toward historical memory

Neal Lerner in the current issue of Teaching English in the Two-Year College reports on a progressive writing laboratory that was an integral part of the U of Minnesota's General College in the early 1930s, narrating how the lab's writing-as-civic-action mission and process-oriented pedagogy reflected and contributed to the ethos of the new open-access campus. Those doing historical work in comp should have a look: "Laboring Together for the Common Good: The Writing Laboratory at the University of Minnesota General College, circa 1932."

But what thrills me about this article is the attention to history. TETYC has remained a largely ahistorical source of scholarship. (There are complex reasons for this, not the least of which is the relatively sparse archives at most two-year colleges and open admissions branch campuses. Many of these campuses began offering courses before the institution had a permanenet physical plant, so records, often, were lost. Plus, workload of course. Many practitioners at these institutions have heavy teaching loads, leaving little time to dig in the archives anyway.) The first peer-reviewed article I published appeared in TETYC about five years ago--Social Utility and Needs-Based Education: Writing Instruction at the Early Junior College--and I had a kind-of grad school fantasy at the time the piece would spur along huge amounts of historical research in the journal.

Didn't really happen and I subsequently had work (work that I succesfully placed elsewhere) rejected by TETYC for "not connecting enough with the two-year college classroom of now." Historical work provides context, serves as a starting point for praxis, fosters institutional memory, and helps us move beyond what Mary Soliday calls our notions of "always newness." Bravo to Lerner, and to the journal, for being receptive to such possibilities.