Martin Nystrand (born December 28, 1943) is an American composition and education theorist. He is Louise Durham Mead Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
Early life and education Martin Nystrand was born in Joliet, Illinois, United States, and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. He received his B.A. in English from Northwestern University in 1965, his M.A.T. from Johns Hopkins University in 1966, and his Ph.D. in English education from Northwestern University in 1974. During 1971-1972, he studied as a special student with James Britton at the University of London.
Career After teaching as a professor of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Nystrand moved to the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he served as architect of a campus-wide reform of undergraduate writing curriculum and founded the doctoral program in Composition & Rhetoric. While also at Wisconsin, he served as a director of the National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement (CELA). Awarded more than $9 million in grants over the course of his career, he was president of the American Education Research Association Special Interest Group for Writing Research, 1991-1993, as well as the National Conference for Research on Language & Literacy (NCRLL), 2002–2003. In addition to editing Written Communication from 1994-2002, Nystrand has published ten books, 60 papers, & chapters and was awarded the Distinguished Lifetime Research Award from the NCRLL in 2011.
Nystrand's research focuses on the dialogic organization of discourse in both writing and classroom discourse. His writing research examines how writing-reader interaction shapes writers' writing processes and development. His classroom discourse research explores the role of classroom interaction in student learning and was the first large-scale empirical study to document the role of open classroom discussion in student learning. His study "Questions in Time" with Wu, Gamoran, Zeiser, and Long was the first use of event-history analysis to investigate classroom discourse.Nystrand, M., Wu, L., Gamoran, A., Zeiser, S., & Long, D. (2003, March–April). Questions in Time: Investigating the Structure and Dynamics of Unfolding Classroom Discourse. Discourse Processes, 35, 135-196
Nystrand's work has successfully introduced several seminal concepts in current research:
Discourse community: Social groups that share discourse practices Doctrine of autonomous text: Written texts differ from conversational utterances in their explicitness; autonomous texts "say what they mean and mean what they say." Textual space: The semiotic space created by the interaction of writers and readers when texts are read: A text is a manifestation of the textual space whose parameters are defined by reader-writer interaction. Authentic teacher questions: Questions without "prespecified" answers. Question events: Interactions surrounding questions plotted in event history analysis. Re-enlightenment: Cognitive, historical, personal, and cultural transformations of understanding replacing old with new. Dialogic spells and dialogic bids: Modes of classroom discourse somewhere between recitation and discussion, characterized by engaged student questions and an absence of teacher test questions. A dialogic bid is a teacher discourse move responding to and taking up ideas and observations introduced by students; examples include student questions, uptake, and authentic questions.
Research on Writing Nystrand’s theory of writing posits that written communication is governed by reciprocity between writers and readers, and his model outlines the textual "moves" that writers make vis-à-vis readers in order to initiate and sustain their interaction. Since Nystrand’s theory is based on reciprocity between writer and reader and a dialogic conception of meaning, it differs fundamentally from Grice’s cooperation model of communication,Grice, H. P. (1975 ). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts (pp. 41-58). New York: Academic Press. as well as rhetorical conceptions and models of writing which seek to explain writing in terms of effects writers seek to have on readers.Bitzer, L. F. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 1(1), 1-14
His research on writing examines how writer-reader interaction shapes writers’ writing processes and development.Nystrand, M. (1989). A social-interactive model of writing. Written communication, 6(1), 66-85. Nystrand’s social-interactive model of writing, in which text meaning is neither (a) found in the writer’s intentions, which, according to cognitive models of writing, the writer "translates" into text,Flower, L. and Hayes, J. (1977). Identifying the organization of writing processes. In L. Gregg and E. Steinberg (Eds.), Cognitive processes in writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum nor (b) embodied in the text itself, as proposed in such formalist accounts of exposition as Olson’s doctrine of autonomous text.Olson, D. R. (1977). From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing. The Harvard Educational Review, 47, 257-281. Rather, texts are said merely to have a potential for meaning, which is realized only in use, for example, when a text is read (even by the writer).
This meaning is dynamic, which is to say, it evolves over the course of reading, a view consistent with Bakhtin,Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Fish,Fish, S. (1980). Is there a text in this class? The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. and Rommetveit;Rommetveit, R. (1974). On message structure: A framework for the study of language and communication. London: Wiley. it is not exactly the same from reader to reader or even from reading to reading; and it is entwined with the cultural and ideational assumptions readers bring to the text. This is not to say that readers completely determine the meaning of the text; instead, whatever meaning is achieved is a unique configuration and interaction of what both writer and reader bring to the text.Nystrand, M. & Wiemelt, J. (1991). When is a text explicit? Formalist and dialogical conceptions. Text, 11(1), 25-41. Because meaning is not encoded in the text itself, writers do not achieve explicitness by saying everything in autonomous texts. The writer’s problem in being explicit is not saying everything—a sure-fire recipe for being tedious and boring. Indeed, the writer’s problem is knowing just which points need to be elaborated and which can be assumed.Nystrand, M. (1987). The context of written communication. In R. Horowitz and S. J. Samuels (Eds.), Understanding Oral and Written Discourse (pp. 197-214). Orlando and London: Academic Press. This in turn depends on what readers already know, or more specifically on what the writer and reader share. Explicitness is consequently not a text phenomenon but rather a social-interactive, or dialogic one. Hence, skilled writers anticipate what Bakhtin terms "responsive understanding" at each point of their composing.Bakhtin, M., (1996). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, p. 94.
The Demographic Postulate: Research on the History of Composition and Rhetoric Nystrand’s research on the history of writing as an activity and Composition and Rhetoric as an academic area of research has correlated its origins and development amidst increases in social mobility and consequential demographic shifts.Nystrand, M. (2008). The social and historical context for writing research. In C. MacArthur (Ed.), Handbook of Writing Research, pp. 11-27. New York: The Guilford Press. Indeed, as Schmandt-Besserat shows,Schmandt-Besserat, D. 1977(June). The Earliest Precursor of Writing. "Scientific American, 238"(6), pp. 50-58 this seems to have been the case as long ago ancient Mesopotamia when in the late fourth millennium BCE, the cuneiform script was invented in the Near East to accommodate a new expanding and expansive commercial class of trading. Later in mid- to late-eighteenth century Britain, as Miller shows,Miller, T. (1997). "The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces", University of Pittsburgh Press composition and rhetoric first gained traction in provincial colleges, not elite universities like Cambridge and Oxford (where Latin was the principal medium of instruction). During this period, an expanding middle class sought self-improvement through writing instruction, as well as upscaling their working class dialects through enunciation instruction. Dissenters to the Catholic throne and drivers of the Protestant Reformation such as Adam Smith and Joseph Priestley, who were prohibited from teaching at Cambridge and Oxford, took to teaching writing, in English, not Latin. Grammars and dictionaries flourished.Miller, T. (1997). The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
A century later after the American civil war, Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard, led the expansion and modernization of Harvard, transforming it from a college for sons of the landed gentry into a modem university dedicated to the education of middle- as well as upperclass managers in an industrial society–in short, from education serving an agrarian aristocracy to specialized professional preparation for an industrial meritocracy, or an "aristocracy of achievement," to quote Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard in 1869.Charles Willian Eliot, quoted in Wallace Douglas, Rhetoric for the meritocracy. Chapter in Richard Ohmann, In English in America: A Radical View of the Profession (p. 127). Oxford University Press, 1976 In this way, the new professional classes of the industrial world were to be given "a quite direct preparation of the work habits and thought patterns that are needed to function in any of the 'varied calls of life.'"Edward T. Channing. (1856, July). Lectures Read to the Seniors in Harvard College. The North American Review, 83(172), p. 210 quoted in Douglas, 1976, p. 210.
Almost exactly a century later in the 1970s, composition studies benefited dramatically from the radical shifts in the demographics of American colleges. Rarely have the problems of the world impacted school and university instructional programs as fully as during the late 1960s when riots torched cities and Vietnam War protests tore at university campuses. The Johnson administration vigorously sought to increase educational opportunities as a key weapon in its War on Poverty, and by the late 1960s, a new community college opened every week.Hugh Davis Graham. (1984). The Uncertain Triumph: Federal Education Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Years. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press,