Unsettling Service: Rhetorical Education in the Chicago Settlement House Movement, 1890-1968.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation explores one story of how those who teach writing and rhetoric have attempted to "own" their own work through the identities that they create. Drawing on Dana Anderson's theory of "first-person identity constitution," I examine how three progressive era Chicago settlements houses invented shared identities for themselves by reimagining the nature of teaching as a form of labor. By calling upon and reinventing a sense of a shared tradition of extracurricular parlor-based civic learning, these settlement workers resisted outside cultural forces' constitution of them and worked toward increased agency for educators: both in their ability to articulate the significance of their own work and in their ability to effect change in the public square. Furthermore, in their process of resisting outside representations and developing a sense of their own shared traditions, settlements became spaces where teachers also negotiated how their work was inflected by race, class, religion, and gender.
Using archives of organizational, personal, and professional materials, each chapter outlines how settlement educators and their colleagues represented their rhetorically-minded education as a form of work. After a brief preface, Chapter 1 situates the project in histories of Composition Studies and Rhetorical Education. Chapter 2 examines how the Chicago Commons revived and adapted 19th century elocutionary self-education, developing a collective identity for several interrelated educational fields that allowed them to mutually support the public value of their fields. Chapter 3 analyzes how Hull House Labor Museum offers an extracurricular precedent for writing program management as a place where rhetorical educators attempt to work out class struggles, including their own. Chapter 4 discusses first how Firman House resisted the city infrastructure's constitution of African American identity. Second, it also addressed how the House navigated the tension of being seen as part of this infrastructure itself, instead of as potential change agents. Chapter 5 concludes with a summary of the preceding argument and final reflections on the tensions within the ideological and material spaces between the commonplaces of professionalism and disciplinarity, especially for those who teaching writing and rhetoric.