A qualitative approach to first-year college composition in the American Upper South from 1930-1945

This examination of college composition instruction at three Kentucky and Tennessee schools in the 1930-1945 era gives the field of rhetoric and composition a richer insight into the type of instruction offered as experienced by both students and teachers. It strives, in short, to merge the academic with the personal. A qualitative methodology, while certainly not unique in composition instruction research, is herein uniquely applied to history, and the resultant product benefits from the simultaneously-broadened data base and focused vignettes. Most historians in the field tell us only what was studied (by examining the textbook used). If they do examine who taught (after generally ignoring who studied), they only tell us about famous scholars at major institutions. This project purposefully ignores famous institutions and famous historical figures of composition instruction.

The study situates not only what was studied--as evidenced by lesson plans, handouts, diaries, and personal recollections--but also who taught and who studied at schools typically ignored by historians. Oral history interviews from former students and professors help to complete the picture of college composition in the mid-twentieth century.

No other studies have examined schools in the Upper South, so what this study adds to the histories we already have is another perspective--a geographic one with abundant socioeconomic and cultural underpinnings in light of the impoverished conditions and poor educational systems in Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1930-1945 period.

The study reveals that trend-setting pedagogies and techniques were not relegated to the more elite schools in this country. Furthermore, this dissertation serves to dispel the either/or fallacies which many other histories in the field offer. The resultant portrait is one of students rushing to class with milk jars in their car trunks and of teachers staying up late to grade papers after playing with their children. Though parts of the picture are blurry or even missing, it is a portrait much more reflective of the ambiguities life offers than existing histories provide. It is a portrait of real people holding "the seams of life" together.