Learning from History’s Pedagogy

Jean Ferguson Carr, University of Pittsburgh

Session Description: We will review some materials from Archives of Instruction and discuss the uses of reading past textbooks for contemporary composition teaching. How do textbooks help circulate attitudes about teaching writing? How do such attitudes become "doxa"? In what ways are textbooks situated--in relation to specific kinds of students or educational situations? How can we read the anonymous or semi-anonymous labor of textbook traditions--labor that is, in some ways, an extension of teaching? What does it mean to have a critical relationship to a textbook?