by Neal Lerner, Principal Investigator

In writing studies scholarship, the past 15-20 years have constituted an “archival turn” of sorts, given the volume of publications that have drawn on archival sources to tell the histories of writing courses and writing programs in US higher education. As a complement—and at times counter—to the grand sweeping historical narratives of writing studies (e.g., Berlin; Connors; Kitzhaber), more recent publications have focused attention on individual institutions (e.g., Ostergaard and Wood; Ritter), individual programs (e.g., Gold; Fleming; Lamos), and individual figures (e.g., Varnum; L’Eplattenier & Mastrangelo; Lerner). These studies complicate what the field knows about its history, challenging long-held beliefs such that all first-year writing grew out of Harvard’s implementation of English A in the 1870s (Donahue & Moon). Instead, we learn that writing instruction has long been a feature at most, if not all, colleges and universities (Gannett, Brereton, & Tirabassi), and that this instruction—its purposes, values, and methods—has been as diverse and situated as all instruction needs to be.

Our project is intended to add to this cumulative history, but not simply by crafting a narrative based on archival materials. Instead, our intent is to combine the “archival turn” with the “public turn” in our creation of a digital public archive of the Northeastern University Writing Program. 

The Northeastern Writing Program (NUWP) PhD program is only 10-years old, but the NUWP is important in many ways because of its familiarity. In short, it is a history that many writing studies scholars and practitioners can easily relate to. In the early 1980s, led by Richard Bullock, the program grappled with assessing and placing incoming students unprepared for college-level writing. Also long-standing has been a writing center designed to serve the entire university and an upper-division required disciplinary writing course (AWD), one that has adapted over time to meet university, student, and general education needs. Finally, the program has shifted as undergraduate student demographics have shifted—from largely a local, urban student population to a much more diverse, but more highly prepared, student body. These activities of the NUWP—and the English Department more generally—are documented in a relatively large collection of paper materials, including meeting minutes, memoranda, reports (including external evaluations), news clippings, readings, and assessment prompts from the early 1980s to the present.

The site that you are visiting is both curated or “narrated” for users to learn from these digitized archived materials (see Exhibits), but also allows users to have access to the “raw data”: the actual memos, reports, articles, student work, assignments, and other “everyday documents” that constitute this archive (Browse).

by Kyle Oddis, Project Manager

The currently available public records in our holdings do not represent all of the records we have; however, this process takes time (so far, five years). Following the public launch of NUWPArc and several re-configurations of processes and procedures, we plan to continue adding to our public collections. At launch to the public (April 2023), there were 250 records available for exploring. Where the collection stands now is a matter of time, labor, and teamwork. 

Through my tenure as PM, I developed several systems for managing records and building the platform you're utilizing now. We hope some of these systems will assist you in pursuing a digital archive project (perhaps of your institution's writing program?). We are currently working to develop a shared platform and set of resources for the field at OWPN.org. NUWPArc's journey is only just beginning, and there's a lot more to be done to unlock the full potential of these kinds of projects for the field. We hope you are inspired and encouraged by what you see in our records; for me—having worked closely with our records for years—I am inspired by the efforts of all who have helped make the NUWP what it is today, and I look forward to seeing what it becomes. 

We imagine a by-no-means-complete list of possible uses of our archive:

• Writing assessment: Researchers can track the attention to writing placement over time.
• Writing products: Researchers can conduct a variety of text-based or coded analysis of the collection of student writing in our archive.
• Writing curriculum: Our deep collection of syllabi for required writing courses offers a variety of angles on the changing nature of curriculum.
• Writing pedagogy: Our collection of teaching materials lend themselves to analysis of how teaching practices are influenced by particularly required texts, particular student populations, particular university initiatives.
• Writing program administration: The memos, reports, and other documents on the day-to-day functioning and larger strategic planning of writing program goals, values, and practices could be explored for what they say about the changing nature of WPA work.

See Oddis et al. (2020) for early project context, situating, and discussion.

There are sets of values, beliefs, goals, and practices that characterize the NUWPArc project. These terms are defined below as they influenced project development:

• Values: Commitments that serve as fundamental guides for behaviors and attitudes and provide a sense of purpose; may be firm but not fixed
• Beliefs: Ideas that are broad in scope and which often arise as a result of conditioning, training, and/or lived experience; mutable
• Goals: Deliverables that can be met over a specified period of time; tangible, observable, sometimes measurable
• Practices: Everyday activities and actions that produce certain outcomes, products, or results; contingent

This concept model can be found in the NUWPArc Conceptual Design Framework.

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