In order to rewrite its central identity as a discipline, and not merely a service course, composition scholars also sought scientific affiliation by locating a subject that could be scientifically studied: the writing process. For some narrators of composition’s history, then, the field’s origins as a discipline began with its research focus.
One example of composition’s efforts to achieve scientific status came in 1961 when NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) created an ad hoc committee to prepare a “scientifically based report” on the status of knowledge in the teaching and learning of composition. In so doing, the committee developed criteria for what counted as research that made “genuine contributions to knowledge”: research that studied the process of written instruction using scientific methods with the goal of improving composition teaching (North, “Death” 198). The resulting document, Research in Written Composition, by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer, served as what Stephen M. North calls the “charter of modern Composition” (Making 17). The book insists that teaching-based inquiry needs to be replaced with scientific methodology. As the text states:
the field as a whole is laced with dreams, prejudices and makeshift operations. Not enough investigators are really informing themselves about the process and results of previous research before embarking on their own. Too few of them conduct pilot experiments and validate their measuring instruments before undertaking an investigation. [. . .] And far too few of those who have conducted an initial piece of research follow it with further exploration or replicate the investigations of others. (5)
Teachers, then, were replaced by “investigators” as the central agents of the field. Knowledge derived from classroom experience was replaced with the stuff of science—pilot experiments, measuring instruments, and replicated studies.
While this emphasis on scientific approaches did allow Composition Studies to advance its status as a discipline and gain legitimacy in and outside of English studies, it also deepened the fracture between largely male researchers who studied composition and female teachers who practiced it in the classroom with students. Consequently, a top-down dynamic was created where male researchers produced scholarship that directed female teachers about how best to teach. In the decades that followed, the number of women hired in tenure-track (research) positions in composition would continue to grow, but a divide remains between those who teach the bulk of composition courses and those who conduct research—a split that feminist scholars, among others, continue to critique and challenge.
Finally, the emphasis on science limited the definition of what counts as legitimate “knowledge,” a question that is central to the feminist project. While composition scholarship certainly diversified over time in both its subjects of study—moving far beyond how to teach first-year composition—and in the form its research assumes, the privileging of seemingly “objective” and quantitative research in the university looms large, even today. One such consequence of this hierarchy is that scholarship focused on teaching is often deemed “soft” or less rigorous than other forms of research. For this reason, it remains an ongoing part of the feminist project to challenge what kind of and whose knowledge we privilege in order to make room for new voices, perspectives, and subjects.
For Writing and Discussion
1.What evidence do you see in the academy that demonstrates the privileging of scientific knowledge? What evidence do you see where other forms of knowledge have successfully challenged the limitations of science?
2.In what ways might scientific approaches to work in fields like English studies serve us? In what ways does it limit us?
Looking Ahead
As this glimpse into the competing origin stories of Composition Studies shows, the field has long sought to revise the status that links it to remediation and feminization. In establishing disciplinary and pedagogical agency, however, the field has sometimes claimed origins that exclude or marginalize feminist knowledges. For this reason, feminist teachers and scholars have had to regularly disrupt, challenge, and offer alternatives to the field’s efforts to establish disciplinarity. In the chapters ahead, I provide an overview of feminist contributions to Composition and Rhetoric, which both revise these origin stories and offer a more expansive and inclusive view of how we understand writers and rhetors, writing and rhetoric, and teaching and learning in the field.
In the first section of the book, Chapters 2 and 3, I highlight feminist scholars’ efforts to alter the rhetorical tradition, described in the second origin story above. While feminist revisions of the rhetorical tradition emerged later, chronologically, than feminist contributions to the composition classroom, I begin with a look at “rhetorica” because, as you’ll see, the recovered rhetorics of women from across centuries show approaches, knowledges, and values upon which feminists in Rhetoric and Composition would continue to build—implicitly and explicitly—in both their writing and in their classrooms.
Chapters 2 and 3 show how feminists have called attention to the masculinist, class-stratified cultures in which ancient rhetorics emerged, which helps us approach these texts with greater awareness of whom, and what, they exclude. Feminists have also argued that rhetoric need not be limited to these classical, canonized texts. Instead, they have reclaimed and rewritten the tradition by recovering women’s voices that have been previously overlooked or forgotten. They invite us to ask, what does it mean to locate our origins within the context of a more inclusive, diversified, feminist rhetoric? Chapter 2 features a range of voices feminists have recovered, which changes the sound, purpose, and tradition of rhetoric. Chapter 3 focuses on more contemporary feminist rhetorical projects that move away from a focus on individual voices to celebrate and investigate common themes and tropes across women’s rhetorics, including attention to human diversity, multiplicity of forms, and new rhetorical topoi, or the topics and places from which arguments can be made. Together, these feminist rhetorical contributions open new possibilities for how we teach, learn, and participate in the rhetorical tradition.
In Part 2 of the book, I focus on how feminist compositionists have expanded traditional notions of teacher and student roles, the practices and persona of the researcher, and approaches to academic argument. In each case, feminist compositionists emphasize the importance of how social location and subjectivity—how subjects are situated according to gender, power, race, embodiment, etc.—shape how we know, teach, learn, and write. That is, just as feminist rhetors challenge the idea of universal rhetorical practices or effects, feminist compositionists emphasize that how we experience our world, our communities, our classrooms, depends on our particular location within it; and that location is necessarily shaped by gender, which is always enmeshed with other social categories.
In Chapter 4 I illustrate how feminists in composition have influenced the field’s perception of the teacher and the student. In this chapter, I trace key metaphors for the composition teacher, and subsequent roles for students, which emerge from several pedagogical movements. I then highlight how feminist scholars have complicated these identities, illuminating the gendered assumptions that shape them and making room for more inclusive, expansive notions of teacher and student identities. In so doing, feminists in composition revise the role of service-provider or disciplinarian established in the first origin story.
Chapter 5 depicts a feminist response to the third origin story, which aimed to legitimize the field by associating it with objective, scientific knowledge. Here I trace feminist efforts to challenge the idealized persona in academic writing and settings, which is built upon a scientific model of the objective, logical, rational—that is, masculine—knower. Alternatively, feminist scholars have sought to claim the subjectivity of the writer and researcher, arguing for experience as a vital form of knowledge.
Chapter 6 highlights how feminists in composition have revised conventional expectations about what constitutes academic writing. Even as Composition Studies grew as a field and gained more agency in defining its courses and curriculum,