Composition: History & Theory: 1960 - 1969
Dartmouth Seminar
Description
In “After Dartmouth: Growth and Conflict in English” (1991), Joseph Harris provides a critical review of the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar in which he claims that the conflicts and contradictions presented at the conference encouraged English scholars to revise their understanding of the discipline. Harris gives an overview of the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar which brought together prominent scholar-teachers from the U.S. and Great Britain in an attempt to define the discipline and establish effective methods for teaching. Harris explains how this aim was never realized, partially because (and Harris concedes this is an oversimplified explanation) the Americans and the British scholars at the conference had differing perspectives on what the discipline of English meant and what it should entail. For the Americans, English studies were a scholarly endeavor. Albert Kitzhaber led the American view of English by describing a student-centered body of knowledge, something one learns rather than something one does (634). For the British, led primarily by figures such as John Dixon and James Britton, English was “a teaching subject,” with the focus being on what happens inside the English classroom. The Americans, as Harris puts it, viewed themselves as scholars, while the British presented themselves primarily as teachers.
Harris looks at the conflict between the two views of the discipline from both sides, but focuses on what was known at the time as the “growth theory.” Growth theory was offered by British scholars as a means of encouraging students to write from a place of personal experience, the idea being that learning to be a strong and effective writer was something organic and would naturally occur in students who were given the freedom to explore it. The Americans at Dartmouth critiqued growth theory as anti-intellectual. They were advocating a return to the basic principles of teaching writing as a skill to be mastered, and claimed that the growth model was too similar to progressive education; a movement they believed did more harm to English education than it did good (638-39). Harris offers his own critique of the way the British scholars presented the growth model, but suggests that, even though growth theory was highly criticized and radical at the time, the Dartmouth Seminar began a shift in the way we think about the scholarship and teaching of English. He claims that after Dartmouth English began to be seen as something that was done as opposed to something that was merely studied. Harris points out that many of the fundamental tenants of the growth model are now accepted parts of current composition pedagogy. Harris then presents a persisting problem: “we have yet to find ways not only to have our teaching better informed by theory but to make our theories more responsive to the scene of teaching” (641). Harris ends by discussing how growth theory has and can continue to evolve a new understanding of English studies by offering students power. Harris claims that by embracing conflicts in the disciplines of English and by encouraging an understanding of the uses of language and experience, students can “achieve a different sort of textual power…one they can use not merely to meet but to question the demands their society makes upon them” (644). Harris encourages scholar-teachers in English to view what some British scholars at Dartmouth called the “growth mode” as a means of developing a theory grounded in classroom praxis as the most effective way to approach the teaching of English.
Date of Upload
3/14/09