For Maxine and Noel, the second essay presented a sharp contrast with the writing of scientific content—or lab reports—that they had done previously. Maxine realized that the expected form was not like the technical lab reports she had done in high school. Instead, this assignment was to be in the form of a journal article. As she noted in an interview, “I’ve never written a biology paper before, especially with the data analysis and writing about yeast and trying to figure out what’s going on there.” Noel had similar feelings about his lack of experience influencing his success with this task. He noted that “the discussion in my first draft, I shortchanged, I felt like. We had a lot of really weird data, and it was really tough to explain, so my discussion was pretty short.” To explain his difficulties with discussing “weird data,” Noel noted, “I’ve definitely done lab reports, but lab reports with creative discussions where you synthesize on your own, I haven’t had much experience with that.” The conflict between expectations and experiences that students 180

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brought from their previous laboratory work on the writing they needed to do in 20.109 was noted by Natalie Kuldell in my final interview with her: “I’m surprised that they don’t know what they are trying to do is write a paper that you would find in a journal. For them, I think they still think they are writing a high school laboratory report.” One way to address these expectations was to have students write each of the sections as homework assignments, which they would submit for Natalie’s feedback. Both Maxine and Noel liked this strategy, Maxine noting that “even though the final copy looked nothing like the drafts I submitted, I learned what not to do, and the grades got better and better.” Noel also “appreciated that we were able to do rewrites, and I utilized that much more in the [second] paper just because I had a lot more problems with that one.” In terms of their actual writing of this laboratory report, the first and second drafts of their abstracts offer evidence as to the strengths and struggles each brought to the task and how these experiences served them differently for this assignment as compared to the first one. As shown below, Maxine focused her abstract quite quickly on the lab work itself: how modification of histones is a key element in the control of gene expression and that studying this process can be accomplished through examination of one particular multiprotein complex, SAGA. As in her first paper, she wrote for an insider audience in this draft, using the terms histones, ubiquitlylation, and methylation in her first sentence without defining these elements and processes. She goes on in both drafts to narrow the focus to the particular protein complex she studied, known as Ubp8, and recounts the specific intent of those experiments (first draft: to study “the effect of deleting Ubp8 from S. cerevisiae on yeast’s grown and on the genes in yeast”) and her results (first draft: “We found that an ubp8 strain has grows [sic] more robustly on YPD + galactose medium and has increased GAL1 expression”). Her second draft expands some of these concepts, smoothes out the language to some degree, and adds another set of results. All in all, it follows quite closely the expected format of an abstract to a research article in its conciseness and its contents, and is written to a specific scientific reader. Abstract, First Draft

Modifications of histones, though ubiquitlylation or methylation, are key methods used by cells to control gene expression. Chromatin remodeling is accomplished via histone modification though histone modifying complexes. One such complex is the yeast’s SAGA complex. A protein

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associated with this complex is Ubp8. It is a nonessential gene protease which is responsible for deubiquitylation of histone H2B. We detailed the effect of deleting Ubp8 from S. cerevisiae on yeast’s grown and on the genes in yeast. We found that an ubp8 strain has grows more robustly on YPD + galactose medium and has increased GAL1 expression. We also found that an ubp8 mutant does not suppress lysine mutations. Abstract, Final Draft

Modifications of histones, though ubiquitlylation or methylation, are key methods used by cells to control gene expression. Multiprotein complexes, such as SAGA, remodel chromatin by modifying histones. Ubp8, a nonessential protease, associates with SAGA to deubiquitylate histone H2B. The purpose of this study is to show what genes are affected by the deletion of Ubp8 from the yeast genome. Our starting strains did not contain a URA3 gene and so we inserted a copy into the yeast cells by replacing UBP8 with URA3. Though spot tests, we found that the ubp8 strains grew more robustly on YPD + galactose medium. When a microarray test was performed we noted an increase in GAL1 expression, a gene that is normally regulated by Ubp8. We also noted an increase in the expression of one Ubp8 gene. Taken together, this data indicates that only one copy of Ubp8 was deleted from the yeast genome and the upregulation of the other copy resulted in the robust growth of the yeast cells.

Noel’s abstract, on the other hand, resembles the opening to his first paper in its broad approach and attempt to reach a relatively wide audience. The first three sentences of his first draft were abstract statements about the general concepts addressed by the lab project but say nothing about the specific experiment. In the genre of the research abstract, brevity and conciseness are highly valued, so Noel’s drawing of the big picture, in contrast to Maxine’s cut to the chase, does not serve him particularly well. In her comments on this draft, Kuldell offered Noel the following: “You’ve done a good job of setting up the problem though you might consider streamlining the background info into two sentences. That would allow more space to cover the results you found and draw a few conclusions in your abstract.” Nevertheless, in his second draft, Noel switches the order of his first and second sentences but still does not get to the question guiding his research until the fifth of seven total sentences. In draft one, he neglects to offer the result of his research, a problem he does address in his redraft in the final sentence.

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All in all, his approach served him well in his first paper but was not the best tack in the second one. Noel realized this difficulty, commenting in an interview that the lab report was “different [than the first paper] in that the scope wasn’t as big, it wasn’t as generally, so for me it was harder to write.” This difficulty was reflected in the grade he received: a 77 on his first draft and an 87 on his final draft. In comparison, Maxine received an 83 on her first draft and a 93 on her final draft. Abstract, First Draft

Gene expression is the fundamental concept upon which all biological processes in a cell are built, as each component involved in a pathway must be expressed in the correct quantity and at the correct time to carry out the required interactions. Faced with the need to develop more complex functions, biological systems have evolved to utilize gene regulation mechanisms at a variety of levels, including transcriptional, translational, and post-translational. Regulation at the level of transcription initiation is a particularly important form of gene regulation because it plays a key role in maintaining the efficiency of the gene expression process. Chromatin-remodeling is a key process in transcriptional regulation, and is largely controlled in yeast by the SAGA complex, which acetylates the histones that make up chromatin to activate transcription. Here we explore the functional interactions of the Sus1 subunit of SAGA by deleting the SUS1 gene from yeast, screening for resulting phenotypes, and analyzing changes in mRNA expression levels on a microarray. SUS1 is known to associate with proteins involved in transcriptional activation and mRNA transport, and therefore we pay close attention to the effects that the deletion of SUS1 has on the genes encoding these proteins of interest.

Abstract, Final Draft

Faced with the need to develop more complex functions, biological systems have evolved to utilize gene regulation mechanisms at a variety of levels, including transcriptional, translational, and post-translational. Gene expression is the fundamental process upon which all biological processes in a cell are built, as each component involved in a pathway must be expressed in the correct quantity and at the correct time to carry out the required interactions. Regulation at the level of transcription initiation is a particularly important form of gene regulation because it efficiently maintains the gene expression process. Chromatinremodeling is a key process in transcriptional regulation, and is largely

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controlled in yeast by the SAGA complex, which acetylates the histones that make up chromatin to activate transcription. Here we explore the functional interactions of the Sus1 subunit of SAGA by deleting the SUS1 gene from yeast, screening for resulting phenotypes, and analyzing changes in mRNA expression levels on a microarray. SUS1 is known to associate with proteins involved in transcriptional activation and mRNA transport, and therefore we pay close attention to the effects that the deletion of SUS1 has on the genes encoding these proteins of interest. Microarray analysis of a SUS1 deletion mutant revealed a significant increase in the expression of THP1 and SAC3, two genes involved in mRNA export, as well as RPB2, which encodes for a large subunit of RNA Polymerase II.

While Kuldell was surprised by students’ expectations of what a journal article might entail, she was mindful of the context for this assignment. Students were not writing an article to be submitted for publication; they were writing a research report in which they could demonstrate mastery of content and rhetorical form. As she described, “We try to give them something legitimate that they’re writing about, but they don’t have a chance to repeat the experiment. I think it’s just moving through that realism to artificial framework that’s most awkward about the student writing. It’s what it makes sound most like student writing to me.” In the “semiprofessional” context of the classroom it is essential to remember that student learning is the ultimate goal, not necessarily the advancement of knowledge in a field based on its published research. In this school context, grades act as a motivating device and also present some level of disparity for students imagining their instructors as readers/graders. Maxine noted, “Drew is a very big picture man. As long as you can step outside and see what’s going on, he’ll give you a good grade, whereas Natalie is picky on the details.” Kuldell said, “I appreciate that this is a student effort; I’m not the editor of Nature trying to accept this for publication. It is a little scary to have to say something intelligent about something that someone knows much more than you do.” Noel, similarly, seemed to distill a lesson about attention to detail when writing up laboratory results. He noted that in the lab report as compared to the first paper, an important difference was “the meticulous details and making sure they were all right.” Details aside, the key professional move asked of him in this assignment was to make sense of his unexpected results in light of other research that had been conducted on the topic. This contextualizing is usually not asked of student-produced lab reports, but in 20.109, it was an essential intellectual and professional

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move (as it would be in an attempt to publish scientific results). In reaction to these expectations, Noel noted that “one thing I didn’t utilize more was background research for my discussion section. Had I had more time to read a bunch more papers and see similar experiments and how they went, they would have helped me in my discussion. That was something I wasn’t used to.” Time, of course, is a key factor for laboratory classes such as 20.109 that attempt to develop a professional context for student work. Students have competing demands on their time (and MIT students perhaps more than most), and the semester and instructional modules are structured with definite end points unlike the more open-ended schedules of professional science or engineering labs. For Natalie Kuldell, however, the time frame of the module or the semester is simply part of the larger scope of student learning that she hopes to achieve as a result of 20.109. In her words, the function of the laboratory report is for students “to critically evaluate the data and to pull loose ends together in a story they can argue . . . because that’s something they’ll have to do; they’ll get data back and they’ll say what it means. . . . I don’t even know if they’ll think back to this class, but if the next time that they do it, if feels familiar, that’s great. They would have it as part of who they are, to think critically about the work that’s in front of them.” Learning to Write Like a Biological Engineer As a case study in writing as a laboratory subject, Laboratory Fundamentals of Biological Engineering offered a context rich in possibilities: • Students had opportunities to engage in research and discursive tasks common to professionals in the field. • Students’ efforts were carefully guided by a variety of instructional staff (whether through one-to-one coaching, classroom instruction, or written feedback), thus ensuring access to more-expert members of the biological engineering community. • Students were engaging in novel research and thus directly experiencing the informal communication and problem solving that marks the creation of knowledge in scientific fields. • Student learning was consistently framed in terms of professional competencies and goals or in terms of professional identity, that is, students were learning to be biological engineers. Nevertheless, as I describe in the cases of Maxine and Noel, their learning was not without struggle, which, of course, is not necessarily a bad or unexpected thing. While neither student at the start of the semester felt that

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engaging in basic research would be the kind of career they would seek, this feeling was confirmed by the research they attempted in this class. Their writing of a scientific-article-like task gave them an understanding of the attention to detail needed for such efforts, but that relatively narrow focus on understanding a biological system at its most basic level (and the frustration over how long such understanding takes to accrue) confirmed for both that their contributions to the biological engineering profession would take other forms. Fortunately for both students, many opportunities within the field are possible and many talents needed. What both students believe to be true about their futures at the end of their sophomore years in college can, of course, change. What is key to their 20.109 experience is that such change could now come from experience in the actual work in the field. The research, writing, and speaking tasks Maxine and Noel were asked to do in 20.109 were ways to learn the language and culture of biological engineering. In Brown, Reveles, and Kelly’s terms, Learning the content and language practices of a discourse-rich subject matter like science requires some appropriation of an identity commensurate with scientific language use. . . . The negotiated role of engaging in the situationally defined discourses of science needs to be reconciled with students’ emerging academic identities. Success or failure in becoming a member of a discourse community, therefore, may hinge on how students are allowed to position themselves with respect to the subject matter, discourse practice, other members of the community, and so forth. (781–82) Conceiving of writing as a laboratory subject means creating the kind of environment that will bring these forces to bear—“subject matter, discourse practice, other members of the community”—and 20.109 is a rich example of what that environment might look like in practice. Biological engineering at MIT, of course, is a relatively resource-rich department in a resource-rich university. However, the necessary conditions for enacting the idea of a writing laboratory are possible at a wide variety of institutions and in a wide variety of classes, writing centers, and research labs. Opportunities for students to engage in meaningful communications tasks and range of those tasks, access to expert members of disciplinary communities—whether peers or professionals—for feedback and guidance, and acknowledgement that the school-based context for this learning (that is, the power of grades) are powerful influences on outcomes: all of these elements can be brought to bear in a wide variety of contexts. Moreover, all of these elements constitute what it means to learn to write. 186

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The idea of a writing laboratory as enacted in 20.109 also meant a willingness to experiment on many fronts, whether the experimentation of the assignments themselves, the experiments conducted in lab, or the experimentation/research site for me that the class represented. Such willingness to be experimental need not be confined to science classes in emerging disciplines that are taught by creative and talented staff. Reform of existing practices is an attempt at experimentation, and success can be as elusive as it was for Noel and Maxine attempting to refactor the bacterial virus M13. What I am urging here is the need for reformers to take the long view, to learn from student experiences in communications-intensive classes, and to have the courage to fail—but then learn from those failures and mount a new experiment rather than revert to the status quo. Whether these are classes in science or in English or in engineering or in social science or in humanities, the point is to experiment and to conduct those experiments with a firm foundation. For writing as a laboratory subject, situated learning provides that foundation, both as a means of understanding why previous efforts have failed and as a way of ensuring the success of future reforms. Appendix A: . Genome Engineering Essay Assignment (Spring ) You are asked to write a thoughtful, researched essay exploring how a foundational engineering concept (e.g., abstraction, modularity, insulation, standardization, decoupling) can be applied as a design tool for biological engineering. Your lab work with M13 will provide the context for your argument. Abstract

This has been written for you to clarify the assignment. You can include this abstract as your own. To engineer novel biological systems, we need to change the genetic code of existing biological materials, not by making a few changes as current methods allow us to do but rather by making lots and lots of changes in a fast, cheap and reliable way. Just as “plug-ins” provide new or improved functions to existing computer programs, the current tools of molecular biology allow for piecemeal modification to genetic programs, adding functionality but often complexity and clumsiness as well. In this essay I will describe two approaches to biological programming, ad hoc adjustment and complete refactoring, as applied to the simple genome of the bacteriophage M13. With both approaches, I will show 187

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how the application of a foundational engineering concept, namely (abstraction, insulation, standardization, decoupling, modularity . . . choose one), enables more reliable and elegant genetic programming and can give rise to a platform with more flexibility and fewer restrictions. Introduction

From your introduction, your readers expect to find out why your topic is important and why they should be interested in it. To do that, you need to describe the larger context for the work, the ways it’s important, and the specific areas your paper will address. There’s no need to hide your main point or approach. At the end of the introduction, the reader should want to learn how the foundational idea you’ve chosen (abstraction, modularity, insulation, standardization or decoupling) serves a useful purpose and affords great opportunity if incorporated among “best practices” for biological engineers, expecting M13 to be the test case they’ll follow. Launch this section using one of the following quotes, or a personal favorite. • Today, most software exists, not to solve a problem, but to interface with other software. (I. O. Angell) • Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary. (Anonymous, Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme) • Programs for sale: Fast, Reliable, Cheap: choose two. (Anonymous) • Think (design) globally; act (code) locally. (Anonymous) • Think twice, code once. (Anonymous) • Weeks of programming can save you hours of planning. (Anonymous) • Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. (M. Fowler, “Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code”) • A program like Microsoft’s Windows 98 is tens of millions of lines of code. Nobody can keep that much complexity in their head or hope to manage it effectively. So you need an architecture that says to everyone, “Here’s how this thing works, and to do your part, you need to understand only these five things, and don’t you dare touch anything else.” (C. Ferguson “High Stakes, No Prisoners; Times Business Press”) Explicitly describe what problem or issue the quote you’ve chosen highlights and how the point applies to genetic programming as well. Next . . . well, it’s really up to you. You could 188

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• allow one of the more familiar software disasters to illustrate comparable design problems that can be encountered when making biological materials • describe some (but not all) current practices in genetic programming and their limitations • introduce M13 as the example you’ve chosen to hack and debug • Some ideas you may want to introduce are listed but this list is neither exhaustive nor mandatory. • complexity • managing complexity • simplicity • refactoring • features of good/bad computer programs • features of good/bad genetic programs • methods for testing and debugging • engineering • science • understanding • standardization • dynamics • decoupling • abstraction • evolution • usefulness • discovery Body: Parts –

In these sections you will build off of your introduction to present M13 as an example of the issues you’ve highlighted. Your readers expect to learn something from what you present; thus, you’ll need to supply ample description as well as an analysis of your lab results. Remember your goal is to make a persuasive argument for the concept of abstraction (or modularity, insulation, standardization, decoupling...) with evidence from your laboratory experience. part 1. how it’s built: m13 as a test case

At the conclusion of this section, the reader should have a good understanding of • the prevalence and diversity of bacteriophage • the M13 life cycle (include a figure if you like) • the size and organization of the genome 189

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• the proteins encoded by the genome structure (include a figure or table if you like) • any natural variations to the genome End this part by highlighting how “engineerable” the natural example seems, and how (abstraction, modularity, insulation, standardization or decoupling) are the key to reliably and predictably accomplishing this. part 2. build to learn: m13 and piecemeal fixes

At the conclusion of this section, the reader should have a good understanding of • the application of M13 for phage display, cite at least one successful application of this technique • the limitations/variations of phage display • the modification to the genome that you performed in lab and what useful purpose it could serve • your plaque assay and Western data, be it positive or negative (include a figure and table) End this part by commenting on how fast, cheap and reliable this approach proved to be. On the scale of other engineering feats, how ambitious was it? How much expertise was required? How can you imagine making it an easier and more robust engineering task? part 3. learn to build: refactored m13

At the conclusion of this section, the reader should have a good understanding of • what refactoring is • what the rough draft of refactored M13 tried to do • which gene (gII, gIX, gVIII, gIII, or gXI) you carefully refactored and how you approached then solved the specifics of that problem • your plaque assay and Western data (when it is available), be it positive or negative (include a figure and table) End this part by commenting on how refactoring compares to ad hoc tweaking and how much or how little promise it holds for building fast, cheap, and reliable biological systems. Conclusions or Summary

In this section, your readers expect you to tie up the concepts you raised in your introduction with the specific examples you’ve described in terms

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of M13. Most important, you need to supply some “future thinking” about the implications of what you’ve presented, whether for future experimental work or the larger field. Appendix B: . Expression Engineering Laboratory Report Assignment (Spring ) You are asked to write a formal lab report detailing your work in this module. Specifics for each section of this report are detailed below. More general information about formatting the report are mostly addressed here: Abstract

• • • •

Please keep the number of words under 250. Do not include references in the abstract. Try drafting this section after you’ve written the rest of the report. If you’re truly stuck, start by modifying one crystallizing sentence from each of the sections of your report. • Please do not plagiarize (accidentally or other) the class wiki. This applies to your entire report. Introduction

The homework you wrote after the first day of this new module will serve at the heart of your introduction. You should add (at least) one final paragraph to narrow the information “funnel,” ending your introduction with a clear description of the problem you’re studying and the method you are using. If you would like to preview for the reader your key results and conclusions in the last sentence of your introduction, you may. Materials and Methods

If you used any kits for any of the manipulations, it is sufficient to cite the manufacturer’s directions, e.g., “yeast were transformed according to the Q-biogene transformation kit protocol.” Subdivide this section into the following: 1. Yeast strains and plasmids • list genotypes and plasmid names when known 2. PCR • include primer design info here • include primer sequences, for knockout and for candidate verification • include PCR cycling conditions

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3. Yeast transformation • include how you selected for transformants • include what you did to verify that URA3 was integrated where you thought. 4. Yeast Microarray • mention kits as relevant, including any deviation from published protocol if any • mention how many yeast and how much RNA was used • describe array analytical methods in results section rather than in Materials and Methods Results figures

You should include but are not limited to the following figures and tables 1. Figure 1 • panel A: table describing transformation results • panel B: agarose gel verifying URA3 insertion 2. Figure 2 • Spot test images 3. Figure 3 • microarray analytics 4. Figure 4 • microarray conclusions Each figure should be numbered, and should have a title and legend. text

• In paragraph form, describe each figure and the observations you made. • As much as possible, reserve conclusions about your data for the discussion section. Clearly an exception to this will be which of your deletion candidates was correct, as this information is critical for the next steps in the experiments. Discussion

You should include but are not limited to • conclusions you can draw from your work, including any uncertainties • other data (published or personal communications) that support or contradict your conclusions

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• limitations of your work, e.g., what kinds of experiments/controls/ samples would have been great to include • next experiments you would like to try to extend your findings and strengthen your conclusions References

Appendix C: Start of Semester Student Survey The Idea of a Writing Laboratory

Neal Lerner, Principal Investigator February 7, 2007 Your name: ____________________________________ Class standing (check one): ___FR ___SOPH ___JUNIOR ___SENIOR Gender: ____M ____F Age: _________ 1. What is your primary language for writing and speaking? 2. What other languages do you write and speak? 3. What have been some of your experiences with writing up scientific content (whether research, lab reports, review articles, etc.)? 4. Describe a significant writing experience, whether in or out of school: 5. What do you struggle with most in your writing? 6. What are your strengths as a writer? 7. What kinds of reading and writing do you do outside of school? 8. What kind of writing do you expect to do after graduation from MIT? 9. Why do you think 20.109 has been designated as a Communications-Intensive class? 10. What are your writing goals for 20.109?

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W

hen my daughter was in third grade, she learned to play piano in her after-school program. While that simple sentence likely captures the musical activities of many eight-year olds nationwide, what seemed particularly fascinating to me—and timely given my interest in writing as a laboratory subject—is that her learning occurred in a context that was largely removed from formal instruction. Rather than the weekly lessons with a somber piano teacher whose dreams of stardom have been reduced to listening to adolescents plunk out “Für Elise” over and over (as was true in my experience as a piano student), my daughter learned to play piano largely from her friends, some of whom were taking lessons, and from an after-school teacher, who interceded now and then to demonstrate a new song or how to read music, or to correct faulty fingering technique. After these sessions at school with one piano and six or seven eager learners, my daughter would practice at home every night, mastering the new knowledge and reinforcing previous knowledge. Every now and then, I’d join her for a duet of “Heart and Soul” or, yes, even play “Für Elise,” but largely her instruction came from friends at school, from her “affinity group” in James Gee’s terms (Situated Language), and her motivation for learning came both from the motivation of the group and from an internal desire to do something well. While my daughter’s experience had to do with music, it is not much of a stretch to imagine writing as the subject for this activity, whether composing stories or poems or other forms. That this learning occurred on school grounds but not necessarily within the sanctioned period for music instruction (during which time my daughter and her third-grade peers were learning to play the recorder) reinforces for me the potential for school settings as sites for laboratory learning, particularly if we can imagine within those settings spaces that are not as fixed as traditional classrooms or laboratories. The challenge, of course, is how to build on the motivation, peer-to-peer learning, and expert-novice interaction that took place in a loosely structured after-school program. Particularly daunting is the context of higher education, where the challenges to this type of learning seem inherent in the very structure of credit hours, lecture as a dominant mode of teaching, and a reliance—particularly in writing classes—on contingent, part-time instructional staff. As shown by the

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histories of teaching and learning that I have presented in this book, the recognition of writing as a laboratory subject and the acknowledgement of the conditions to enact that vision are longstanding—as, unfortunately, are the barriers. Of the factors that discourage me most, staffing and labor issues continue to be vexing. The findings from the MLA’s 1999 survey of staffing in English and foreign language courses are particularly sobering, and it is unlikely that the situation has improved since then. From that survey, we learn that in two-year colleges, 62 percent of the English courses were taught by part-time faculty (Laurence 214), and “in the doctoral English departments, tenured and tenure-track faculty members taught 6 of the first-year writing sections” (Laurence 217). Overall, “institutions, particularly institutions with doctoral programs, assign tenured and tenure-track faculty members to the advanced undergraduate and graduate courses for which those faculty members are most qualified and rely on part- or full-time adjunct faculty members (or, where they are available, graduate student teaching assistants) to handle the many sections of introductory writing and language courses” (Laurence 217). As I have tried to demonstrate in this book, however, first-year English classes are far from the only sites where writing instruction might occur. One promise of the writing-across-the-disciplines programs that I have been a part of is the ways that tenured and tenure-track disciplinary faculty will by necessity (and sometimes unwillingly) be involved. While I do not mean to dismiss the efforts or intentions of part-time faculty (having hoed those rows myself for over eight years), it is simply a lot more difficult to enact institutional change when the folks carrying out that change are deemed tangential to the institution. While staffing is one barrier to enacting the idea of a writing laboratory, another is the structure of higher education. In her opening chapter to a book on how composition might be “delivered” in our age, Kathleen Blake Yancey offers the following quote from an educational conference: “The best container for learning is not a course” (1). Yancey goes on to point out that the sites of learning in college are not as specified as they once were: “College—if defined by its students and the places it delivers instruction—is no longer a specific place, if indeed it ever was. Rather, college occurs in multiple sites—physical and virtual, informal and formal, official and just in time—that are defined explicitly or function de facto as collegiate” (4). In this new reality, writing instruction can be similarly untethered from traditional classroom contexts and can flourish in contexts where students are engaged in meaningful practices. In short, the writing laboratory can be an idea brought to bear on a variety 195

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of contexts, whether based in content that is about science, engineering, nursing, pharmacy, history, sociology, or whatever the field of study that our institutions offer. Nonetheless, I am not abandoning classrooms and for-credit laboratories as potential sites for the ways of learning to write that I am calling for, sites that feature hands-on, student-centered, meaning-making activities. In his research on students’ experiences at Harvard, Richard Light tell us the following: “Students identify the courses that had the most profound impact on them as courses in which they were required to write papers, not just for the professor, as usual, but for their fellow students as well” (64). Thus, writing in the boundaries of classroom structures can indeed offer “profound impact,” particularly if the peer-to-peer learning that has long been a feature of laboratory methods of writing is present. It is also not difficult to find models of classrooms as ideal writing laboratories. From my experiences with two National Writing Project Summer Institutes and from my own children’s experiences in the early grades, I am always delighted by the ways literacy activities in kindergarten to second-grade classrooms are based on laboratory methods of learning. The challenge, certainly, is how to retain the play that marks these early efforts at learning language in a system that often does not believe in playing around. Broad brush strokes to describe whole educational systems or schools or even classrooms are not fair, of course. As I visit institutions around the country, consulting with faculty and staff looking to develop writing-across-the-curriculum programs or beef up existing writing centers, I invariably am sought out by someone at that institution who is doing amazing and creative work with student writing. On a recent trip, it was an instructor in the biology department at that university who was doing remarkable (and grant funded!) activities with peer review and student writing in an introductory lab class. Ironically, that work was not particularly known by the English department faculty looking to broaden the impact of their writing program. An additional irony, however, was that the biology instructor started the program in consultation with a former writing center director at that institution. In other words, the reach of laboratory methods of teaching writing can be extensive, serpentine, and barely visible—but there, nonetheless. The idea of a writing laboratory is an old idea as I’ve shown in these chapters, yet an idea somehow always ahead of its time, whether that time was the 1890s, the 1930, the 1960s, or our present era. Perhaps we need to stop and let it catch up. Or perhaps we need to move a little more quickly and ride its draft. Whatever the strategy, teaching writing as an 196

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experiment in what is possible, as a way of offering meaning-making opportunities for students no matter the subject matter, is an endeavor worth the struggle. It embodies the ideals of higher education, while at the same time it offers a pedagogical plan for meeting those ideals. It is an ongoing experiment in teaching and learning that beckons us all to don those white coats and safety glasses and discover what works.

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Notes

Introduction: In Search of Experimentation in the Teaching of Writing

1. While my reading of this history is that required first-year writing proliferated following Harvard’s lead, the contributors to Donahue and Moon’s Local Histories: Reading the Archives of Composition show that by no means was Harvard the first institution to make composition a first-year required course. 2. For CCCC workshop accounts, see “The Organization and Use of the Writing Laboratory: The Report of Workshop No. 9A” (1950); “Organization and Use of a Writing Laboratory: Report of Workshop No. 9” (1951); “The Writing Laboratory: The Report of Workshop No. 9” (1952); “Clinical Aids to Freshman English: Report of Workshop No. 14” (1953); “Writing Clinics: The Report of Workshop No. 2” (1955); “Skills Laboratories for Any Student” (1956). 3. Two relatively recent exceptions to this absence are Elizabeth Higgins Gladfelter’s Agassiz’s Legacy: Scientists’ Reflections on the Value of Field Experience and Miriam Levin’s Defining Women’s Scientific Enterprise: Mount Holyoke Faculty and the Rise of American Science. . The Secret Origins of Writing Centers

1. Welcome interrogators of this perception of the writing center as a safe haven include Nancy Grimm, who warns of the complicitness of writing center workers in replicating dominant literacy practices, and Jackie Grutsch McKinney, who notes that the idea of a safe haven as signified by coffee pots and worn couches is a particular cultural construct not necessarily shared by nonmainstream students. 2. These publications include Carol Laque and Phyllis Sherwood’s A Laboratory Approach to Writing, Joyce Steward and Mary Croft’s The Writing Laboratory: Organization, Management, and Methods, Thom Hawkins and Phyllis Brooks’s New Directions for College Learning Assistance: Improving Writing Skills, Thom Hawkins’s Group Inquiry Techniques for Teaching Writing, Muriel Harris’ collection Tutoring Writing: A Sourcebook for Writing Labs, and Marian Arkin and Barbara Shollar’s The Writing Tutor. 3. The connecting link between Preston W. Search, Frederic Burk, and Edgar James Swift is that all three had studied with G. Stanley Hall at Clark University in Worcester, MA. Burk and Swift received their PhDs from Clark, and Search dedicated his book, An Ideal School, to Hall, whom he calls “America’s greatest educator” (v), and Hall contributed the introduction to that book, writing that it is “a book I could have written myself” (xvii). 4. Although Search was superintendent of three major schools systems— Pueblo, CO; Holyoke, MA; and Los Angeles, CA—he had essentially retired from 201

Notes to Pages 27–74

active work in schools by 1906, instead opting to become an “educator, author, traveler” according to the brochure advertising one of his 1906–7 lectures. At that point, he had also founded a “travel school for young people.” It is not inconceivable, then, that Parkhurst had no real opportunity to cross his path or to hear about his work. Search died in Carmel, CA, in 1932. 5. Unfortunately, Hopkins himself succumbed to this workload, brought on by his efforts to tend to his duties at Kansas and finish the Cost and Labor report. In 1919, Hopkins needed to take a year’s leave of absence after being hospitalized that summer for “nervous exhaustion and with dental infection added” (Hopkins qtd. in Popken 15). . Writing in the Science Laboratory: Opportunities Lost

1. For more on the theory of mental discipline as a justification for the study of science—as well as the use of grammar/usage worksheets, see chapter 7. 2. In a more recent article, Michael Carter and colleagues express much more enthusiasm for the laboratory report as “a legitimate apprenticeship genre” (“Writing to Learn” 294). In the framework of apprentice/expert teaching and learning that is at the heart of laboratory methods, Carter et al. describe the laboratory report as a key component in this process: “The genre of the lab report encodes a scientific way of knowing in its structure—a structure that defines and is defined by ways of knowing in the community. The lab report shapes the experience of the lab itself as a scientific experience” (295). . The Writing of School Science

1. My choice of these institutions as subjects for archival research is based on several factors: (1) their known strength in undergraduate science teaching during the period I was most interested in, 1890–1930; (2) their forethought to archive student-produced materials; (3) the assistance the archival librarians were able to offer. Mount Holyoke College deserves special notice for all three of these factors, particularly the ways that graduates for over a century have felt that keeping and donating their undergraduate work were essential to preserve the legacy of the institution. I also examined student writing about science in the archives of Yale University and the University of Kansas, and the work produced at those institutions is consistent with the kinds of writing I show in this chapter. 2. The 1908 course catalog entry for the Department of Mining and Metallurgy indicates at least one more point of entry for the English department. In a class for seniors titled “Memoirs,” the description notes that the “work consists in transcribing into English articles from standard foreign books and periodicals, and reading them before the assembled class. The papers are reviewed from a technical point of view directly after they have been read, and are later criticized by the Department of English as to their literary character” (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bulletin 222).

202

Notes to Pages 152–72 . The Laboratory in Theory: From Mental Discipline to Situated Learning

1. Interestingly, Faigley’s examples of research under the “social view” are studies of professionals writing science, such as Charles Bazerman’s study of physicists (Shaping Written Knowledge, chap. 3) and Greg Myers’s research on biologists. Unfortunately, in the twenty-plus years since Faigley’s article appeared, the number of published long-term studies on student writers—whether in composition or in classes in their majors—is still relatively small (e.g., Walvoord and McCarthy; Carroll; Sternglass; Beaufort). 2. A more damning criticism is that these theories are often not based on sustained study of actual practice. While the work of Flower and Hayes and other “cognitivists” underwent withering criticism for offering models of composing that did not represent the socially situated nature of school-based writing, the work was at least based on studies of writers writing rather than theoretical treatments based on other theories, including ones that arose from studies of learning in contexts in which no writing was taking place. Richard Haswell’s “NCTE/College Composition and Communication’s Recent War on Scholarship” smartly summarizes the critique of such armchair theorizing. . The Laboratory in Practice: A Study of a Biological Engineering Class

1. This research was approved as exempt by the MIT Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (COUHES), and all participants have given informed consent for the information included in this chapter. Student participant names have been changed to protect their privacy. 2. I distributed the start-of-semester survey (see appendix C) to all twentyfive students and received completed surveys from twenty-one. Based on students’ responses, I contacted seven students to arrange follow-up interviews, and four agreed to participate in the semester-long study. One of those four students dropped out of the study before the end of the term, and another is not featured here. 3. I focus on Maxine and Noel’s introductions for the first paper for two reasons: (1) their introductions are representative of their writing throughout the paper, and (2) their introductions are a task that called for a particularly identity construction as a biological engineer to connect with the topic and persuade a fairly general reader.

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