The History of Writing Instruction 1960-1975

During these years, the principles upon which writing should be taught were changing in accordance with the changing times. Selective service deferment for people attending college and graduate school was a driving force encouraging many to attend college. When the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, many people felt that public schools should be subject-centered and not student-centered because they felt like the US needed to compete with other nations in technological advancements and the way to do this was through a highly educated population. By 1964, the National Defense Education Act expanded to improve instruction of literature, language, and composition.

Jerome Burner recommended organizing a sequenced curriculum, which proved highly influential. He thought of learning as a cognitive process in relation to the structure of the subject being studied. He put great emphasis on the role of discovery in learning, according to Berlin, and pushed for an inductive approach to learning in which the student figures out the structure of the subject being studied. He thought student research led to more influential learning by students. Therefore, it was the process of writing from which students learned best, rather than from studying the works of someone else. Only after the students arrived at their own sense of knowledge, argued Burner, learning to compose is possible.

Then, in 1971, Janet Emig published a work, which provided research evidence to support the cognitive approach to composing. Later, in 1975, James Britton also supporter the cognitive standpoint when he published results of research conducted in England. James Moffett, in 1968, came up with a series of activities to directly correlate with the four developmental stages of interior dialogue, conversation, correspondence, and public narrative.

In 1966, at the Dartmouth Conference, the British explained their model of instruction, which focused more on personal and linguistic growth, opposed to the demands of the discipline of English. The process at hand was much more important than the content of the curriculum according to the British standpoint. As a result of the conference, US teachers put more emphasis on the expressive model of writing. Political activism of this time period, too, encouraged this standpoint. This expressionist process was taught in classes resistant to dominant political formations. The cognitive process, then, avoided political conflicts or looked at them as rational problems. Although there are differing opinions on how to approach the instruction of English, most agree that language is not simply reflective of “material and social realities” according to Berlin. Rather it is an inclusive process for both the writer, reader, and all others involved.