Suzanne Bordelon

Preparing students for college‐level reading and writing: Implementing a rhetoric and writing class in the senior year

Abstract This study investigated the instructional practices of three high school teachers perceived as successful in implementing a new rhetoric and writing course in an ethnically diverse high school district in the Southwest United States. Using qualitative research methods over a three‐month period, researchers examined teacher practices related to the yearlong course, teachers’ perceptions of the successes and challenges in applying the curriculum, and the impact of the curriculum on teachers and students. Through an analysis of field notes, structured interviews, a pilot survey, and course‐related documents, researchers found that the class provided important bridging opportunities aimed at preparing students for college‐level reading and writing. The curriculum also emphasized direct, explicit instruction, which several scholars contend benefits linguistically and culturally diverse students. In addition, course creators offered weekly staff‐development sessions that supported teachers in implementing the new curriculum. Areas of challenge that emerged included the course pacing, reading selections, and the focus on writing and revising.

Contradicting and complicating feminization of rhetoric narratives: Mary Yost and argument from a sociological perspective

Abstract This article adds to the growing body of feminist scholarship critiquing Robert J. Connors’ assertion that the entrance of women into higher education in the nineteenth century contributed to the decline of oratory and debate. It contradicts and complicates Connors’ claim by highlighting the efforts of Mary Yost, who taught English at Vassar College during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Yost promoted debate both in the classroom and in extracurricular activities, and she crafted a feminist theory of argument quite distinct from the traditional type of argument that Connors argues was displaced after women entered higher education.

Participating on an “Equal Footing”: The Rhetorical Significance of California State Normal School in the Late Nineteenth Century

This essay examines the rhetorical education that late-nineteenth-century women received at California State Normal School. The article complicates Gregory Clark and S. Michael Hallorans claim that during the nineteenth century, rhetorical theory and practice shifted from an oratorical to a professional culture by considering how gender, class, and region affected this transformation. Building on the research of Beth Ann Rothermel, this analysis also reveals that although experimentation concerning womens gender roles occurred in the northeast, it was more sustained in the West. California women generally faced fewer gender constraints than did women in northeastern state normal schools and were provided with more opportunity to learn typically masculine discourse practices.

“What Should Teachers Do to Improve Themselves Professionally?”: Women's Rhetorical Education at California State Normal School Alumni Association in the 1890s

Although scholars in the field have begun to investigate normal schools, they still represent an underexamined site. One significant aspect of normal schools that has been overlooked is the educational activities of their alumni associations. California State Normal School Alumni Association, the focus of this analysis, provided a woman-centered space where women could engage in lively, rhetorically sophisticated public discussion of issues integral to women teachers in the 1890s. This analysis demonstrates that these alumni members, like clubwomen across the nation, participated in the process of transforming conventional assumptions about women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

“Resolved That the Mind of Woman Is Not Inferior to That of Man”: Women's Oratorical Preparation in California State Normal School Coeducational Literary Societies in the Late Nineteenth Century

Complicating claims about the decline of oratorical culture in the nineteenth century, this article demonstrates that rhetorical training was integral to the coeducational literary societies at California State Normal School in the 1870s and 1890s and that women benefited from such education. The societies were based on assumptions of relative equality between the sexes, fostering the development of teachers who would serve as powerful public speakers and leaders within their communities. This study also challenges arguments concerning the feminization of argumentation in the nineteenth century by highlighting the centrality of debate to the societies and the ways this argument overlooks such activities.

Restructuring English and Society through an Integrated Curriculum: Ruth Mary Weeks's A Correlated Curriculum

Some scholars trace the start of writing across the curriculum to the 1970s. However, in 1929, when appointed president of the National Council of Teachers of English, Ruth Mary Weeks initiated A Correlated Curriculum (1936), a significant interdisciplinary project that specifically viewed English as the mechanism for achieving an integrated curriculum. Although her goal was not fully realized, Weekss efforts are important in their attempts to open education to broader classes of students, to promote learning as a collaborative process, to prepare all students to meet the demands of transforming social and industrial circumstances, and, ultimately, to restructure industrial America.

‘Private Letters’ for Public Audiences: The Complexities of Ethos in Louise Clappe’s The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851–1852

This essay examines the work of Louise Clappe (1819–1906), specifically The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851–1852. Clappe’s Shirley Letters are significant because she uses the epistolary genre in the form of private letters to her sister to reach public audiences, a strategy practiced by few other American pioneer women who have been studied. Furthermore, although her location in the mining camps is extremely limiting in a material and social sense, Clappe creatively details her deprivations to highlight her distinctiveness and ingenuity in adapting to California’s challenging frontier.

Embodied Ethos and Rhetorical Accretion: Genevieve Stebbins and the Delsarte System of Expression

This essay extends efforts to complicate traditional understandings of ethos by considering it as expressed through and by means of the body. This analysis also examines ethos in relation to Vicki Tolar Burton’s concept of rhetorical accretion or the practice of overlaying new texts on the primary core text. To reveal the significance of analyzing ethos in this manner, this study explores the work of Genevieve Stebbins, a late nineteenth-century proponent of the ideas of French acting and vocal instructor François Delsarte. The essay examines her use of textual accretion as a form of critique but also as a means of acceptance and overlay. More significantly, it reveals the ways that Stebbins’s deployment of rhetorical accretion represents a striking reversal of Burton’s concept. Instead of men overlaying a woman’s text we see the opposite practice in Stebbins’s case.

Nineteenth-Century California Teachers’ Institutes: Exploring Connections Among Teachers’ Institutes, Normal Schools, and Elite Eastern Colleges

Building from extant scholarship on normal schools, this essay takes up a complementary but less well-examined topic: state teachers’ institutes of the nineteenth century and the short-term practical training and professional guidance they provided teachers. Focusing on California’s state-sponsored institutes held from 1861–1863, this study examines the ways these institutes promoted the new progressive European pedagogy. More significant, extending an ecological approach to historical analysis, this essay proposes that the relationship among normal schools, teachers’ institutes, and some faculty from select eastern colleges may have been closer than has been suggested. Thus, this analysis suggests a more complex and integrated history during this period.

A “Literary Approach to Speech Work”: Oral Reading and Speech at San Jose State Teachers College, 1862–1930

Abstract This essay investigates the ways that some teachers colleges not typically considered in traditional histories of the Speech field reconfigured aspects of elocution or the performance arts through their teaching practices. Focusing on San Jose State Teachers College in the early decades of the twentieth century when Speech was emerging as a discipline, this analysis demonstrates how some speech teachers refashioned and democratized the teaching of oral reading, particularly the oral reading of poetry. In so doing, this study reveals the gendered nature of our standard histories while broadening our understanding of how teachers colleges fit into the disciplinary split between Speech and English.