This article considers connections between the work of composition and rhetoric and the growing field of faculty development. It defines faculty development, explores reasons composition and rhetoric scholars might be drawn to and successful in faculty development positions, and examines existing and potential intellectual connections between these two fields of inquiry.

Review Article| October 01 2004 Can Transcendentalist Romanticism Save Education? In Search of an Active Learning Countertradition Gerald Nelms Gerald Nelms Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2004) 4 (3): 475–484. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-4-3-475 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gerald Nelms; Can Transcendentalist Romanticism Save Education? In Search of an Active Learning Countertradition. Pedagogy 1 October 2004; 4 (3): 475–484. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-4-3-475 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2004 Duke University Press2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Roundtable: Minding American Education: Reclaimin the Tradition of Active Learning You do not currently have access to this content.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I wish to thank RR peer reviewers Janice Lauer and Andrea Lunsford for their helpful advice in the composition and revision of this article. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Janet Emig and Susan Gzesh, Emig's case study subject "Lynn"; in The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, for allowing me to interview them at length.

Whatever dates Composition historians suggest as the beginning of modern composition studies whether it's 1949-50 with the founding of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, or 1961 with the publication of Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer's Research in Written Composition, or 1971 with the publication of Janet Emig's The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders they all agree that the modern study of written communication is at least two decades old, with its gradual emergence occurring over decade or so. One way of marking the emergence of this new discipline is to look for the rise of what Robert Connors has called a coherently evolved of composition (Introduction xii). In fact, the journal literature of the 1950s and early 1960s is full of suggestions for theoretical foundation for the study and teaching of writing. Finding coherent theory that the field could embrace, however, was problematic.

The almost exclusive reliance on evidence developed from documentary analyses, specifically analyses of textbooks, in composition historiography has resulted in an agonistic, heroes-and-villains image of the history of writing instruction, whereby modern composition scholars have defined themselves in terms of their opposition to what has come to be called “current-traditional rhetoric.” This article promotes the use of oral evidence in composition historiography to guard against overgeneralization and simplistic reduction of composition history to binary oppositions. Oral interviews also can serve as a way of collecting information that would otherwise be lost, of exploring the thoughts, motivations, feelings, and values of informants, and of giving voice to those marginalized politically, socially, and professionally. This article also defends oral data against positivistic attacks on its reliability as evidence and argues that the evidentiary value of any piece of historical data depends not on some abstract ranking of different kinds of evidence but on the historian's understanding of the rhetorical context informing the production of that data.