In the Archives of Composition: Writing and Rhetoric in High Schools and Normal Schools (Composition, Literacy, and Culture, 163) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822963779 ISBN 13: 9780822963776

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Lori Ostergaard is associate professor and chair of the department of writing and rhetoric at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.
Henrietta Rix Wood is assistant teaching professor in the Honors College at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822963779
• ISBN 13: 9780822963776
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264
• Editor: Ostergaard Lori, Wood Henrietta Rix