Several Sigourneys : Circulation, Reprint Culture, and Sigourney’s Educational Prose

In her now-famous essay Reinventing Lydia Sigourney, Nina Baym argued that Sigourney\u27s literary range inevitably allows for the construction of several Sigourneys who are unknown to modern criticism. 1 Since 1990, when Baym revealed Sigourney as a student of history and a writer of historical prose, scholars have filled the gap she identified with a variety of Sigourneys, identifying her generic plurality\u27\u27 as a means to achieve multi-positionality as a woman poet, as Paula Bernat Bennett writes, and noting that Sigourney\u27s wide-ranging oeuvre does not readily lend itself to a reading of the author as a sentimental poetess. 2 Subsequently, scholars like Bennett, Wendy Oasler Johnson, and Elizabeth Petrino have taken up the call to reinvent, reconsider, or, as Dasler Johnson strives to do, revive Sigourney as a complex poet worthy of scholarly consideration. But while such scholars acknowledge Sigourney\u27s range of genres, few have focused on her prose. Even as they acknowledge it, they leave it, as Allison Giffen says, all but overlooked. 3 In this chapter, I fill this gap by focusing on the reinvention of Sigourney as an educator who used her prose to advance her educational causes. Many scholars have remarked on her educational program, and she herself was admittedly always the teacher, identifying herself as a schoolmistress and a literary woman. 4 For example, in chapter 12, Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso pays similar attention to Sigourney\u27s didactic use of history and biography, which connects hers to the educational projects of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the other transcendentalists. In From School to Salon, Mary Loeffelholz offers perhaps the most extended attention to the centrality of schooling to Sigourney\u27s writing and life. Loeffelholz suggests that we consider the school as the common social location ... of Sigourney\u27s poetic and prose genres, inseparable from their matrix of republican ideas. 5 That is, she frames schooling and Sigourney\u27s identity as a teacher-rather than the home and motherhood-as central to the writer\u27s work as a whole. 6 In her attention to the school, Loeffelholz raises a question that is central to my own essay: Is the authority of the teacher modeled on that of the mother, or that of the mother on the teacher? She answers, For Lydia Sigourney, the role of the teacher came first, nor just biographically but historically, ideologically, and almost, it seems ontologically. 7 I would add that, while Sigourney positioned herself in relation to domestic culture in her early work, she developed an increasingly professional authorial persona in relation to education that drew on the authority of mothers but was increasingly distanced from the home. In other words, she spoke to maternal teachers in her earlier essays; but by the late 1830s and 1840s, as the schoolroom became an accepted site of practice for women students and teachers, she increasingly intervened in conversations about formal, extra-domestic schooling. Further, in Sigourney\u27s broad circulation of her educational essays, we can clearly trace the evolution of her ideas about education and gender and about herself as a woman educator, which changed as the cultural terrain around women\u27s education shifted, particularly in regard to what Loeffelholz calls the emergence of the domestic- tutelary regime, in ways she did not always control.

Beginning at the End: Reimagining the Dissertation Committee, Reimagining Careers

In this article, we forward a perspective on interdisciplinarity and diversity that reconsiders the notion of expertise in order to unstick discussions of graduate education reform that have been at an impasse for some fortyfive years. As research problems have become increasingly complex so has demand for scholars who specialize narrowly within a discipline and who understand the importance of contributions from other disciplines. In light of this, we reimagine the dissertation committee as a group of diverse participants from within and beyond the academy who contribute their knowledge and skills to train the next generation of scholars and researchers to be members of interdisciplinary teams. Graduate students, then, are not expected to be interdisciplinary themselves, but to work in interdisciplinary and diverse teams to discover new insights on their research areas and to prepare for careers interacting with a range of academic and non-academic stakeholders

“A Maturity of Thought Very Rare in Young Girls”: Women’s Public Engagement in Nineteenth-Century High School Commencement Essays

Though largely debarred from public rhetorical performance as adult women, young women in the nineteenth-century US received rhetorical training and performed their original compositions before large public audiences as high school students. Their access to the academic platform stemmed in part from their politically contained position as students and “girls” in this context. But students used these opportunities to intervene in political debates and to comment on their experiences as women and students. These rhetorical interventions represent an important part of our rhetorical history, shedding light on a significant rhetorical opportunity for many young women across the US

“Classbook Sense”: Genre and Girls’ School Yearbooks in the Early-Twentieth-Century American High School

In the spring of 1908, the students of Louisville Girls High School (LGHS) in Louisville, Kentucky, inaugurated their first school annual, a special edition of the school’s quarterly literary journal dedicated to the senior class. The object of this volume, as delineated in the preface, was “to collect into a narrow compass, and to arrange in a form convenient for reference, and consultation, a choice selection of the remarkable utterances, and pictured thoughts of the great among all classes, but chiefly of the great Seniors among the class of nineteen hundred and eight” (LGHS, Record 2). That is, a primary purpose of this annual was to compose a shared repository of memories for reference, particularly in the face of an implicitly wide range of student experiences

“A polished, a practical, or a profound education” : (gendered) rhetorical literacies and higher learning in Louisville’s first free public high schools, 1856-1896.

This archival project investigates the first public high schools in Louisville as they negotiated the means and ends of providing higher education to an increasingly diverse and expanding body of learners. Drawing on primary documents from the schools’ first four decades of operation—particularly school board reports, newspapers, and student writing—I foreground the interplay and overlap between regional and institutional identities and histories, which contribute to a rich and complex picture of “higher education” in the nineteenth-century US. Each chapter of the dissertation explores a distinct but overlapping aspect of the curriculum—including “practical” education, women’s education, and manual or industrial education—that contributes to a rich ecological perspective on the political, social, economic, and gendered aspects of rhetorical education being negotiated for learners across the last half of the century. Together, the arguments forwarded in each chapter demonstrate the value of examining high schools as sites of pedagogical innovation, rhetorical opportunity, and citizenship training of significance both to our rhetorical histories and to the ways we address reform efforts in higher education today. In “The Idea(l) of the High School,” I begin by introducing the high schools as collegiate institutions serving the higher education needs of the city’s students, outlining the general justifications for establishing these schools—which included training teachers for the lower schools and providing access to higher education in the student’s home community to develop citizens and workers. Here, I outline key terms of the project and the historiographic conversations to which it contributes. My next chapter, “The Practical and Practice: William N. Hailmann and the Louisville High Schools,” focuses on the first decade of the schools’ operation, during which European educational philosophies of the “New Education” were introduced to Louisville’s schools by science professor William N. Hailmann. Under his influence, educational theories associated with the lower schools (particularly “object teaching”) were applied to a collegiate learning context, replacing traditional disciplinary values of memorization and recitation with student-centered methods emphasizing self-activity, hands-on practice, and a “pedagogy of interest” as the basis for a “practical” education. Following Linda Adler-Kassner’s “Liberal Learning, Professional Training and Disciplinarity” and Min Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner’s “Composing Careers in Global Local Context,” I argue that this notion of practical education, as grounded in meaningful student-centered practice and learning across one’s lifetime, provides an alternative definition and purpose for a “practical” liberal arts education that can be drawn on to counter reductively career-oriented appeals circulating in current educational reform discourse. Chapter Three, “The Flower of Democracy: Female High School,” focuses specifically on opportunities for young women. Building on the student-centered academic focus provided by the new education, women at Female High School were afforded remarkable opportunities to develop as rhetors and teachers, and to pursue both high academic standards and professionalization opportunities at a time when these two aims were seldom combined for women. In this chapter, I argue that the construction of these young women as “high school girls” (even though they were as old as 21) alleviated concerns about their rhetorical performances, while their role as future teachers provided a frame for their civic participation and professionalization. In particular, I focus on the opportunities for women’s rhetorical engagement from within the seemingly contained but very much public school ceremonies. I analyze three student essays from the 1860 commencement ceremonies to demonstrate the ways students used this traditionally epideictic context as a venue for deliberative rhetoric that commented on their own experiences as women and students. The perceived innocuousness of the “high school girl” and her public service role as a future teacher enabled remarkable opportunities for rhetorical development and civic participation that have been overlooked in our emphasis on colleges, providing insights into how we might conceive of publicly engaged students and pedagogies today. Chapter Four, “The Mind and Body of Higher Learning,” traces the constriction of opportunities for rhetorical education through the development of differentiated programs in the final decades of the nineteenth century. These programs were increasingly focused on preparing students for particular career outcomes, and led to the construction of students as gendered and classed learners. In particular, I argue that the emerging attention to students’ material needs and embodiment served as a warrant for developing curricular programs that confirmed social class positions and available gender roles rather than affording opportunities for students to transcend them. The emphasis on embodiment coincides with the emergence of race as an important signifier, as Louisville’s first public school for African Americans was opened in 1873, when these reforms began to catch on in the city. The account of embodied vocational education helps us to understand the ongoing devaluation of manual education and careers, and has explanatory power for understanding the eclipse of what Graves calls the “female scholar” by the “domesticated citizen” by the end of the century. In my final chapter, I summarize the historical and historiographic insights provided by a study of the Louisville high schools. I link my account to national educational trends and discourse to show how Louisville helps us to frame a shared sense of history between Rhetoric and Composition and Education in order to rethink the utility of our origin stories and the disciplinary boundaries they are used to uphold

“Higher” School: Nineteenth-Century High Schools and the Secondary-College Divide

This article traces the emergence of nineteenth-century U.S. high schools in the landscape of higher education, attending to the gendered, raced, and classed distinctions at play in this development. Exploring differences in the conceptualization and status of high schools in Louisville, Kentucky, for white male, white female, and mixed-gender African American students, this article reminds us of how these institutional types have been situated, socially inflected, and structured in relation to broader political and power structures that transcend explicit pedagogical considerations. As a result, I argue for the recognition of high schools as historically significant sites in the history of college composition instruction

High School Girls”: Women’s Higher Education at the Louisville Female High School

Nineteenth-century women gained access to significant higher education opportunities under the auspices of the urban, public high school (as well as at seminaries, academies, normal schools, and other variously named institutions) even when they did not matriculate into colleges proper. Women made great strides in all forms of higher education in the last half of the nineteenth century, but particularly in high schools and academies; while remaining underrepresented in colleges until 1978, women constituted a majority of graduates from high schools as early as 1870. This trend held true both nationally and in the local context of Louisville, where women outpaced men in high school graduation numbers eight to four in 1861 and by forty-two to twenty-nine by 1895. Still representing only a small minority of white women in the city, these early women high school graduates were envoys into higher education on behalf of their gender. Their high rates of matriculation and graduation were due at least in part to the impressive academic and professional opportunities granted to them at a time when other avenues to academic and professional advancement remained limited

Graduate Student Peer Mentoring Programs: Benefitting Students, Faculty and Academic Programs

Peer mentoring—students mentoring other students—is an area of increasing interest for scholars and administrators of graduate education. The range of activities that constitute peer mentoring is vast, but includes providing insights into the departmental culture, guidance through major program milestones, psychosocial support, and friendship (Kram and Isabella 1985; Grant-Vallone and Ensher 2000). While most students are assigned a faculty advisor or mentor, the perspectives of peer mentors who may be only a year or two ahead of the mentee are valuable in different but powerful ways (Kram and Isabella 1985). While it is most common to talk about peer mentors helping new students adapt to a graduate program, peer mentees and mentors both can benefit from the mentoring relationship by co-presenting at conferences, forming study groups, or co-authoring articles. These other models of co-mentoring and group support are increasingly recognized alongside one-on-one peer mentoring as supportive of student retention, satisfaction, and success in graduate studies (Allen, McManus, and Russell 1999; McGuire and Reger 2003)

Frameworks for Collaboration: Articulating Information Literacy, and Rhetoric and Writing Goals in the Archives

Rhetoric and composition scholars have recently called our attention to the value of archival research in the undergraduate classroom, leading to rich collaborations with archivists and librarians at many institutions. As we engaged our own pedagogical collaboration as a university archivist and English faculty member, we realized that, though we might use slightly different language to articulate them or cite different sources in support of them, many of our learning goals overlapped. As we explored these goals together, we realized that they evidenced a correspondence in our disciplines that we had not explored—one that is reflected in our fields’ recent outcomes statements: the 2011 Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing and 2016 Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. In this article, we briefly describe our course and use it as a touch point for comparing these disciplinary statements. We argue that analysis of the overlap between these two documents helps us articulate a new set of reasons for faculty to connect with their allies in libraries and archives to teach undergraduate research and writing

Inclusivity in the Archives: Expanding Undergraduate Pedagogies for Diversity and Inclusion

This chapter uses the experience of two undergraduate students conducting research in their university archives to consider the “hidden curriculum” entailed in archival research at some institutions. When diverse identities and experiences are not represented in our archives, we run the risk of communicating a lack of value for those identities, producing a feeling of marginalization and exclusion for some students and foreclosing an opportunity to build solidarity across difference for others. In light of the limited holdings at many university archives and the increased prevalence of archival research in the undergraduate classroom, the authors draw on research from writing studies, anthropology, archival research, and public memory to produce recommendations for students, faculty, and institutions working to compose inclusive archives and research experiences