Cheryl Glenn and Jessica Enoch

I want to start this blog with a quote from Drama in the Archives: Rereading Methods, Rewriting History by Cheryl Glenn, and Jessica Enoch. “For years now, historians of rhetoric and composition have studies the history of university-level writing practices by turning their attention toward archival and primary documents such as, “actual student writings, teacher records, unprinted notes, and pedagogical materials ephemera that writing courses have always generated but never kept” (323). Archival research practices are, “a Burkean framework of “scenes, acts, agents, agencies, purposes, and attitudes” can invigorate our understanding of historiographic methods and open up new possibilities for future histories of rhetoric composition” (322). This article is particularly important because it touches on issues that are central to feminist pedagogy. Namely the question of whether it is productive to essentialize women's writing. Looser, in demonstrating the dangers of blindly accepting essential definitions of women's writing, is able to make a case for examining closely when and how we invoke these descriptions. This fits into the debate surrounding teaching masculine and feminine (for lack of better terms) modes of writing in composition classes. Looser suggests that it might be dangerous to perpetuate these restrictive categories without a clear examination/explanation of the reasons behind doing so. Therefore, the question becomes: are our students sophisticated enough to understand that we are not advocating a split between masculine and feminine writing, but that we are merely attempting to articulate a need for a more accepting academy? In other words, should we bring this debate into our classrooms, where we may be reinforcing the dichotomy instead of working to eliminate essentialisms?
I enjoyed how Glenn and Enoch emphasized that, “not all research in rhetoric and composition begins-or ends-on a university campus or at a great research library” (326). I strongly believe that some of the best research comes from a number of different sources. For example, I had to write a history paper a few years ago and some of my research and sources were from my grandfather and his friends. I had gained so much insight on what really happened and the emotions that they experienced during that time in the war. They also kept records like newspaper clippings, diaries, letters and postcards that helped me tremendously. Their stories and records helped my archive research experience to be efficient, fun, and less daunting. Glenn and Enoch go on to state, “in their research, these scholars could not access catalogued materials that had been archived by professional librarians at the university library. Instead, they leveraged the collections of their “pack -rat” colleagues” (327). That is more often than most the best kind of research!