Lance Massey and Richard Gebhardt offer in this collection many signs that composition again faces a moment of precariousness, even as it did in the 1980s--the years of the great divorce from literary studies. The contours of writing in the university again are rapidly changing, making the objects of scholarship in composition again unstable. Composition is poised to move not from modern to postmodern but from process to postprocess, from a service-oriented "field" to a research-driven "discipline." Some would say we are already there. Momentum is building to replace "composition" and the pedagogical imperative long implied in that term with a "writing studies" model devoted to the study of composition as a fundamental tool of, and force within, all areas of human activity.

Appropriately, contributors here use Stephen M. North's 1987 book The Making of Knowledge in Composition to frame and background their discussion, as they look at both the present state of the field and its potential futures. As in North's volume, The Changing of Knowledge in Composition describes a body of research and pedagogy brimming with conflicting claims, methodologies, and politics, and with little consensus regarding the proper subjects and modes of inquiry.

The deep ambivalence within the field itself is evident in this collection. Contributors here envision composition both as retaining its commitment to broad-based, generalized writing instruction and as heading toward content-based vertical writing programs in departments and programs of writing studies. They both challenge and affirm composition's pedagogical heritage. And they sound both sanguine and pessimistic notes about composition's future.

THE CHANGING OF KNOWLEDGE IN COMPOSITION

Contemporary Perspectives

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-820-6

Contents

Introduction: Making Knowledge in Composition Then, Now, and in the Future Lance Massey and Richard C. Gebhardt...............................................1Notes on the Origins of The Making of Knowledge in Composition Stephen M. North...............................................................................111 The Significance of North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition for Graduate Education Edward M. White...................................................172 The World According to North—and Beyond: The Changing Geography of Composition Studies Lynn Z. Bloom..................................................283 The Epistemic Paradoxes of "Lore": From The Making of Knowledge in Composition to the Present (Almost) Richard Fulkerson....................................474 Philosophies of Invention Twenty Years after The Making of Knowledge in Composition Kelly Pender............................................................635 Making Knowledge, Shaping History: Critical Consciousness and the Historical Impulse in Composition Studies Erica Frisicaro-Pawlowski.......................846 Makers of Knowledge in Writing Centers: Practitioners, Scholars, and Researchers at Work Sarah Liggett, Kerri Jordan, and Steve Price.......................1027 Rhetoric, Racism, and the Remaking of Knowledge-Making in Composition Victor Villanueva.....................................................................1218 Undergraduate Researchers as Makers of Knowledge in Composition in the Writing Studies Major Joyce Kinkead..................................................1379 Pedagogy, Lore, and the Making of Being Matthew Jackson.....................................................................................................16110 Practice as Inquiry, Stephen M. North's Teaching and Contemporary Public Policy Patricia A. Dunn...........................................................17312 Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition and the Future of Composition Studies "Without Paradigm Hope" David Smit.............................21313 Are We There Yet? The Making of a Discipline in Composition Kristine Hansen................................................................................23614 Coordinating Citations and the Cartography of Knowledge: Finding True North in Five Scholarly Journals Brad E. Lucas and Drew M. Loewe.....................26415 Making Space in Composition Studies: Discursive Ecologies as Inquiry Patricia Webb Boyd....................................................................28316 The (Dis)Order of Composition: Insights from the Rhetoric and Reception of The Making of Knowledge in Composition Lance Massey..............................305Afterword Stephen M. North....................................................................................................................................323Index..........................................................................................................................................................326About the Authors..............................................................................................................................................332

Chapter One

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NORTH'S THE MAKING OF KNOWLEDGE IN COMPOSITION FOR GRADUATE EDUCATION

Edward M. White

I was among the handful of English faculty teaching a graduate course in writing research when Stephen M. North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (MKC) appeared in 1987. Before it became available, I used two books for the course, the only ones that seemed to me appropriate: the survey of research produced by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Shoer twenty-four years earlier (1963), and the collection of essays on writing research edited by Charles Cooper and Lee Odell in 1978. Neither book was really satisfactory. The Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Shoer book was hard headed and comprehensive for its time but had one huge drawback: it defined research as only empirical, statistically based research; none other was worthy of the term. Cooper and Odell had a more expansive view of research, yet the book was a series of discrete essays of varying quality and perspective. I adopted the views of both texts, teaching an incoherent and statistically oriented course. In common with the accepted truths of the day, I mocked teacher knowledge as a kind of superstition, although I presented isolated studies, including success narratives, as examples of approved research. I am embarrassed at the course I taught, as I look back at it, and I hope it did not do too much damage to the students in it.

Like most of us in those remote days establishing, unawares, the "new" field of composition studies, I was reasonably qualified to teach the course, and my enthusiasm for it may in part have compensated for my ignorance about the burgeoning research about to flower everywhere in the field. (I was also painfully ignorant of rhetoric, a word never, I think, mentioned in my graduate studies of English and American literature. That large lacuna was widely shared, most obviously by North.) I had published a number of articles on the teaching of writing, had become rather an authority on writing assessment (the first edition of my Teaching and Assessing Writing appeared in 1985, just too late for North to include) and I had edited two composition textbooks for W.W. Norton. But I had no real understanding of the varieties and methodologies of writing research. I accepted the division of such research into "quantitative" and "qualitative" categories, with its reductive dichotomy, and I struggled with a vague understanding of what constituted knowledge in our field. I remember Jim Gray, founder of the then Bay Area Writing Project, inviting me to present a survey of what we knew about writing and writing instruction to the second group of Project Fellows. When I asked him why he didn't do that himself, he scowled and said, "Everyone thinks I'm an expert, but I don't know anything about that stuff. Now you, you know what you're talking about." I didn't have the confidence to confess my own ignorance, so I did the best I could. I can't recall a word I said, but the presentation was well received, so I suppose I knew a tad more than the others in the room.

I also remember asking Rich Haswell, who was teaching a course in writing research then at Washington State University, how he structured it. He replied glumly that he spent the first half of the term teaching statistics to the literature graduates in his class and that that approach was a recipe for disaster. He asked me what I did. After I told him, we both shook our heads in silence; we knew enough to know that what we were doing wasn't good enough. Steve Witte was more positive; he was certain that statistics were the basis of any serious research and, indeed, argued that position until his untimely death. But I, perhaps because I saw myself as a writer first and a scholar second, was not convinced. I was and am at heart a storyteller and I was not about to give away the power of narrative in practice, though I had done so in theory. But storytelling is hardly a curriculum and not even I could call it research.

Into this world burst North's book, which I immediately saw as transforming the teaching I had been doing. The copy I first read sits...