“The Power to Write”: Commonplacing Curricula and the University We Need Now

By Jessica Yood, City University of New York,
The Graduate Center & Lehman College

Fostering an academic commons— shared knowledge and experience —must be at the core of what the academy is and does. That is essentially the argument of my 2024 book The Composition Commons: Writing A New Idea of the University. Many policy makers agree with this in theory.  However commitment to a commons comes mostly by way of abstractions. Colleges claim to cultivate “learning communities” “supportive” of “culture” and “excellence” but assume this will materialize at any time, in any curriculum, with the magic of a well-made mission statement.[1] My book calls for something more particular and pressing. I make the case for a “composition commons,” a social and intellectual collective generated by writing that happens in classrooms of diverse, non-prestige colleges and universities, the kind of institutions where most educators and students teach and learn. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence, I detail practices that actualize this idea of the university, so that we recognize the composition commons as a legacy of the American academy and an essential component of student and scholarly life.

Why “commons” and not some other term is a question animating the first half of my book, which recovers forgotten writing-based general education experiments from the last century. Yet one term that didn’t appear anywhere in my research is commonplacing.  Strange it didn’t. Because this is exactly what the most radical and relevant commons curricula did. The occasion of this special issue helps me see that the writing-based curricula featured in my book look a lot like the social and collaborative art forms detailed here, and especially in Jillian M. Hess’s How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information.[2] In 1852 Cardinal John Henry Newman declared— and the young American nation was listening— that the idea of the university is about making an ideal society manifested in “mutual dependence” on heritage literature and its universal truths.[3] Our approach is to pay attention elsewhere. We notice how social and intellectual bonds develop through ordinary practices that produce extraordinary interventions in culture. My hope is that our collective efforts help bridge the gap between commons curricula of the past and commonplacing activities of the present as well as between composition and literary studies, and the work we do to revitalize higher education.

A good place to begin this bridge-building is to look at one curricular invention discussed in The Composition Commons, the Stanford Language Arts Investigation (SLAI). The SLAI took place between 1937-1939, as the “general education” movement and its experimentations with core learning ended, and as the “golden age” movement, with its renewed interest in Newman’s ideal civilization, began.[4]  Most contemporary general education programs stick to orthodoxies from that time, sourcing a commons from the cultural literacy of a shared past (great books) or from the promises of a prosperous future (skill sets, close reading standards). The SLAI had a different agenda: no canons, no outcomes, just rigorous pursuit of what the leaders defined as everyone’s “potential power to write.”

The SLAI recruited hundreds of educators to teach 10,000 students in public, under-served high schools and colleges. These “power to write” classes could be about anything, as long as they emphasized informal, emergent practices like freewriting and letters, which encouraged process and discovery.  Participants in the SLAI collected, coded, and reflected on the unique features of these genres.  The principal investigators, a foreign language scholar and a compositionist, thought that this material should become one part of the nation’s core curriculum. They called student writing “cultural matter” that develops a “world society” of writers.[5]

The Stanford Language Arts Investigation started out strong, buoyed by famous (and fickle) fans, like philosopher Columbia University’s John Dewey and Harvard’s I.A. Richards.[6]  Yet by 1945, policy makers dismissed the Investigation as unfit for the unifying academic culture of the Cold War. Power, pursued with potential in writing by all, proved a short-lived idea of the American academy.

My book blames elite institutions and its acculturation agenda for debasing progressive composition initiatives. But this is not the full story.  Everyone turned their backs on the Stanford Language Arts Investigation because it refused to standardize requirements or codify findings into universal truths or replicable lessons. The final project for one of the SLAI offerings, a World Literature section, had students annotating hundreds of class freewrites into a student manual. A vocational college class published their close readings and personal opinions of Engineering textbooks. Both counted as core curriculum because both added to the content of evolving academic communities.

This belief places Stanford Language Arts Investigation squarely in the commonplacing tradition, a tradition of generating shared knowledge from the ground up. In the second half of my book I describe how today’s students carry on this tradition. One Lehman College class handwrote letters about the week’s reading assignment, delivering them to a new classmate each week. Students uses these letters for their final exam: an epistolary novella about the course. Another group kept a semester-long google doc, which included soundbites from class discussion, doodles, and post-lecture interviews with the professor. This was integrated into the next term’s syllabus.

We need to learn to read these forms as knowledge, as literature. That is, we need to commonplace curricula. 

Curricula are usually designed by and for educators and enacted by students in the work they do in and outside of classrooms, work that has consequences for their ability to move through college. A commonplace curriculum is co-created by and for educators and students in classrooms. It assumes that this local approach has wide-ranging consequences, beyond college walls. In other words, to borrow terms from the editors of this special issue, a commonplace curriculum is “intimate” and “world-building.” It is intimate because making it requires engagement with the background knowledges of the educators and students who inhabit that space at that time. It is world-building because it contributes to a general education revised over and over again in the present even as it is accountable to our histories and future hopes.

Fixed content, canons and critique are not going away. They stabilize scholarship. But they don’t do enough to stretch disciplines, develop disciples, and connect us to one another and to our literacy stories. In creating curricula from the shared practices of our classrooms, we access untapped powers of persons and projects often ignored in national conversations about higher learning. That will benefit American higher education. And it will benefit the world society too. Because rather than peddle in myths about the death of writing or reading or English departments we commonplace humanists participate in the practice of empowering the university we need now. 

Notes

[1] These are phrases that come from The City University of New York’s Core Values mission statement but this language is used in many colleges and universities. See https://www.cuny.edu/about/administration/offices/evaluation/about-us/our-mission-vision-core-values-2/. 

[2] Compositoinist Andrea Lunsford’s review of Hess’s book, “On Commonplacing” makes a thoughtful connection between commonplacing and the rhetoric and writing classroom. See https://community.macmillanlearning.com/t5/bits-blog/on-commonplacing/ba-p/17623

[3] Newman, John Henry. 1996. The Idea of the University, edited by Frank M. Turner. New Haven: CT, Yale University Press: 99.

[4] Louis Menand unpacks the pros and cons of this golden age in “College: The End of the Golden Age,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 2001, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2001/10/18/college-the-end-of-the-golden-age.

[5] See chapter one in The Composition Commons. Utah State University Press, 2024: 19-20.

[6] Richards was once a consultant for the Stanford Language Arts Investigation. After World War II, he says nothing about this experiment and promotes Western literature and literary studies as the essential content necessary for building a generally education populace in a democratic nation.  See “The ‘Future’ of the Humanities in General Education.” The Journal of General Education 9.3: 232-37.

About the Author

Jessica Yood is associate professor of English at Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center and author of The Composition Commons: Writing A New Idea of the University (2024). In her research for The Composition Commons, Yood collected and analyzed 232 writing samples from 45 students in English 111 over the course of two years, coding features of this archive, connecting it a century-old tradition of informal classroom composition practices, and illuminating how these genres contribute to shared knowledge and a dynamic academic commons.