History of Writing Instruction: Summary

(1) economic, political and social changes, and (2) changes in curriculum and teaching methods for one of the following time periods discussed in Berlin's article:

Between 1975 and 1985, great change was taking place in America. The liberal chords of the 60s and 70s were being broken by a more Conservative lifestyle headed by the Nixon and Reagan Administrations. These administrations smashed the protest movements of the former with political policy and social instruction.
Schools around the nation were being held "accountable for the products" they were producing for the work force; students were viewed as a commodity. During this time, national achievement tests were introduced to measure said commodities, which ultimately led to a decline in educational writing instruction. Teachers began to model there curriculum's around these tests, and as Daniel Koretz put it " After all, machine graded, fill0in the blank tests do not require writing ability". During this time, writing and compositional instruction was virtually extinct at all levels of education. Ironically enough, Reagan's national education policy blamed the schools for the nations economic failures, while in turn giving his administration credit for any success.
Eventually, teachers all over began to fill the writing-compositional void. The first organization of note was the National Writing Project which was a program which taught teachers how to teach english composition. Most notably, it was taught by teachers to instruct others teachers. The teacher-as-researcher phenomenom sought to re-establish the teachers role in the classroom. It emphasized the attention of ethnographic techniques and cultural contexts, this allowed for an approach to writing that was equally prepared for issues of class, race, and gender. Finally, the whole language approach declared composition an inherently social and democratic process. Teachers who adopted this method were less interested in cognitive and emotional processes, and more interested in the social nature of learning; that reading, writing, speaking, and listening should be integrated as one experience.
As the workplace began transforming with the coming information age, its demands began changing. English composition became responsive to these demands, forming the agenda of a primitive discipline not seen before. As Complicated bureaucratic decision making was now requiring more compositional skills than ever before, this discipline became divided into three paradigms: Cognitive rhetoric took a strictly empirical approach to writing, expressionism, which implored writing as a deeply personal act, and social constructionism, which stated collaborative writing was elemental in any composition.