A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966

Headnote

A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966

Joseph Harris

Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.160 pp. $26.80 (paper).

Why we teach writing in college in the United States (a puzzling phenomena to instructors in higher education in most other countries) is perhaps the most crucial and controversial question for composition scholars and teachers to answer. In this book, Joe Harris aligns himself with "a dissenting tradition in English that has argued for looking closely at the uses students and ordinary people make of language" (xi) and argues for a strongly civic purpose for teaching writing.'Beginning with the questions of how and why people might be encouraged to change their uses of writing and "the sorts of work students and teachers might do together in a college writing course" (x), he advocates that the college writing classroom be seen as "a public space where students can begin to form their own voices as writers and intellectuals" (116) and where they are urged "not simply to defend the cultures into which they were born but to imagine new public spheres which they'd like to have a hand in making" (124).

This stance on the purpose of college writing classes inflects and enhances Harris's delineation of "the competing uses and meanings of ... [five] key words in the teaching of writing" (97) -growth, voice, process, error, community-accompanied by an afterword on contact zones. In his discussions of the debates surrounding these terms that have framed and continue to frame the ongoing conversations about the teaching of writing, he is careful to show how each position positively answered a need in the context in which it developed and how changing contexts and conflicting needs gave rise to alternate positions.

At the Dartmouth Seminar in 1966, the differing histories of British and American educators came into conflict, as the British growth theorists proposed a model that, with its emphasis on developing students7 natural abilities, reminded American researchers of the progressive teaching they wished...