RESEARCH
∙ Writing
Martin Nystrand
University of Wisconsin-Madison
department of english
university of wisconsin-madison
usa
nystrand@ssc.wisc.edu
Martin Nystrand (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is Louise Durham Mead Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been a leader in the field of composition and rhetoric from almost the time that the field became recognized as a distinct strand of English Studies in the late 1970s, and from the moment he arrived at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the early 1980s, he almost single-handedly created the program that would eventually lead the UW-Madison to becoming one of the best doctoral programs in the field. After receiving his PhD from Northwestern University in 1974 and short stints as an Assistant Professor of Education at Kean College of New Jersey and a Project Director at the Ontario (Canada) Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), Professor Nystrand taught as an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago until 1982, when he was hired as an Associate Professor (with tenure) at UW-Madison. Within two years of his arrival, Professor Nystrand–by dint of his pathbreaking research on the relation between classroom discourse and the improvement of their writing– was selected as a member of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Over his years at UW-Madison, Professor Nystrand became a leader at the WCER, and made it a key research center for the US Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI). Professor Nystrand also made the UW-Madison an important research site for the National Center on English Learning and Achievement (CELA), for which he acted as the local director for several years in the 1990s. It was through Professor Nystrand’s work on the relation between the contexts of spoken language and the development of student writing and reading at the primary, secondary, and post-secondary school levels, that he became a national figure on education and writing research in the United States. He is widely recognized internationally as a leading expert in discourse study, working with colleagues in Europe, Africa, and Australia.
Professor Nystrand also was instrumental in two major initiatives on the UW-Madison campus. The first was the resurrection of the universal writing requirement, which eventually became the Communications A and Communications B programs in the University’s General Education architecture in the early and middle 1990s. Working closely with the chairs of the departments of English and Communication Arts and with the Dean of Letters and Science, Professor Nystrand was responsible for the establishment of a core communications requirement in L&S, which established teaching writing and oral communication in small, autonomous sections, and which distributed the Communications A requirement across various campus units rather than having it housed in any single department. This was a revolutionary development in what was eventually called ‘writing across the curriculum’ and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s approach to writing and communications instruction is now seen as a model across the United States. Professor Nystrand also spearheaded the drive to build the doctoral program in Composition & Rhetoric in the UW-Madison’s English Department in the early l990s. He made a successful case to hire two tenure-track faculty in writing at a time when the English Department was uncertain as to the value of specialization in the field in the late l980s and early 1990s. and as a result two of the leading younger scholars at the time (Deborah Brandt and Stuart Greene) became the core faculty in the program. The Composition and Rhetoric program at the UW-Madison has, since its establishment in 1991, become known as the producer of some of the finest teacher-scholars in composition and rhetoric in the country, with a placement rate to date of 100% and with alumni/ae who have tenured positions, as well as administrative ones, at the University of Illinois, Michigan State University, Temple University, and Texas A&M University, to name only four. Professor Nystrand has had a leadership position in the doctoral program since its inception, and has maintained and improved its quality during a time of small budgets and flagging morale.
Of course, Professor Nystrand’s leadership and his visibility in the field nationally and internationally has depended, in large measure, upon his prolific production of excellent scholarship and his profound effect as a teacher and mentor of undergraduate and graduate students during his tenure at the UW-Madison. He is the author or co-author of almost 80 essays in peer-reviewed journals in English studies, composition and rhetoric, curriculum and instruction, and literary and discourse theory. He is also the author, editor, or co-editor of seven books, the most recent of which–Toward a Rhetoric of Everyday Life–has been called “substantial,” “ambitious,” “exciting,” and “a rarity” for the fact that all of its essays could easily have been published in the premier journals in the field; Professor Nystrand’s main contributions to the field of writing studies have been his serious integration of the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin into questions of written discourse — particularly Bakhtin’s notion of ‘multi-voicedness’ and dialogism — and the serious attention he has paid to the intertextual and intergeneric properties of socially situated writing. His three earliest books, The Structure of Written Communication: Studies in Reciprocity Between Writers and Readers, What Writers Know: The Language, Process, and Structure of Written. Discourse, and Language as a Way of Knowing — all published prior to 1987, are still widely cited and are seen as absolutely integral to our understanding of written language’s function as knowledge-making for human social interaction. Nystrand served as president of both the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy (NCRLL) and the American Education Research Association (AERA) Special Interest Group (SIG) for Writing Research
His classroom discourse research, in collaboration with Adam Gamoran, probes the role of classroom interaction in student learning and was the first empirical study to document the role of open classroom discussion in student learning: Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom (Teachers College Press, 1997). His study, “Questions in Time: Investigating the Structure and Dynamics of Unfolding Classroom Discourse” (with L. Wu, A. Gamoran, S. Zeiser, D. Long: Discourse Processes, 35 (2003), 135-196) is the first-ever use of event-history analysis to investigate classroom discourse.
In addition to his own published work, Professor Nystrand served as editor of the journal Written Communication, one of the few places where emerging scholars working on qualitative and quantitative language research in the field of composition studies could publish their work and have an international audience. Professor Nystrand was also well known throughout his career for inviting fledgling scholars (some at the earliest stages of their careers, some as graduate students) to co-author studies and essays with him, and there are more than two dozen such scholars listed as co-authors on Professor Nystrand’s curriculum vitae who have gone on to prominent positions as faculty members and scholars themselves.