The Dartmouth Exhibit Live webinar featured a live engagement with one of the WAC Clearinghouse's newest resources, the Dartmouth ‘66 Exhibit. Participants used the opportunity offered by the webinar to reconsider the Seminar’s impact almost sixty years later. We are thrilled to have assembled a distinguished panel of respondents, representing scholars from around the globe. A video recording of the webinar is available.
Read critical reflections on the Dartmouth '66 Exhibit from all event participants.
Date: October 18, 2022
Time: 11am CDT/ 12pm EDT / 5pm BST / 3am AEST
Place: Zoom
Brenton Doecke has written extensively in the fields of English curriculum and pedagogy and teacher education, including several essays on the significance of ‘growth’ pedagogy in the history of English teaching. In 2016 he helped to organise a forum on the Dartmouth Seminar for the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE), and subsequently co-edited a special issue of English in Australia on Dartmouth. His latest publication is a co-authored book, Literary Knowing and the Making of English Teachers: The Role of Literature in Shaping English Teachers’ Professional Knowledge and Identities (Routledge, 2023).
John Hardcastle is an Associate Researcher at UCL Institute of Education, University College London. Before lecturing at the Institute, he taught English in an East London comprehensive school and worked as an ILEA advisory teacher in Hackney and Tower Hamlets. He has written extensively about urban classrooms, English pedagogy, and cultural diversity as well as contemporary socio-cultural theory. Following a major research project, Social Change and English, 1945–1965, which he directed, and which involved interviewing key British delegates (Harold Rosen, John Dixon, Dorothy and Douglas Barnes) to the original Dartmouth seminar of 1966, with co-researchers, he wrote, English Teaching in a Post-war Democracy: Emerging Choice in London Schools, 1945–1965 (2014). He is presently researching in pupils’ experience of grammar school education in the early 1960s.
Dorell Thomas earned a PhD in English Education in 2019. He is currently a lecturer in Composition at Brooklyn College. His 2021 College Composition and Communication article, “Beyond Disciplinary Drama: Federal Dollars, ESL for African Americans, and Public Memory”, suggests that the 1966 Dartmouth Conference is not sufficiently situated in English studies--specifically, within the larger context of the Cold War, federal and foundation sponsorship, and attempts to define who qualifies as a native English speaker.
Amy J. Wan (she/her/hers) works as an Associate Professor of English at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on writing, literacy, and pedagogy and is the author of Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times (Pittsburgh, 2014), a historical examination of citizenship’s influence on literacy instruction. Her writing has also appeared in College English, WPA Journal, Writing Spaces, Rhetoric Review, Literacy in Composition Studies, and Radical Teacher, among others. Her current project analyzes how to create spaces for change and resistance within the global US university through a historical and contemporary study of policies addressing access, diversity, race, and language.
Annette Vee is Associate Professor of English at University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches courses on writing, digital composition, materiality, and literacy. She is the author of Coding Literacy (MIT Press, 2017), which connects the computing to the history of literacy. She fell into the Dartmouth ’66 project by researching intersections between the development of the programming language BASIC and the Seminar, which both took place on the Dartmouth campus in the 1960s.
Megan McIntyre is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and Director of the Program in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Arkansas. She was formerly the Assistant Director for Program Development in Dartmouth College's Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. Her work at the Institute and her interests in the complex history of writing studies led to her work with Annette on this project.