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A
Conversation with Margaret Whitt
Carol Samson
Dr. Margaret Whitt
served as Director of the University of Denver Writing Program from 1986
until 2004. On January 31, she spoke to Carol Samson and Casey Rountree
about her tenure as Director as part of a series of interviews that
Samson and Rountree are preparing on the History of the Writing Program
at the University of Denver.
We started with the Now, with Dr. Margaret Whitts decision to retire
this spring and to move to Gerton, North Carolina, twenty-some miles
from Ashville down a mountain with thirty-three hairpin curves. Gerton,
she tells us, has one general store-community center building, one post
office, and one postcard-reality white-paneled church so perfectly rural
as to be on the cover of travel books. There is also, Margaret told us,
a grand meadow in Gerton. She took a pen and drew the meadow on her
paper napkin. In the center of the meadow she drew a big circle. I will
live on Pond Street, she said, with her southern-by-way-of Florida
accent, drawing parallel lines next to the circle. Because there is a
pond. We saw that she was mapping her life in the woods, a life to be
lived in a forest with trees so thick in summer as to make the
neighbors house disappear. Like Thoreau, Margaret said she has many
lives to live, and she feels she has spent enough time in Denver. She
believes that she is retiring after 40 years of teaching, including 17
years directing the writing program, in order to slow down and that she
will not teach any more. After our conversation in January, however,
Casey and I might counter that thought. As Casey was a graduate student
who taught in Margarets program and as I was a Ph.D. candidate and
graduate student colleague of Margarets, we know she is as energetic as
ever. There she was, pen and paper napkin in hand, teaching us the
landscape of Gerton, demonstrating that she is an inveterate teacher --
what someone in North Carolina might call dyed in the wool.
Responding to our questions about her Writing Program experience,
Margaret contextualized her work in the DU English Department. Having
earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of Denver, she served as
an Assistant Director of Writing under the aegis of Dr. Lee Chambers in
1985-6 and as Interim Director, when Dr. Chambers returned to his duties
in comparative literature, in 1987-88. When the English Department made
a national search that year, Margaret was selected to be the Director of
a newly-styled program that would not be merely a part of an English
professors teaching assignment, but would be a full-time appointment
focused on directing student writing and, under the English Department
mandate at this point in time, would require that freshmen essays be
based on three aspects of writing: expository writing, critical research
and analysis, and close reading of literary works and humanities
research. Needless to say, Margaret had her own fresh vision for her
program. In her interview for the position, she rephrased one of the
committee members questions about what she would do if she had all the
money in the world to run the program. Margaret changed the question to,
What would you do if you had all the time in the world? And she spoke
to her commitment to make the Writing Program a campus presence, to
visit all of the graduate students classes, to have time to teach
course content, and to assist graduate students with teaching
strategies.
Throughout her tenure as Director, Margaret kept the careers of the
graduate students in mind, offering them a variety of opportunities. She
selected two graduate students to serve as assistants who would work
with book orders and handle the reception desk. She sent summer
correspondence to new graduate students, and taught a Teaching Forum
course with all of her graduate teachers from 2-4 p.m. on Fridays
throughout the year. I dont believe you teach people to teach, she
told us. It is better to create a forum and to let them each find an
authentic teacher self. I wanted them to reach inside their beings, to
be themselves. In her Teaching Forum they spoke about problems,
examined assignments, shared writing exercises, and even worked out the
their class assignments and exercises before giving them to students. At
the end of every year, Margaret put out a selection of textbooks that
she had evaluated as potential texts for the next year. The graduate
students perused the books and voted on the one they would all use in
the coming year. That way, Margaret said, in the four years or so
they were with us, the graduate students would know at least four texts
extremely well. She always wanted them to see their jobs at two levels:
rhetorical theory and everyday reality. The group worked with a sample
syllabus which each instructor could adapt, but Margaret required that
each class enforce a 20 pages of formal written work rule and that the
types of essay assignments focus, in general, on a selected group of
essay types each quarter. Graduate students were asked to visit each
others classes looking for the great idea or for the moment when one
might say, God, I would never do it that way! Everything worked for
the good of the order. She told the students to imagine a broom as it
worked to sweep scattered bits of matter into a cohesive order. She said
the quarter system demanded that sort of orderly vigilance.
Outside of her work with graduate students, Margaret organized meetings
with the other Colorado colleges wherein Writing Directors would meet
and discuss programs. In the late 1980s, up to 30 schools sent delegates
to DU on a Saturday. They developed a sense of community. The
engineering school, the Colorado School of Mines, explained its focus on
the classics and on epic poetry. Representing DU, Margaret spoke of her
work to set up Service Learning instruction in conjunction with
First-year Writing. She taught the Colorado group her concept of the
Casebook, a word she chose to temper Research Paper, wherein the
student includes drafts and Xerox copies of source material along with a
documented paper all of it bound in a report book with spiral binding.
Then, too, Margaret worked to streamline her program and to focus the
assessment projects. Using her experience as an AP Grader and Table
Leader, she instituted Placement and Exit exams. She wrote two versions
of the exam because of the MW and TTH line-up of the classes. The
teaching assistants all met together to grade them; and at the end of
each year, Margaret reported to the Chair in English to explain the
statistical results. As technology made its way into the lives of
students, Margaret spoke to the Provost, Bill Zaranka, and arranged for
computers for her graduate students. Hers was the first program on the
DU Campus to set up the Portfolio system wherein students posted their
papers online with, of course, the ominous threat that, If you dont
post the essay, we will fail you. And, to facilitate logistical
problems of classroom space, she met with the administrator in charge of
classrooms and, as she promised 95% guaranteed student occupancy, she
claimed three classrooms in STURM for First-year Writing and only
First-year Writing. She set one classroom up as a computer room, STURM
411, with side tables and designer chairs. Then, too, Margaret
experimented with curriculum. She developed a Sentences and
Paragraphs, later dubbed Developing the Essay, for students who
lacked fundamental skills in writing before they took the standard
three-quarter curriculum included: Expository Writing; Persuasive Voice
(Critical Argument and Research); and Writing about Literature. For a
time, she selected several of the Teaching Assistants to serve as on
duty writing consultants for students with writing problems. As part of
the writing program, she set up evenings wherein students, selected from
each writing section, read from their work. The event, called In My Own
Voice, was held over four nights with 12 readers each night. The
Teaching Assistant Instructor and students attended; and sometimes
students felt that being selected to read was such an honor that they
invited their parents to attend the program which filled the STURM
auditorium. Other universities heard of the success of these evenings,
and Utah State University borrowed the idea, setting up its own version
of the readings. While the Voice evenings were created for the main
sections of the course, the Advanced Standing Seminars held their own
version called A Literary Evening wherein students selected favorite
texts and, crowding into the English Departments Skylight Room, held
salon-styled panels with presentations and open-ended discussions. Over
and above all this, Margaret published guidebooks for the courses:
The Bellwether Handbook and editions of Aspire. The preface
to these classroom supplemental texts included background information on
the teaching assistants, and each instructor was asked to write a
teaching philosophy. The guidebooks also included a grammar/mechanics
section and a chapter filled with successful essays written by DU
freshmen, some of which were picked up by national publications and
reprinted. Because this was a required class text, it generated income
which was shared by the student writers. Students whose essays were
selected for publication received cash prizes, usually between $25-$40,
for their efforts.
Looking back at her Writing Program career, Margaret said that many
times it took on the flavor of that act on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour
where a man begins to spin plates on long sticks. He gets the first one
going, then the second; and he must go back to set the first one
spinning again before it falls to the floor and breaks -- that dizzying
kind of flavor. But Margaret also speaks with deep affection for the
graduate students she worked with, students who have gone on to win
literary awards and publish books and even head up writing programs. She
remembers their stories of joy and progress; and she recalls their pain,
the tales broken marriages, the discussions of their not having the
money to take their children to the dentist, their tears. Clearly, she
cared deeply about each one. She wrote recommendations. She attended
weddings. She receives e-mails with pictures of their new babies. And,
so, she says that she is ready now to go to North Carolina. She says she
knew when the Marsico committee decided to create a new program and to
hire writing instructors rather than training graduate students, she
understood that she had taken her place on a long and historic continuum
of programs. For awhile, the change was hard for me, she said. But I
saw that it was time for DU to move along to something else.
Casey said, I dont think youre finished with teaching.
I said, Margaret, I see you on Pond Street with people in your living
room discussing books. I see you mentoring students.
Margaret smiled. Remember those plates? Eventually, they fall. Im
spinning right now, but I am tired.
She picked up her jacket. It was January cold, the streets slick with
new ice.
And, besides, Margaret told us, youll both have to come to Gerton to
meet my friend Nita who runs the General Store. She tells me stories I
love to hear. Then Margaret laughed her Margaret laugh, filled with
deep affection for whatever she is thinking about.
The point is this: Margaret Whitt loved being Director of the Freshman
English Program. She gave all of her energy to it. She became a campus
presence. One of your people did X or Y, the other professors would
say, and she would respond with her mind and heart to the moment,
defending what had to be defended, correcting what she could, or
celebrating the compliment. At her
Retirement-from-the-Freshman-Writing-Program-Directorship several
years ago, the graduate students from years past collected monies and
presented her with a check so that she could buy a handmade wooden
rocking chair for her North Carolina home. She then bought another one.
Two chairs for company, she will tell you, just as Thoreau intended.
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