Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Woolfolk timeline of PV History

 The idea her is to outline the developments of Prairie View as conceived by Woolfolk in Prairie View: A Study in Public Conscience.

Terms:

"a bustling optimism"  10 This refers to the reaction to the "African" provision in the Constitution of 1866.  

Theses:  

  • The civil war brought more than just freedom to Blacks.  It ignited the desire for free public education.
  • The Texas experience may have been different from that of the western South.  Anderson asserts the strength of the "ideological position of the planter regime." 4  Woolfolk makes the case that Texas was committed to free, public education for all citizens. "Most students of Texas for this period have been superficial enough to follow the old idea that whites were completely  antagonistic to the idea of education for the Freedmen; the record does not bear them out." 12 

Early period

1787 Provisions in the U. S. "for giving in each township of new states or territories one or more sections of land "for the use of schools." 4

1833 Mexican government makes it a law that "all children were to be trained in the Catholic schools." Mentions Stephen F. Austin, ""we want free schools for our children." 3

1835 Declaration of Independence of the Province of Texas.  Cites the text complaining about no public schools.

1836 Texas Constitution.  "It was declared in that instrument that "it shall be the duty of Congress, as soon as circumstance will permit, to provide by law a general system of education." 4

1839 Legislative provision "for future free schools by giving each organized county three leagues of land, divided into tracts of 160 acres each, for the purpose of establishing a primary school or academy in the  county." 4 

1840 Legislature of the Republic passed an act creating School Commissioners for each county.  The "free school" act.  "The School Commissioners were empowered to make the proper disposition of the school lands, organize the school districts, inspect the schools, and examine, for the purposes of certification, the teachers to be  employed in the county schools and academies." 5 

1845 Texas Constitution Legislative duty to "establish free schools throughout the state...." 5

1854 Act to mandate provisions ($2M) "...to be distributed among the counties for the support of schools,  on the basis of free white population in each from six to sixteen years of age." 6 

1856 Legislative act loaning school funds to the railway.

1860 Republican Party takes control of the national government. 

1865 Creation of the Freedmen's Bureau in Texas (1865 - 1870)

1866 New State Constitution had "educational provisions." 8 Provisions for "'Africans,' or persons of African descent, should be exclusively appropriated to the maintenance of a system of schools for  Africans and their children." "...marked a new era in the annals of public education in Texas." 9 "enthusiasm" 10 "The values of self-help and self-determination underlay the ex-slaves' educational movement." Anderson 10.  






Wednesday, June 5, 2024

Engaging with Archives

Engagement with an archive 

film, new conversations based on archives

reanimating the stories, bring data back to location

look for themes in the data

compare change, exploring data creatively, groups, surprising connections, decentering the researcher


Keynote Address: Dr. Rachel Thomson

Juxtaposing (hetero)sexualities 1990/2020: Time Binds, Rematriation, and Caring for the Neglected Things of Social Research

Dr. Rachel Thomson shares some of the learning, experiences, and creative outputs from Reanimating Data: experiments with people, places and archives. This project sought to secure, digitize, and share a landmark feminist social research study (the Women, Risk & AIDS Project 1988-90) with new audiences in new times. Through the research, Thomson and her team have worked with ideas from queer theory (operationalizing Freeman’s concept of time binds) and from indigenous and feminist archiving and activism (Muthien’s notion of rematriation and Moore’s conceptualisation of careful risk-taking). They have also developed a method of reanimation that includes practices of re-asking, collaging, re-voicing, and re-collecting. Dr. Thomson's aim in this keynote is to share insights from the study and to show the potential of working with the archives of qualitative research as a starting point for collaborative and creative enquiry that places time at the center. The presentation includes sharing a short film that showcases their collaborative work.

Speakers

Rachel Thomson
Professor , Childhood & Youth Studies, University of Sussex



Saturday, December 2, 2023

The Changing Landscape in Archival Studies

 Notes

The conversation about archives

In discussing the controversies surrounding access to archives detailing the colonial past, Lowry notes changes in how archivists speak of their work.  Another point to be made in relation to the displacement of archives of colonialism is that very often textbooks contain a version of the colonial ethos. That version so often puts the voices of colonial domination into the mouths of children, a trope that, for many, obscures the reality of people's lived experience. 

But, at the same time, these essays demonstrate that the conversation may be changing. Over the several years since the previous volume was published, the archival dialogue has shifted. Archivists have become both angrier and resigned and are searching for different, forward-looking solutions. A new archival vocabulary is shifting the value of disputed archives – terms such as ‘affect’, ‘radical empathy’ and ‘social justice’ throw a different light on the situation for the country, region, territory and individuals denied these archives.

Lowry, J. (2023). Disputed Archival Heritage. library.oapen.org.

According to Lise Jaillant, the conversation about solving the problem of access to digital archives (born-digital, digital, and "dark" archives) needs to be cross disciplinary.   She claims that we need to "set up collaborations across disciplines that seldom talk to each other." 

Jaillant, L. (2022). How can we make born-digital and digitised archives more accessible? Identifying obstacles and solutions. Archival Science, 22(3), 417–436.

The schoolbooks project recognizes the interdisciplinary nature of working with digital archives, and will research and share work done by researchers in a number of academic, organizational and public arenas.  However the schoolbooks approach differs in that the method is to dive deeply into access and engagement issues of two Canadian textbook archives in hopes that lessons so learned can be shared with archivists across disciplines.

The value of archives

Lowry also speaks of the values of archives, which often are undervalued in relation to other kinds of displaced artifacts (such as looted art objects or items with cultural significance).  

Archives have representational potency. They can cause terrible pain (archives wound) or give comfort (archives heal), and, like people, they can do many other things to our psychic states because they come from, describe, can stand in for and are intended for people. Likewise, records can be highly consequential to our bodies, about which they convey data (such as medical data), transmit commands (such as execution or deportation orders) and shape environments (as in design documentation for physical and digital spaces).

As for aesthetics, archives frequently are beautiful, in their formal elements, on screens or other carriers, because of their calligraphic fourishes, bitmaps, forms design, images, patinas, glitches, in their decay. From striking photography to intricate illuminations, archival aesthetics can pique the interest of the collector, whether private or state.3

Textbooks are somewhat like these documentational archives:  they share some of the indirect or not-so-obvious values. But most importantly they are "intended for people."  

Proposed solutions



Thursday, November 2, 2023

Historic DigitalTextbook Collections


Here are some of the many collections of textbooks available to academic and public researchers. I used the following search string in Google:  "list of historic textbook collections digital". This work was done on November 2, 2023.  

Most of these are large repositories and some are in professional websites.  The thing is, once these are posted they tend to remain stable and can be relied upon (to some extent) to last as links and repositories. They have intrinsic value. 


The Wiedrick Collection

The Wiedrick Collection contains digitized versions of the over 4000 books and print resources that make up the collection built by Dr. Laurence “Laurie” Wiedrick [1925-1982] over his 30+ year career. Dr. Wiedrick began his career as a teacher-librarian eventually becoming the Supervisor of School Libraries at Edmonton Public Schools and a professor of Education here at the University of Alberta. Among his significant achievements here at the UAlberta were coordinating the Faculty of Education’s Curriculum Laboratory from 1967 to 1981 and helping to establish the University’s School of Library Science. 

The IBE Historical Textbook Collection

6,070 records.  Textbooks and teaching materials from over 140 countries, covering more than 50 different subjects and available in over 104 languages. These include, among others:

- Rare textbooks dating from the 1700s

- Textbooks from the personal libraries of the IBE's precursors, founders, and educators such as Marc Antoine-Julien, Pierre Bovet, Marie Butts and Jean Piaget.

The digitization of the Historical Textbook Collection is in progress. 


Historical Textbook Collection, University of Saskatchewan

The core Historical Textbook Collection consists of materials authorized by the Department of Education for use in Saskatchewan elementary and secondary schools from 1884-1992. This Collection continues to grow and includes textbooks, teachers' editions,  recommended children's literature, and selected audiovisual materials. The Collection also includes school materials that have archival value.

"Maha Kumaran is the liaison librarian for the College of Education. She'd likely be the best person to contact about the collection. You can find her profile here: https://library.usask.ca/people/maha-kumaran.php"  From my conversation with Rob Alary, Librarian on November 21, 2023.    

19th Century Schoolbooks, University of Pittsburgh

The 19th Century Schoolbooks Collection contains schoolbooks from the Nietz Old Textbook Collection. In addition, this online collection also contains two works by Dr. John Nietz, which survey historic American schoolbooks in the context of the history of education. Size:  9,000 volumes.

The Internet Archive, s. v. textbooks

This archive returns 39,143 results for books about textbooks and textbook archives.  Some collections include the following. 

Historical Textbooks, National Library of Education

NCERT Textbooks, The National Council of Educational Research and Training 

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) is an autonomous body which aims to provide qualitative education to the school children in India. Its primary work is to prepare and publish model textbooks, supplementary material, educational kits, etc. 

------------------------------------------------

The following sites are listed on the Historical Curriculum Collections page at the University of Alberta. The text was copied from that page. 

 British Columbia Historical Textbooks

The Curriculum Library at the University of Victoria has a unique collection of textbooks used in British Columbia’s public schools since the province joined confederation in 1871. This historical textbooks collection includes books on a variety of school subjects including science, math, health, English and language arts, foreign languages, history, and social studies.

Memorial University's Digital Archives Initiative

The Memorial University's Digital Archives Initiative (DAI) contains research-based cultural resources held by Memorial University and partnering organizations. From books and maps to photographs, periodicals, video and audio, the DAI hosts a variety of collections which together reinforce the importance, past and present, of Newfoundland and Labrador's history and culture.

Ontario Historical Education Collection

The Ontario Historical Education Collection includes approximately 6500 items, including numerous documents, mainly from the Ontario Ministry of Education (formerly the Ontario Department of Education) that cover the areas of elementary, secondary and teacher education in the Province from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.

Ontario Textbook Collection

The Ontario Textbook Collection includes elementary and secondary school texts approved for use in Ontario circa 1846 to 1970, as well as some materials used in nineteenth-century schools which were not authorized by the Ontario Department of Education. Supporting this collection are other holdings of textbooks including post-1970 texts deleted from the approval lists.

-----------------------------------------------

Historical Textbook Collection, University of Cincinnati

he Archives & Rare Books Library’s Historical Textbook Collection was created by Gary Lare, former head of the Curriculum Resources Center, now called the College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services (CECH) Library.  Now a special collection in the Archives & Rare Books Library, the collection continues to be developed as primary source materials for the history of education in the United States.  Comprising more than 2000 textbooks from the early 19th century to the turn of the 21st century, the textbooks cover virtually every subject taught in elementary, middle and secondary schools.

The goals of this exhibit are to provide a preliminary finding aid for the volumes, along with background information on textbook publishing in Cincinnati and the heritage of K-12 education in the United States, with the eventual aim of cataloging and naming the collection.  A collection development policy is also being developed, with guidelines to expand scholarly research and teaching with primary materials. Subjects included in the collection are foreign languages, art, health, grammar & composition, handwriting, speech & theatre, mathematics, music, science, social studies, and engineering.

Education: Historical Textbooks: Home, Berkley Library, University of California

Collections, JSTOR

Explore collections of images and primary sources from libraries, museums, and archives around the world.

Discover new avenues of research

Go beyond the usual sources. Discover new avenues of research and gain deeper understanding of your topics with original materials including artworks, photographs, publications, recordings, and other artifacts. Explore important and rare collections from libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies around the world. 

 Digital Collections, Smithsonian Libraries

Our digital collections include over 35,000 digitized books and manuscripts (available in either our Digital Library or as part of the Biodiversity Heritage Library) as well as digitized photo collections, ephemera, and seed catalogs. 

Collections, HathiTrust Digital Library

Our enormous collection includes thousands of years of human knowledge and published materials from around the world, selected by librarians and preserved in the libraries of academic and research libraries. You can find all kinds of digitized books and primary source materials to suit a wide range of research needs. Our collection is always growing, so check back!

Historical Children's Books at the Library of Congress:  Selected Resources, Library of Congress, Research Guides

The Library's digital collections contain a variety of primary source materials related to historical children's books, including scanned books, articles from historical newspapers, and prints and photographs. We have provided links below to some relevant collections, as well as tips and strategies for searching the Library's website more broadly, to find additional resources on this topic.

Center for Research Libraries: Textbooks (not digital)

The textbook collection includes U.S. imprints of primary and secondary schoolbooks, textbooks for post-high school non-degree schools such as business and trade schools, and foreign language grammars and readers through college level. The publication dates range from the 18th century, although most holdings were published in the 20th century. This collection was formed by deposits from member libraries and is maintained through retrospective deposits. There are 70,000 volumes in the collection occupying 8,000 linear feet of shelf space.

Note:  At this point I started running out of sites that featured collections of textbooks.   Results showed the words collection and historical and digital, but not textbook

A number of specialized textbook archives have begun to surface in my research. 

All About Circuits (independent online community for electrical engineers) 

In their forum on Education and Homework Help I found a library of old books, magazines and textbooks.  In a post on the topic the user posted 20 links to other posts in the forum pertaining to circuitry textbooks.  

 

 

 

Friday, September 22, 2023

The Key: The Contribution of Bob Kline


Robert Kline, co-author of the 1983 Ready Writing Handbook, was a linguist in the English Department during the 1960s and 1970s.  

I know a little about his scholarship, and I came across an article he coauthored with W. Dean Memering for the NCTE Research in the Teaching of English in the Fall, 1977 (V. 11, no. 2), pp. 97 - 110.  The title was "Formal Fragments:  The English Minor Sentence."  It was about sentence fragments. 

The article identifies sentence fragments (sentences without verbs used sparingly in writing) and inquires about their advisability in writing by consulting the rhetoricians.  The list of authors, publishers, and titles is instructive as a glimpse into the writing authorities of the mid-1970s in the U. S.  

Here is a list of those authors: 

James Bell and A. A. Cohn Handbook of Grammar, Style, and Usage, 1972

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Modern Rhetoric, 1972

Janet Emig, The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. 1971

William Irmscher, The Holt Guide to English Language and Writing, 1972

https://archive.org/details/holtguidetoengli0000irms/page/n7/mode/2up

Kenneth Macrorie, Writing to be Read, 1968

James McCrimmon, Writing with a purpose, 1972

Richard M. Weaver, A Rhetoric and Composition Handbook, 1974

Just reading those titles takes a person back to those days.  I was there, because in 1968 my first job as as the librarian in the Freshman English Library, a small room filled with literature and composition textbooks donated by professors as a resource for composition scholarship.  

My job was checking out books.  I was work study, which meant I had to put in a designated number of hours per week on the job.  My hours were the hours of the library.  I don't think I ever checked out a book, but I was ready, with an arcane method of recording times and a date stamp.  The only customer I ever had was David Delora, who one day showed up in the library, scanned some books, and left.  He was my sophomore English teacher my first year.  

But the point of the authors mentioned in Kline's consultation of rhetoricians, is its representation of how writing was thought of at that time:  the purview of informed and influential textbook writers whose work was peddled to professors by textbook representatives in their offices.  The books they didn't use ended up in the library.  Under my watchful eye. 

Maxine Hairston brought one of these authors up during her presentation at an English 398T colloquium on teaching.  She mentioned Carl Rogers as a scholar who had something new to contribute to the teaching of composition.  I remember her mentioning it in her talk. "The only new thing," she said.

Point: Teaching writing was dominated by authoritative figures who dominated the textbook market.  

What was new?  Research in writing. It was being done at all times back then by the NCTE and CCC, but it wasn't the priority.  While there were studies done of composition, the influence of social science methods had not been felt and large-scale, well funded projects were not underway.  Except for one.  I came across it because Kinneavy had a whole file devoted to it in his file cabinet. 

This was a study done by Richard Young and Frank Koen entitled, "The Tagmemic Discovery Procedure An Evaluation of Its Uses in the Teaching of Rhetoric."  This 174-page study was funded by the NEH and published in ERIC in 1973.  It came from the University of Michigan and the Acknowledgements is a "who's who" of UM writing giants:  Dwight Stevenson, Peter Klaver, and Thomas Sawyer.  It may have been part of the birth of the writing across the curriculum movement that was dominant during the 1970s and 80s.  

This study was different because it was real research into the teaching of writing.  It represented the ascendancy of research as a counter to the big names that Kline mentions, who dominated the intellectual world of composition scholarship. The characteristics of that older world were pedagogies based on grammatical and linguistic elements, syntax and style, genre and form, wisdom and aphorism, dogma and stability.  That older world, in its prime during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s was male, published, authoritative, and based on assumptions of class and privilege.  

It was pre-baby boom.  It came before the exploratory impulse that grew out of social movements, demonstrations, ecological politics, social rebellion, and counter-culture mentality. It represented the tweed and pipe crowd that preceded the button-down, bell-bottom, wide collar nerd professors that I encountered in 1968.  

If we look, then, at the tone and approach of the two Ready Writing handbooks, we can see these two ethos represented in the approach, diction, and mentality that they represent. Stewart, for example, bases his advice on the teachings of Mark Twain:  "Murder your pets," a phrase he repeats with emphasis like a bumper sticker in the last few pages of his handbook.  The phrase is like a key that he is handing over to the new generation of cool, collected young men whom he hopes he will dominate the contest.  but without struggling. These are writers who he counsels not to be as arrogant as to go into the contest to win.  "Wear your learning as you should your clothes, without ostentation or parade, naturally."  To him, winning is an attitude that the cultured young contestant maintains.  He writes, 

Don't use a seventy-five cent word when you can get the meaning you want with a ten-cent word.  This does not mean, of course, that you should give up enriching your vocabulary.  It is just a caution to remind you that one has to possess wealth of any kind a long time before it becomes natural to him.  We all laugh at the man who goes about showing off his first dollar, or even his first million; after wealth has become natural to him, he can use it without arousing comment.  It is the same with words.  (p. 16)

The advice here is allusive to the culture of comfortable assumptions, confident restraint, and and knowing acknowledgement of success. 

The Kinneavy approach is very different.  It begins with rules and dives straight into the mechanics of types of writing.  It is Aristotelian in its analytical approach much more than its prescriptions of rhetorical devices, although there are many of those.  Above all, it is a formula for winning and it makes no assumptions about dress. It calls for "original and fresh thinking" more than once.  The stylistic advice is not something handed down from authority, but found in the winning essays, which are quoted as examples and included in the handbook.  Learning from peers, originality and independence, and suitability to argument make up the theme of the stylistic advice of the revised handbook. 

Because Kinneavy was the more well known author of the revised handbook, his influence may, for some, overshadow our understanding of the contribution of his co-author.  Kline's work in linguistics (sentence fragments) reminds us of the dominant thinker approach that we often find as a hold over of 50s thinking, a mort main on the energetic independent ethos that was all the rage in academia in the late 60s.  

Kline's understated, indirect and almost accidental role also reminds us of a larger shift that was going on at the time that we might not even see.  I didn't see that shift, partly because I basked in the authority of "rhetorics" in the deadly quiet, Freshman English library on the third floor of Parlin hall on those sleepy Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.  That room provided me with my first key, and my first academic desk and gave me my first role in the academic world I was later to inhabit. 

But the profession was changing in ways we only see now and now only partly.  That shift is from originality and insight supported by social structures of exclusivity and wisdom to a vigorous questioning, aimed at seeing education as a problem to be solved and research as the ticket to it. Funded research became, over time, the watchword, the new ticket to academic life.  We see it in the transformations of universities, transformations that started 20 years ago with financial re-structuring, and we now see in state allocations based on research revenue, tuition income, and big dollar projects.  

At the time, a project like the Tagmemics project funded by the NEH was rare;  now it is expected.  The culture of reserve, academic autonomy, endowment security, and historical inevitability was at its maturity.  Information democracy, technological expediency, transparency of pedagogy, and accountability had only begun to make its way into our thinking.  

It made its way into the Ready Writing Handbook in ways that you can only see by listening to the words rather than reading them.  Kinneavy and Kline write, "the wining essays tend to be fairly rich in allusion,"  they "...seem to be sprinkled with effective figurative use of language."  The advice asks the reader to see for him or herself.  

"The allusions are nearly always used to support a point being made and therefore are usually relevant to the essay's theme.  The allusions are ordinary either to personal experience, or to historical examples, or to instances taken from literature." (p. 34)

Advice like this invites the reader and does not challenge.  It asserts basic functionality and practicality; less on expectations and conformity.  It doesn't offer a key, but opens the door.  





 

Tuesday, August 22, 2023

Austin, October 2023


Monday, October 2

Examine the James L. Kinneavy Collection, Dolph Briscoe Library 10:00 - 5:00 pm

Tuesday, October 3

Examine the Prairie View Interscholastic League Collection, Prairie View University, Prairie View, TX

Wednesday, October 4

 Visit to the UIL Office, 1701 Manor Road,  (512) 471-5883 

Talk in Parlin Hall, 4:00 - 5:00 pm.   "The Ready Writing Contest:  Struggling and Overcoming'

 Thursday, October 5

Examine the James L. Kinneavy Collection, Dolph Briscoe Library 10:00 - 5:00 pm

Friday, October 6

Examine the James L. Kinneavy Collection, Dolph Briscoe Library 10:00 - 5:00 pm

Saturday, October 7

Meeting with old friends

Tuesday, August 1, 2023

Who was Powell Stewart?

 


Who was Powell Stewart?

Smith, Grace Beam. 1965. “‘Not THE Method, but A Method.’” The English Journal 54 (5): 379–81.


Saturday, March 25, 2023

Two Narratives

The idea of two narratives weaves throughout this project.  One dual narrative is the 1956 version and the 1983 version of the Ready Writing Manual.  The second is the narrative of my experiences at UT during the late 60s an 70s and the analytical narrative of the analysis project. 


I have been reading Auerbach's account of the Homeric epic and the Biblical epic in Mimesis.  In this analysis the two epic, literary narratives are portrayed as one of manifestation of physical reality and the indexing or validating of physical reality to a cosmic (Hebrew and Biblical) tradition of interpretation.  

  • Manifested = unframed, in a present time, flowing, reactive, existent, repeatable entirely, always new, at the word/image level, epic
  • Validated = at an end point in time, a result, timeless, static, representative, indexed to meaning, systematic, mythic, fragile, framed, mythic
This distinction can be applied to the project if I see my recollections as manifested experience and the study itself as a validation.  I recollect the changes as I saw them from lived experience as a student, but I can validate them or see them now as reflecting or representing something I didn't or couldn't see at the time.  The validated experience is one of fitting, dot connecting, and aligning whereas the manifested experience is one of memory and uninterpretable images.  The validation is a search and the manifested is an experience. 

In terms of communication, the experience of a coalition, a group, a working group, a class, a team or whatever are a kind of lived manifestation.  Each person has his or her own reference, system, connectivity, relationality to their validated world, their meaning networks.  But the immediate experience is one of present reality.  Efforts to communicate are efforts to create systems of interpretable, symbolic, interpretable, referential meanings.  Such meanings become a shared, communicable artifact: a message.

Monday, March 20, 2023

Exploring Textbook Archives: The Larger Project

This document is written to give some shape to what might be the next phase of my project.  Some activities I would like to engage in for that project include:

  1. giving talks on automated text analysis with a focus on school textbooks
  2. recording school stories surrounding books
  3. providing a variety of platforms for textbook researchers and others to share their work
    • conferences
    • books of collected essays
    • film and video discussions of textbooks
    • collaborating with other researchers on larger projects
    • creating collector and reading groups
    • creating community research collectives

The current project, which is to do a textual and social analysis of the revision of text material in a high-school writing contest held in Texas, is intended to be a prototype or exemplar of the kinds of analysis that can be done on textbook archives.  

The larger project is exciting because, while so much is being done in the study of digitally archived materials, the study of textbooks offers ways to connect individual school experience with collective educational and democratic projects. It provides a democratic focus to research that can foster research skills and capacity in everyday people.  Almost everyone had some school or learning experience that may connect with books and text, or we have learned from reading.    

A number of digital textbook archives exist Internet Archive

    • available to the public as well as to scholars
    • Internet Archive lists 92 collections of textbooks, comprising 34,518 texts
    • digital archives are often searchable, and can be converted into analytic corpuses
    • archives are readily accessible to the visually and hearing impaired 

 Textbooks are keys to understanding many things

history, culture, technology, pedagogy, specific disciplines, oppression, ideologies, social attitudes

A tradition of textbook research exists

Anyon, Jean. 1979. “Ideology and United States History Textbooks.” Harvard Educational Review 49 (3): 361–86.

Issitt, John. 2004. “Reflections on the Study of Textbooks.” History of Education 33 (6): 683–96.

Paxton, Richard J. 1999. “A Deafening Silence: History Textbooks and the Students Who Read Them.” Review of Educational Research 69 (3): 315–39.

Nietz, John Alfred. The evolution of American secondary school textbooks. CE Tuttle Company, 1966.

Pierce, Bessie Louise. Civic attitudes in American school textbooks. Vol. 9. University of Chicago Press, 1930.

This study of civic education is one of a series of similar analyses in a variety of states. Broadly speaking, the common purpose of these inquiries has been that of examining objectively the systems of civic cohesion in a group of states, of determining the broad trends of civic training in these modem nations, and of indicating possibilities in the further development and control of civic education.  vii 

The study of textbooks lends itself to storytelling, community building, and social justice 

    • Groups can be formed to share research stories, school histories and stories, new resources, research methods
The study of textbooks lends itself to digital and automated processing of texts
    • Programs like Voyant.org Tools and other automated analysis platforms 
    • Loon, Austin van. 2022. “Three Families of Automated Text Analysis.” Social Science Research 108 (November): 102798.
What makes the project doable?
  • It is both public and academic, so many people can get involved in a variety of ways
  • It calls on shared experiences that are interesting to remember and make for good stories
  • It uses written and oral (story) discourse in productive ways
  • There are many archives that can be explored and they are all available to the public
  • It makes for interesting, intersectional and cross-disciplinary work
  • It uses easy to use and free technology for making meaning from text materials
  • It lends itself to scholarship because of the theoretical and technical basis of the work

Monday, March 6, 2023

Phusiopoiesis or The Art of Training

 I'm reading Debra Hawhee's book Bodily Arts, Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece, published by the University of Texas Press in 2004.  In this book the author discusses and explores the connections between athletics and the arts of rhetoric.


The exploration starts with the consideration of a statue of an athlete found in a shipwreck.  In examining the statue, the author makes the point that the debates about it, whether it was a god or mortal, athlete or orator "...suggest a convergence of athletics and rhetoric as arts of hexis, in other words, as bodily arts.  (4)  The story this book tells is of a time when the division between training in arts and athletics, for my purpose "academics" and "athletics" did not exist. 

In Greece, the Archaic and Classical periods instead marked a time when training was broad, when arts were intricately interwoven, and when mind and body moved and thought together.   (5)


Friday, March 3, 2023

The Lessons

I am beginning a study of two artifacts: the Ready Writing Handbook of 1965, by Powell Stewart,  and the Ready Writing Handbook of 1983, by Charles Robert Kline, JR. and James L. Kinneavy.  The purpose of the study is to identify elements of the two works that reflect the intellectual milieu in which they were written. 


The original:  Stewart, Powell.  The Ready Writers Handbook: For participants in the University Interscholastic League Ready Writing Contest. Bureau of Public School Service, Division of Extension, The University of Texas, Austin Texas, Numer 6504, Sixth printing, February, 1965, 16 pages.  

The revision: Kline, Charles R., Kinneavy, James L.  Ready Writing Handbook:  A manual for Ready Writers, Sponsors, and Judges, The University Interscholastic League, Division of Continuing Education, Austin, Texas, 1983, 126 pages.

The two images below represent word clouds made of the main instructional text in both works.  These were created in Voyant-Tools, a text analysis platform.  As a beginning of the study, these broad brush-strokes of the text can tell us something about the teaching approaches used in the two works. 

Over the next few months I will expand this analysis by looking more closely at the texts, and also contextualizing the two works against the backdrop of library holdings of the authors' papers and collections of archived materials pertaining to the changes in pedagogical approaches to composition teaching in the 1960s and 1970s and to the intellectual, cultural, and social climate of the two eras.  

1965

1983