In the Archives of Composition: Writing and Rhetoric in High Schools and Normal Schools

by Lori Ostergaard (Editor), Henrietta Rix Wood (Editor)

Overview

In the Archives of Composition offers new and revisionary narratives of composition and rhetoric's history. It examines composition instruction and practice at secondary schools and normal colleges, the two institutions that trained the majority of U.S. composition teachers and students during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing from a broad array of archival and documentary sources, the contributors provide accounts of writing instruction within contexts often overlooked by current historical scholarship. Topics range from the efforts of young women to attain rhetorical skills in an antebellum academy, to the self-reflections of Harvard University students on their writing skills in the 1890s, to a close reading of a high school girl's diary in the 1960s that offers a new perspective on curriculum debates of this period. Taken together, the chapters begin to recover how high school students, composition teachers, and English education programs responded to institutional and local influences, political movements, and pedagogical innovations over a one-hundred-and-thirty-year span.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822981015
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	12/18/2015
Series:	Composition, Literacy, and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Lori Ostergaard is associate professor and chair of the department of writing and rhetoric at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Foreword - Kelly Ritter Introduction: Adding New Stories to the History of Composition and Rhetoric - Lori Ostergaard and Henrietta Rix Wood Part I: High Schools 1. The Rhetorical Praxis of Central High School Students, 1894–1924 - Henrietta Rix Wood 2. “Raise Your Right Arm / And Pull on Your Tongue!”: Reading Silence(s) at the Albuquerque Indian School - Whitney Myers 3. Radical, Conservative, Extreme: The Rhetorical Education of the Prince Edward County Free School Association, 1963–1964 - Candace Epps-Robertson 4. “These Parts of People Escaping on Paper”: Reading Our Educational Past Through the High School Diary of Pat Huyett, 1966–1969 - Jane Greer Part II. Normal Schools 5. “Stand ‘Mum’”: Women’s Silence at the Lexington Academy, 1839–1841 - Melissa Ianetta 6. “Shall the Courses in Composition and Literature Be Divided? Yes”: Curricular Separation at the Illinois State Normal University, 1892–1916 - Lori Ostergaard 7. “A Home for Thought Where Learning Rules”: Progressive Era Students and Teacher Identity at a Historic Normal School - Beth Ann Rothermel 8. “Be Patient, But Don’t Wait!”: The Activist Ethos of Student Journalism at the Colored State Normal School, Elizabeth City, North Carolina, 1892–1937 - Elaine Hays Part III. Building Secondary-Postsecondary Connections 9. Adapting Male Education for a Nation of Females: Sara Lockwood’s 1888 Lessons in English - Nancy Myers 10. Toward a Genealogy of Composition: Student Discipline and Development at Harvard in the Late Nineteenth Century - Edward J. Comstock 11. Project English: Cold War Paradigms and the Teaching of Composition - Curtis Mason Afterword - Jessica Enoch Contributors Index

Editorial Reviews

An important collection for scholars in the field of composition and rhetoric. It explores an area of history in our field that is rarely covered and contributes greatly to an unknown area. Thorough, engaging, and very readable.

Centenary College of New Jersey Lisa Mastrangelo

This volume deepens our understanding of writing education by moving beyond the university setting to examine the high school and normal school context. In so doing the book engages narratives familiar to the field and introduces stories that have been overlooked or ignored, complicating our histories while broadening our methodological horizons. It should be required reading for all writing teachers and historians.

San Diego State University Suzanne Bordelon

This volume deepens our understanding of writing education by moving beyond the university setting to examine the high school and normal school context. In so doing the book engages narratives familiar to the field and introduces stories that have been overlooked or ignored, complicating our histories while broadening our methodological horizons. It should be required reading for all writing teachers and historians.”
—Suzanne Bordelon, San Diego State University


“An important collection for scholars in the field of composition and rhetoric. It explores an area of history in our field that is rarely covered and contributes greatly to an unknown area. Thorough, engaging, and very readable.”
—Lisa Mastrangelo, Centenary College of New Jersey

From the Publisher