Process Pedagogy (Tobin)

...I could not think of any alternative to organizing the course around the identification and appreciation of the rhetorical features of good writing. (2) --that's what the UNH Freshman English 401 course was, in a nutshell, also "assigning topics and dictating forms" (6) also, "choosing topics, teaching conventions, correcting, and grading" (6)

Murray Articles that Tobin articulates as most significant:

• Write Before Writing
• Writing as Process: How Writing Finds its Own Meaning
• Teaching the Other Self: The Writer's First Reader
• The Maker's Eye: Revising Your own Manuscripts

James Marshall "Of What Does Skill in Writing Really Consist: The Political Life of the Writing Process Movement" (Writing Process Movement in the 90s)
Thomas Newkirk "The Writing Process--Visions and Revisions" (in To Compose)

What process theorists were reacting against was as important to the movement as what they were arguing for. Process pedagogy was decidedly antiestablishment, antiauthoritarian, anti-inauthenticity. (4)

(after a passage from Murray):

These ideas--that students actually have something important and original to say and will find ways to say it if we can just get out of their way, give them the freedom to choose their own material, and show them that we are interested--run throughout early process pedagogy. It is not so much a matter of teaching students new rules or strategies but of helping them gain access to their "real" or "authentic" voice and perspective that traditional school has taught them to distrust and suppress. (5)

My primary job was not to tell the writer where she had gone wrong or right but to help her see what she had accomplished and what the essay might become in its next incarnation. I was now reading not for error and assessment but for nuance, possibility, gaps, potential. For the first time, I realized that student essays were texts to be interpreted, discussed, marveled at, and that writing students were, amazing enough, writers. (6)

In spit of this very wide range of scholarly approaches, it was the version of process that emphasized free writing, voice, personal narrative, and writing as a form of discovery--that is, the version articulated by Murray, Elbow, Macrorie, Graves, and other so-called "expressivists"--that had the greatest influence on classroom practice and drew the most impassioned support and criticism. For that reason, it was not unusual to hear "process" and "expressivism" used almost interchangeably, as if expressivism were the only kind of process and process teachers were only expressivists. In fact, a teacher could emphasize the organic nature of the composing process but not assign or even allow personal writing, just as a teacher could insist on personal expression while still clinging to a traditional two-step (think first, then write) notion of the process. (9)

Murray followed the lead of creative writers (11)