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A maverick writing course: English 1-2 at Amherst College, 1938-1968
Abstract
James Berlin, Stephen North, and other leading historians of composition have implied that nothing very interesting happened in composition classrooms before 1960. To counter that assumption, I offer my description of English 1-2 at Amherst College, an innovative and challenging freshman writing course directed by Theodore Baird from 1938-1968. Although no one published much about this course while it was a going concern, several members of its staff, including Walker Gibson and William E. Coles, Jr., later wrote about similar courses they designed elsewhere. My observations about English 1-2 are based on interviews with its faculty and graduates and on a study of materials now held in the Amherst College Archives. English 1-2 was taught collaboratively by a staff of eight or ten men who devised a new and demanding sequence of 33 assignments each semester, calling on students to write from experience. The instructors, who otherwise used no text, mimeographed their students' papers and made these the focus of classroom discussions. The instructors invited students to explore the relation between language and reality and to view themselves as makers of meaning. Paradoxically, English 1-2 seems both to have generated a potentially disempowering mystique and to have enabled many students to claim new measures of authority over language.
Subject Area
Education history|Language arts|Higher education
Recommended Citation
Varnum, Robin R, "A maverick writing course: English 1-2 at Amherst College, 1938-1968" (1992). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9305912.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9305912