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.

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

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)

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