Education / History

An original and significant study of the developmental diversity within the discipline of composition that opens the door to further examination of local histories as guideposts to the origins of composition studies.

Thomas Masters examines a pivotal era—the years following arrival of former soldiers on college campuses thanks to the GI Bill—in the history of the most ubiquitous and most problematic course offered in America: freshman English.

Mariolina Salvatori presents an anthology of documents that examine the evolution of American education in the nineteenth century and meaning of the word pedagogy.

Connors provides a comprehensive history of composition and its pedagogical approaches to form, genre, and correctness. He shows where many of the today’s practices and assumptions about writing come from, and he translates what our techniques and theories of teaching have said over time about our attitudes toward students, language, and life.

Co-Winner of the 1998 Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize for outstanding research publication in the field of teaching English language, literature, rhetoric and composition, The Formation of College English reexamines the civic concerns of rhetoric and the politics that have shaped and continue to shape college English.

Co-Winner, 1997 MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize

This volume describes the formative years of English composition courses in college through a study of the most prominent documents of the time: magazine articles, scholarly reports, early textbooks, teachers’ testimonies-and some of the actual student papers that provoked discussion. Includes writings by leading scholars of the era such as Adams Sherman Hill, Gertrude Buck, William Edward Mead, Lane Cooper, William Lyon Phelps, and Fred Newton Scott.

Winner, 1997 CCCC Outstanding Book Award