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Industrial Revolution Changes Needs of Education
Industrialization in Great Britain meant that populations were moving from the rural areas to the cities for work (33). To move forward in the factory-driven world, there was a call for "good English" as a skill necessary to move upwards (33). Teachers began to "set out to standardize the language" (34). One's own language was considered folk literature and not taught in university, but was fairly common in coffee houses. The teaching of standardized English became seen as patriotic (34). -
Essays Read and Corrected Aloud
In 1831, Professor Robert Scott wrote of a method for correcting student writing wherein the work was read aloud and corrected orally. He notes that the professor read the work first, and then the work was offered for class commentary. At this time, "responding to student writing was a matter of correction rather than appraisal, and more often than not it was oral. In the lower schools, it was largely correction of mechanical errors" (49). This seems to have evolved into modern peer editing. -
Normal Schools -- Established for Educating Future Teachers
According to Encyclopeadia Brittanica, the first normal school was established in Lexington, Mass. in 1839. After Horace Mann's common school campaign, normal schools formed to teach high school graduates to teach in public elementary schools (Fitzgerald). According to Fitzgerald, they were usually tuition-free schools to students who would agree to teach after graduation (173). Using Herbart's philosophy, teachers learned about the students and designed lessons on the students' needs. -
George Payne Quackenbos Classifies Parts of Composition
According to D'Angelo, in 1863, Quackenbos classified writing into five components: description, narration, argument, exposition, and speculation (350). According to Purdue OWL, today there are four recognizes categories of writing: exposition, description, narration, and argumentation, which certainly mirror those proposed by Quackenbos. While there are various kinds of writing tasks, they do seem to fit into categories. (Month + Day added). -
Freedmen's Bureau -- abbreviated as FB in the name of space below
A government agency established during the Reconstruction era. Originally intended to deal with issues such as food and shelter, the FB later focused on schooling (Fox 123). Literacy here was highly political in that "literacy instruction switched from literacy for liberation to literacy for social control" (Fox 125). Many teachers were white, which was met with resistance. Many schools were founded by evangelicals, and held religious overtones. FB helped found Howard College (history.com). -
HN Day - Art of Discourse Published
HN Day published books on both rhetoric and logic. One of his famous work is the ART OF DISCOURSE, published in 1867 (334). The book "presented a full-blown inventional scheme for expository discourse...based on informal logic" (334). Prior to this, Day was a tutor at Yale and a pastor. He was also president of Ohio Female College as he was interested in women's education. -
Alexander Bain Publishes ENGLISH COMPOSITION AND RHETORIC
Scottish Alexander Bain wore two hats -- that of a popular psychology teacher and that of an unpopular composition teacher. Bain's composition program focused on grammar as "he felt strongly that the way to good English, written and spoken, was primarily through a knowledge of grammar" (41). His work ENGLISH COMPOSITION AND RHETORIC, first published in 1871, was revised six times in ten years (41). -
Establishment of Harvard's Composition Program
According to Harvard's website, the university has required all students to take an expository writing course since 1872. In 1874, Harvard established a composition program, and was followed in suit by institutions such as the University of Iowa, Amherst, Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Michigan (Brereton). The English Department was created in 6-20-1876. The program was mostly led by James Child, and students began choosing modern languages over the ancient ones. -
Barrett Wendell's Notecard Idea
In 1891, Barrett Wendell published "English Composition." Among other topics, Wendell wrote of a "three-stage process" for writing, involving brainstorming, creating a thesis, and planning. Wendell also came up with the early concept of notecards -- that is, "organizing topic headings onto cards, which the writer then studies and sort" by hand. This later led to the concept of outlining. Wendell wanted writers to see the relationships between ideas and having them available to shuffle. -
Oxford University Fully Admits Women
Women did attend grammar schools in the 18th century, but doors began to open in the late 19th century. "In 1848-49, Queen's College and Bedford College for Women were founded in London, although examinations were still closed to them" (42). Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Durham allowed women to take exams in 1865; the University of London followed in 1868 (42). Women weren't able to earn degrees from Victoria University until 1887. In 1920, Oxford admitted women to "full university status" (42). -
National Defense Education Act (NDEA)
In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik. A year later, the US felt the need to shift education practices to compete on a global scale. Prior to this, Encyclopeadia Brittanic reports that the focus of US education was teaching "life skills." NDEA "included federal support for summer seminars for teachers" that later "not only addressed creative processes, but had also classified two separate groups of English teachers: 'literature and language' and 'literature and composition'" (xxxix). -
Advent of PhD in Rhetoric and Composition
Russell notes that in the 1970s, graduate programs started in the area of composition and rhetoric and "forty PhD programs existed by 1987" (165). This is an important step as "after a century of marginalization, the study of writing could be viewed as a serious intellectual activity" and later, as a research field. I attempted to Google the oldest PhD program in the US, but was only able to say for sure that Carnegie Mellon claims to have one of the oldest, but not necessarily the oldest. -
Prose Improvement Committee Evolves into Bay Area Writing Project
In 1947, UC @ Berkeley created the Prose Improvement Committee, designed to train TAs to tutor students in writing. The program disbanded around 1964 but reemerged in 1971 as the Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP). The BAWP focused on writing at the secondary level and the importance of writing to learn. As the program evolved, writing projects popped up all over California, and later the whole country. BAWP has evolved nationally into the National Writing Project, funded by the US government.
