A Guide To Composition Pedagogies

"What is Composition Pedagogy? An Introduction"

...rare is the teacher who does not blend the practices of many pedagogical philosophies. (6)

Each pedagogy enacts specific motives for teaching and embodies specific ways that we construct students--for example, as communicators, as scholars, as disenfranchised citizens, or as future professionals (Tate). (8)--I have requested this book via ILL.

For about two decades, as they used process approaches in the classroom, scholars sought something like an ideal process that could be taught and would ensure success. Think-aloud protocols and other research conducted with student writers revealed that processes are multiple, flexible, and recursive (e.g. Flower and Hayes). In part because of the field's process pedagogy orientation at the time, our scholarship evolved to suggest that writing is more social than we were even acknowledging, leading to the "social turn" of thought in the field. (9-10)

In wading through the many good but sometimes conflicting choices among composition pedagogies, Gary Tate provides a simple approach: The pedagogy or pedagogies we choose must respond to the goals we want to achieve in our courses, and those goals depend primarily on "how we construct our students" and their needs.

If we see students as mute or semiliterate, then we help them to find their "voices" so that they can speak out. If we view them as unthinking repositories of largely conservative beliefs, then we might decide to help them learn to critique those beliefs. If we see them as college students who need to be successful in their majors, then we will probably help them learn to write academic discourse. And so on. (2) (11)

That last passage really nails it. How do we see students and how do build our classes as a result of these visions...

Process presents familiar, shared territory that we do not want to take for granted and newcomers need to understand; it is the rare teacher today who teaches process without some other operating theory or goal. (14)

"Process Pedagogy and Its Legacy" (Anson)

1. I'm thinking about the stories that others have told, autobiographical stories about their relationships with the process movement...the typical story for Anson's generation is how process was a transformative part of their professional life. Examples of this are Anson's introduction in this chapter but also Tobin and Knoeller (see reference p. 214). I'm thinking about how my story is more like a "born digital" story. Born-process. This is different and notable and perhaps worth thinking and writing about some more. My professional practice was not transformed by process, as Anson, Tobin and others were. It was what I took as inevitable. I had experienced it myself at the hands of those like Anson or Tobin who had, themselves, had the transformation. This is a kind of 2nd generation story.

2. Macrorie may be the vehicle I am looking for in drawing forward the story that Graves tells about children in elementary school. In fact, if you put Graves and Macrorie together you have bookends of the system--what happens to the kids at the start and then what they are like by the time they arrive in college. I think I should plan to use Macrorie to talk more about the tribal story. Even though he was, himself, not a member of the tribe, his narrative is very much part of the tribal lore.

3. In terms of learning the skills and practices of the tribe, I'm thinking about Graves' articulation of community, response, time, choice as one framework and also Murray's from "Teach Process"--those documents are sort of foundational documents that lay out key methods and practices. Use them both.

4. I am struck by this passage: "In its historical context, process resisted the imposition of norms, regulations, and conventions; it was 'decidedly anti-establishment, antiauthoritarian, anti-inauthenticity" (Tobin, "Process" 4; Marshall; Newkirk). (217)

Two things about my orientation towards anti-establishment etc. changed a lot as a result of my work with Genre Studies and with WAC/WAW.

With genre studies, there is really no battle. Genre studies really does not aim at changing the system, rejecting the system, etc. It strikes me as a sort of politically neutral pedagogy...this might be something to think more about.

Second, to identify with the WAC/WID movement is to very much locate oneself within the establishment. It is to say: here is the establishment and here is how it works and while we would like to change it, our job is helping students learn how to acclimate to academic writing of all kinds.

Process and the UNH brand was much built on a rejection of academic writing and discourse. It was positioned as working in opposition to academic language. To embrace WAC/WID is to acknowledge the importance of academic discourse and the importance of helping students learn to produce it well. Academic language is not the enemy in WAC/WID. And teaching students to write in academic ways is not an evil (unlike with in Macrorie, Murray, Tobin, Newkirk, etc.)

Expressive Pedagogy: Practice/Theory, Theory/Practice

For better or worse, our maps of the discipline encouraged us to think that, if we agreed with the social, we must dismiss the alternatives. (Byron Hawk, "Foreward, Neo-Expressivisms," Enculturation 13 (2012)

I became a writer in an expressivist classroom. (111)

As a teacher and a writer, I could not have named the theoretical underpinnings of expressivism. I did not even know that what I was doing was called "expressivism" (111-112)

Expressivism is not dead. It grew up. (112)

Expressivism was in the air. It found me. (112)

...our classrooms are not solely expressivist classrooms, if such a classroom should exist (113).

...it is expressivism's commitment to individual expression that we believe makes our pedagogies work. Expressivism places the writer at the center of its theory and pedagogy, assigning highest value to the writer's imaginative, psychological, social, and spiritual development and how that development influences individual consciousness and social behavior. Expressivist pedagogy employees ferreting, journal keeping, reflective writing, and small group dialogic collaborative response to foster a writer's aesthetic, cognitive, and moral development. Expressivist pedagogy encourages, even insists upon, a sense of writer presence even in research-based writing. This presence--"voice" or ethos--whether explicit, implicit, or absent, functions as a key evaluation criterion when expressivists examine writing. For expressivist teachers, the education of the writer is the central problem. (113)

anti-textbooks (113) all offered counterapproaches to current-traditional pedagogy. This pedagogy used non directive feedback to return the responsibility for writing back to the student (Murray, Elbow). It encouraged students to use their own language and to reject "Engfish," the academic language of schools (Macrorie). It saw writing as more than the product of communication, as a means for making meaning and creating identity. (113-114)

Elbow and the expressionists ... work to subvert teaching practices and institutional structures that oppress, appropriate or silence an individual's voice (114)

Alternate Aims of Expressivism:

Kinneavy claims that through expressive discourse the self moves from private meaning to share meaning that results ultimately in some action. Rather than a "primal whine," expressive discourse traces a path away from solipsism toward accommodation with the world and thus accomplishes purposeful action. (115)

[Gradin] explores a commonly overlooked connection between romanticism and expressivism. Pointing to German romanticism's concern for social justice and political action, she counters the claim that expressivism values individualism to the exclusion of social concerns. Rather, expressivists value autonomy as signaled in their concern to empower people through voice, and they believe in agency and resistance. Individuals can use personal awareness to act against oppressive material and psychological conditions. (118)

...the expressivist classroom where students function as experts and teachers as learners (123).