by Dorell Oneil Thomas
Lecturer in Composition at Brooklyn College
Remembering the 1966 Dartmouth Conference, as Joseph Harris does, for its dramatic framing of conflicts in English instruction is legitimate. Writing studies, like any other discipline, benefits from having a shared public memory, among its experts, about both the field’s origin stories and which questions—have and currently—reflect the discipline’s epistemological agenda. In Authoring a Discipline, Maureen Daly Goggin’s cites the important function of histories in “legitimizing intellectual communities and in helping them to secure a place in academia” (xiv). But, both Harris and Goggin largely center elite groups of researchers as the main source of creativity in a discipline.
In effect, this discourse reifies the status of the author as the primary agent in knowledge production. Somehow, the researcher is contracted by sponsors and remains ostensibly immune to the sponsors’ influence. In John E. Dixon’s account of Dartmouth, Growth through English, Dixon uses a map-making metaphor to isolate the researcher’s unique role in charting threshold concepts for a developing field (1). Different histories of composition engage in a similar rhetoric to represent the Dartmouth Conference’s seminal status, using largely dramatic retellings of a clash between British and American teacher-researchers. The archival consequences in composition amount to outsized representations of epic confrontations, a “Copernican shift” in Harris's words (631), and heroic epistemology.
Perceived failure has less value in a knowledge regime that privileges the development of new paradigms. In fact, despite direct connections to Dartmouth, English as a Second Language (ESL) pedagogy for African Americans remains undertheorized and marked for complete erasure. Prominent linguists at the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) presented research at Dartmouth about using foreign language pedagogy to help native-born marginalized groups. Albert H. Marckwardt edited this collection of Dartmouth essays entitled Language and Language Learning. At the time, the dominant assumption was (and perhaps persists) that language patterns unique to Black speech are so deviant that this vernacular does not qualify as a regional variety of English. Two years before Dartmouth, Marckwardt summarized the essays for another collection, Social Dialects and Language Learning (Bloomington Conference), where the linguist Charles Ferguson compares Black English in the United States to Basque speakers in Spain (114). Both groups speak a language that the linguists in question viewed as essentially foreign, given the preferred medium of instruction in schools.
Featuring the role of researchers in histories of Dartmouth forecloses on a closer reading of coordinated sponsorship—especially both the federal government and the different foundations’ roles in shaping questions that researchers ask. The federal government’s Cold War priorities, which provided money to researchers through the 1958 and 1964 National Defense of Education Act, meant that English instruction had to present itself as relevant to the Government’s domestic and international agenda. In my own article, “Beyond Disciplinary Drama: Federal Dollars, ESL Instruction for African Americans, and Public Memory,” I uncover evidence from more writerly communication, such as memos between linguists and sponsors, that show a Ford Foundation official actively shaping research at the Center for Applied Linguistics in the 1960s. Yet, Dixon’s more readerly history (Growth through English) limits the Carnegie Foundation’s role to a paratextual reference in the preface.
The seminal status of the 1966 Dartmouth Conference is not actually diminished by its association with ESL instruction for African Americans. Essentially, Edward Said makes the same argument in Culture and Imperialism as I am making here, that evidence of colonial designs does not reduce the value of canonized or seminal work (13). On the contrary, pairing the Dartmouth Conference with ESL for African Americans permits more complex readings of the Anglo-American Seminar on the Teaching of English (Dartmouth’s official name).
References
Brandt, Deborah. “The Sponsors of Literacy.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 49, no. 2, 1998, pp. 165–85.
Dixon, John. Growth through English. Cox & Wyman LTD, 1967.
Ferguson, Charles. “Teaching Standard Languages to Dialect Speakers.” Social Dialects and Language Learning, edited by Roger W. Shuy, National Council of Teachers of English, 1964. pp. 112–117.
Goggin, Maureen Daly. Authoring a Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2000.
Harris, Joseph. “After Dartmouth: Growth and conflict in English.” College English, vol. 56, no. 6, 1995, pp. 631–646.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism, Vintage Books, 1994.
Thomas, Dorell Oneil. “Beyond Disciplinary Drama: Federal Dollars, ESL Instruction for African Americans, and Public Memory.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 73, no. 1, 2021, pp. 52–79.