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I've also spent a lot of time thinking about this one over the years. > For some time I have been wrestling with the question as to whether there is > a Canadian tradition of teaching writing in Canada. Are there practices and > positions that occur here that would be less likely to occur in the United > States? I'm not sure entirely what "practices and positions" is trying to get at, but I'll comment on practices anyway. The tradition as Henry Hubert lays it out is of belles-lettres teaching of writing as an adjunct to literary study. At UNB in the 40s they taught writing for engineers by having them read Hemingway, among others. So it was a "practice" that went beyond the audience of English majors, and it is unlikely to occur in the US at this point, anyway. If I remember Connors work accurately, the belles lettres practice here was phased out of the engineering type curriculum in the 20s. What I think this really points to is a sharp break in the role of universities. I once looked up the enrollment figures for all Can. univ. from 1920-1980 or so, and the figure jumber from something like 40,000 (Can. total) in 1940 to 400,000 or more in the 1960's. I think the old liberal arts college model of ed.--which I think involved a lot of writing in non-English classes--just fell apart under the weight of the numbers of people and the needs/skills/abilities of these new students (returning war veterans, 1946-50, and their progeny, 1960-75). But in response to this Can. univ. didn't set up first-year comp programs, and despite these numbers didn't enroll nearly as many students (about half as many as the US by percentage) as the US model called for. So, yeah, some really different practices have arisen, but I would realte them to socio-political factors and values rather than any lack of knowledge of how to do things differently. Academics at these times knew perfectly well what US universities were doing; they simply made sure that nothing of the sort happened in CAn. universities. > > Is there a conservative set of practices that is uniquely our own? Are > there also less conservative ( should I say "enlightened" ) practices that > are also more likely to occur here? My own expereince is that Can. practices, like Canadian politics, can be both more conservative and far more radical that the US equivalent. The whole Inkshed experience is too radical to have come out of the US, but teaching first-year writing to 200 students in a lecture hall is just as far out in the opposite direction. And both are uniquely Canadian practices. Roger Graves DePaul Univ., Chicago