Teaching Through the Archives: Text, Collaboration, and Activism - Tapa blanda

Teaching Rhetoric and Composition through the Archives: A Critical Introduction
Wendy Hayden and Tarez Samra Graban

Telling stories about the past, our past, is a key moment in the making of our selves. To the extent that memory provides their raw material, such narratives of identity are shaped as much by what is left out of the account—whether forgotten or repressed—as by what is actually told.
—Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, 2.

Since John C. Gerber’s invitation in 1950 for readers of College Composition and Communication to come together at the newly formed Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in order to more sustainably “develo[p] a coordinated research program” about teaching college composition (12), the field of rhetoric and composition has remained simultaneously interested in both its knowledge-making and its history-making potential. Unsurprisingly, institutional archives and repositories have played a critical role, serving as subjects of our graduate seminars, methodologies for our research, service sites for our composition classes, and agents in our disciplinary identifications. To wit, the National Archives of Composition and Rhetoric, and its preconference workshop and special interest group at the CCCC (which celebrated its ten-year anniversary in 2017), have made progress in historicizing the discipline. A survey of rhetoric and composition scholarship since the first CCCC shows that archival inquiry has always helped to define rhetoric and composition as a field interested in its own emergence as it interrogates the absences and presences that invariably ensue when we teach our institutional and local histories.

Indeed, since the field’s inception, rhetoric and composition scholars have conducted exclusively archival explorations into ephemera (Carr et al), underrepresented schools (Gold, Rhetoric at the Margins; Ritter; Ostergaard and Wood; Donahue and Moon) or curricula (Rose; Schultz; Sullivan), and overlooked pedagogues (Enoch, Refiguring; Bordelon) in an attempt to find new pathways for doing recovery work. In 2015, Lori Ostergaard surveyed articles sourced from archives in College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, and Composition Studies, finding an increase from one in four to almost half (81). These explorations have been done partly in response to a long tradition of critical historical questions raised by Jim Berlin’s 1984 expansion of Albert Kitzhaber’s 1953 dissertation; partly in response to Robert Connors’s and Sharon Crowley’s historical interrogations into first-year composition’s past; partly in response to John Brereton’s documentary presentation of the field; partly in response to Jean Carr, Stephen Carr, and Lucille Schultz’s re-presentation of textbooks and primers as veritable “archives”; and partly in response to the need to acknowledge various groups of students and pedagogues whose stories have been omitted from disciplinary histories (Newcomer; Halloran; Smitherman). Recent work has addressed methods and methodologies (L’Eplattenier and Mastrangelo; Ramsey et al) as well as the redefinition and evaluation of digital archives in relation to historiography (Cushman; Enoch and Bessette; Haskins; Graban; Graban et al; Solberg; Yakel, “Who”) in an attempt to find new pathways for doing recovery work. All of these explorations—while situated in certain moments—point to extant and ongoing interests in the evolving role of institutional repositories.

This collection addresses the readers, scholars, and teachers of existing collections such as Beyond the Archives(Kirsch and Rohan), Working in the Archives (Ramsey et al), and Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration (L’Eplattenier and Mastrangelo). While we acknowledge these significant volumes, as well as other foundational compilations of secondary scholarship in archival theory, archival practice, and archival methods (cf. Burton; Blouin and Rosenberg; Kirsch and Rohan; Ramsey et al)—all offering some explicit crossover with rhetoric and composition—we note the absence of a collection showing how innovative course models for rhetoric and composition and related fields have grown from what many of us practice as a pedagogy of archives in response to specific institutional constraints. Landmark Essays in Archival Research (Gaillet et al) points to some of rhetoric and composition’s vital contributions in archival studies, and Lynée Gaillet and Michelle Eble’s textbook Primary Research and Writing: People, Places, and Spaces usefully includes archival research as one section teaching primary research. As well, Kathryn Comer, Michael Harker, and Ben McCorkle argue that innovative pedagogies are possible through incorporation of the Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives in their collection, The Archive as Classroom. Both The Archive as Classroom and Jane Greer and Laurie Grobman’s Pedagogies of Public Memory come closest to our vision for this work, given their explicit emphasis on teaching (about) writing studies through archives—both digital and physical—and memorial sites. In joining with this work, our collection explores questions about the relationship between rhetoric and composition’s pedagogy and its identities and values: how do the ways in which we teach through archives reflect the knowledges we value as a field? Moreover, how does rhetoric and composition’s pedagogy, derived from its own ethics and values, result in a theory of archives that could benefit others outside the discipline?

Charting Shared Archival Turns

The “archival turn” in rhetoric and composition has not only benefited from contributions of other fields, it has also made ethical and pedagogical interventions in them, including public memory studies, digital humanities, information literacy scholarship, and gender studies. Scholars in rhetoric and composition either themselves work in these fields or collaborate with scholars in these fields to showcase the values and the value of archives to critical pedagogical work (cf. Buehl et al; Keegan and McElroy; Mutnick, “The Appeal of the Archives”; Saidy et al; VanHaitsma). Yet it is important to acknowledge the collaboration on both ends, and one distinguishing characteristic of rhetoric and composition’s archival turn is its understanding of how reciprocal these contributions can and should become.

We offer this collection in part to meet that need in the humanities, making steps to resolve what archival studies scholar Michelle Caswell has called a “failure of interdisciplinarity when it comes to archives” (4). Caswell illustrates the critical distinction between discussions of  “‘the [construct] archive’ by humanities scholars” and discussions of “archives by archival studies scholars,” arguing that they are “happening on parallel tracks” without engaging in the same conversation or “benefiting from each other’s insights” (4). Since the popularity of Derrida’s Archive Fever in 1995, Caswell says,

‘the archive’ has been deconstructed, decolonized, and queered by scholars in fields as wide-ranging as English, anthropology, cultural studies, and gender and ethnic studies. Yet almost none of the humanistic inquiry at ‘the archival turn’ . . . has acknowledged the intellectual contribution of archival studies as a field of theory and praxis in its own right, nor is this humanities scholarship in conversation with ideas, debates, and lineages in archival studies. (4)

Caswell attributes this disconnect in part to the feminization of archival studies and to the “the humanities-has-theory archives-have-practice trope” she finds common in humanities scholarship (27). This is a trope that rhetoric and composition has had to overcome as well, in trying to carefully and thoughtfully contend with the materialist convictions of Wolfgang Ernst (“Archival Rumblings”) and Walter Benjamin (“Work”), enabling archived objects and historicized spaces to function both as critical subjects and as critical agents. For her part, Caswell recommends that humanities disciplines acknowledge the field of archival studies through citing their work, creating a dialogue with them, and jointly teaching graduate seminars on archival methodology (29).

In Caswell’s critique of humanities scholarship that acknowledges neither the work of archivists nor the field of archival studies, and in her observation that the “archival turn” often does not refer to “actually existing archives” (23–26), we see an opportunity to illuminate the ways in which rhetoric and composition’s disciplinary appropriation ofarchival work is in fact a disciplinary appropriation through archival work. To be clear, we do not promote the idea that rhetoric and composition’s only viable contributions through archival studies are found in “actually existing archives.” In fact, we take our cues not only from our own discipline, but also from library sciences and cultural informatics to become more cognizant of how theoretical flattening and erasure can and do occur through our archiving practices in both physical and digital realms (Finnegan; Graban; Jimerson; Juby; Ridolfo; Sullivan and Graban). Instead, we see Caswell’s critique as one of expectation and approach, reflecting on how too often and too easily “actually existing” archival collections become discounted as sites for real critical work.
The contributors to this volume work in “actually existing” archival collections at their institutions and in their communities, demonstrating how even though we as a field embrace a definition of archive as a more theoretical space in the ways that Caswell has criticized, we ground our definition in our work in “actually existing”—whether physical or digital, dynamic or static, established or newly created—archives. In fact, though the contributions’ focus on these existing archives may indicate a definition of archive as static, this collection’s focus on epistemic possibility reveals more dynamic definitions, often informed by their interdisciplinary collaborations. To that end, we see that scholars in rhetoric and composition have emphasized the importance of working alongside archivists to create, research in, and teach with archives, both in university collections and in community settings because, as Jessica Enoch has noted, these are often not our field’s stories to tell. Speaking with and sharing our work with archivists is positioned by Enoch not merely as a collaboration or courtesy, but as an integral research methodology for the field (“Changing” 61). This collection focuses on what is the field’s story to tell and how that story has benefited from and benefits other disciplines. A survey of work in our field demonstrates that rhetoric and composition scholars not only frequently partner (physically and virtually) with archivists, directors of special collections, and scholarly communication librarians, they also actively and critically reorient themselves toward<> both the collaboration and the archival collection(s), in turn emphasizing a rhetoricity to the archives that is realized in our decisions to teach about, for, and through various archival collections. In field journals and edited collections, there are already some specific places that indicate these reorientations (Sullivan; Graban and Rose; Glenn and Enoch; Neal et al; Grobman, “(Re)Writing”; Ridolfo; Morris and Rose). Furthermore, as David Gold points out, in reassessing its historiographic inheritances, “the field has begun to reassess its ideological inheritance from scholarly work of the 1980s and 1990s, becoming more reflective about its practice . . . [and] has begun to turn attention to research methodologies, formerly a somewhat ad hoc affair” (“Remapping” 16). This dual attention to research methodologies and to collaboration with archivists in “actually existing archives” has enabled the values characterizing the field’s archival turn to reflect its pedagogical values as well. Thus, while much of our scholarship positions rhetoric and composition as a field well-versed in borrowing from archival and library studies, this volume aims to highlight and showcase one of the principal ways that rhetoric and composition’s archival turn is distinguished from other fields: its focus on theories of teaching. How do we bring the archives into the classroom? How do students become historians of rhetoric and composition’s archives? How do our reflective practices both stem from and contribute to a critical understanding of what to do better?