History Bump

Varnum cites Crowley and North as objecting to the narrow twin foci of comp histories to this point--that they really onlyy deal with classroom pedagogy and epistomology. Their complaint is that the materiality of teaching composition and composition as a disciplinary venture is never chronicled--things like pay for teachers, conditions of teaching, numbers who learned to write, geographic discrepancies. By his own admission, Varnum's book has "three chief virtues": 1) it focuses on the contexts (place, space, time, political, cultural) in which this writing program emerged and developed, 2) it consluted new kinds of historical resource materials, and 3) it "reconsiders an historical period of composition that has been ignored" (9).

Some of the data collection done by Varum includes archival documents, like memorandums, letters between Varnum and Baird himself, photos and reports from the college, student writing, original writing assignments and course descriptions, and interviews with past program participants. He tends to analyze these collected artifacts and stories in the style of an historicist reading, moving between as diverse contexts as local college administration and WWII to give a more full picture of how and why and where this "maverick" writing program took place.

Varnum's hope is that exposing the particularities of the Amherst program will shed some new light on the social and cultural history of composition, and make connections bewteen widely accepted practices in the current day discipline to this then-innovative writing instruction. Another goal of Varnum's is to highlight how non-trivial professional and cultural politics are to what happens in the classroom, in the lives of the instructors, in the discipline, in public conceptions of literacy.