Issues of Power and Powerlessness

Issues of Power and Powerlessness

Shor, Mitchell

As I sit to work on this theme, I realize that I don’t really know what it means, or at least what it will achieve that my work with feminism and multiculturalism didn’t already accomplish. As such, I’m only going to look at Shor and Mitchell, but in a question on this topic would probably also bring in some of the people I’ve already talked about.

Ira Shor

In When Students Have Power, Shor experiments with making his classroom more democratic in an attempt to defeat the dreaded Siberian Syndrome. He allowed students to negotiate some of the course policies and how classes were conducted, and even created an after class group (ACG) of students who would tell him how he did and what he could do to serve them better. The result of the experiment seems overwhelmingly positive. Shor explained that more people than ever were invested in the course and its content simply because they had some say in how it was run. He even reached some of the students who began in Siberia; they didn’t move, but they were more engaged in the class than they probably would have been otherwise. The implications of Shor’s research are that when students have some of the power, they are more invested in the course and engaged in the content. They’ve been conditioned to sit in a subordinate position within the classroom their whole lives, but Shor gave them an opportunity to level the playing field and take control of some aspects of the classroom.

Candace Mitchell

In Writing and Power, Candace Mitchell argues that academic power lies in the ability to write in academic discourses. Students who are not given access to the genres and skills required to craft an acceptable academic essay are denied the opportunity to grow through writing, and their chances of succeeding in college and beyond are lowered. Implicit in this systemic hierarchicalization is the notion that if one does not become a good writer, it is the individual (not the institutions) who is at fault; a further implication is that failure stems from the misapplication of skills or failure to work hard enough. Such mindsets are dangerous for students (usually underprivileged or foreign) who think this way. It can cause them to drop out, thus continuing the cycle of keeping power with the few elite (usually white) who have mastered the dominant discourse. Thus, Mitchell argues that comp teachers need to reflect critically on our practices and assumptions (a la Hillocks) to ensure that we do not perpetuate a cycle of marginalization.

How I would answer a question on this theme

As I said earlier, I would incorporate Shor’s and Mitchell’s explicit notions related to power into a larger cultural discussion that could include such authors as Pratt, Hawisher and Sullivan, and Elbow. Including these three sources could lead to an interesting discussion about where power is located in the university and how the comp classroom can serve to deconstruct, decenter, redefine, or displace it.

Multiculturalism in Composition Studies

Multiculturalism in Composition Studies

Kent, Foster, Pratt, Elbow, Mitchell, Smitherman

David Foster

Post Process Theory, as Kent describes it, is based in the notion that there is generalizable writing process to which everyone could comfortably adhere. He argues that the three main assumptions behind Post Process Theory are that writing is public, interpretive, and situated, all of which suggest that each person has an individualized process that cannot be universally codified. However, David Foster is hesitant to let process theory go and embrace post-process theories, specifically a cultural critical approach. He argues that process theory enhanced the importance of schooling by naturalizing it in a framework of analytic conversation between student and teacher. Foster also argues that by leaving behind process and moving to a cultural critical pedagogy, teachers introduce a lot of unnecessary risk to the composition classroom: turning toward the social and emphasizing difference leads to unpredictable and unstable interactions, which then leads to conflict. Thus, comp studies must think carefully about the effects of dissonance and conflict on writing scenes because articulating difference is risky, stressful, and potentially painful.

Mary Louise Pratt

Pratt does not support the Process Movement, but argues for classrooms to confront difference in the way that Foster urges us to refrain from doing so. She explains that classrooms are “contact zones,” or social spaces in which cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other. Pratt points out our classrooms are potentially full of underprivileged and underrepresented students, and that we can change our classroom practice so that they can gain more of a voice in the composition classroom. She suggests that teachers should embrace the difference and incorporate nontraditional assignments (like ethnographic narratives) in order to allow cultures to deal with the tension each one has because it is different from the others. Pratt does not deny that this could potentially be risky (that students could get angry or upset as their culture clashes with another), but she urges that the pedagogical benefits are worth the risk because we will be able to produce a critically aware student body that can approach social and cultural issues in an appropriate manner.

Peter Elbow

Elbow has made many contributions to comp studies, but one of the most important ones is the notion that students should be allowed to compose initial drafts of text in what he calls their “mother tongue(s),” by which he means the dialect(s) with which the students are most comfortable (likely the one they were raised speaking with their family). This means that students could stop worrying about their writing being judged incorrect or inadequate; the classroom becomes a safe space in which they can use their own dialects freely. However, in order for this safety to continue, Elbow argues, it is imperative that students’ final drafts are in Standard Written English (SWE). In other words, they can write as many drafts as they need to in their “mother tongue,” but by the time their final draft is submitted, it must resemble an academic essay (although he admits no such thing truly exists). If students do not learn to translate their home dialects into SWE, we are doing them a grave disservice; though our classroom may be safe for the time being, the rest of the university will not be. Elbow’s notions have implications for multiculturalism because they provide a framework from which to both teach students SWE while encouraging them to maintain their “mother tongue.” He acknowledges that no one speaks SWE as their “mother tongue,” but some have had access to language that is closer to it; the ones whose “mother tongues” are vastly different from SWE need to work through a period of transition, and we should encourage and help students who need it. On the other hand, if we simply try to quash out any minority dialects, we run the risk of writers drifting toward the dominant language and losing their “mother tongues” through lack of use; therefore, we risk wiping out minority dialects. Elbow argues that such dialects will not flourish unless there are legitimized in our classrooms.

Candace Mitchell

Mitchell also grapples with the tension between students being required to write in SWE but also needing to hold onto their home discourse. She argues that we must absolutely teach them how to write in academic settings. Mitchell brings up an instance from her own experience in which she witnessed composition teachers whose only graded writing assignments were journal entries. Such assignments were valuable in that they validated the writing of (especially underprivileged) students who were able to write in whatever way seemed comfortable to them. However, she argues that relying so heavily (indeed, entirely) on a nonacademic form of writing did those students a grave disservice because they did not achieve practice in writing academic discourse. Mitchell explains that the genres of the academy hold the key to power; the students who succeed in such genres as the academic essay are the ones most likely to succeed in college and beyond. Thus, it is imperative that students learn how to write correctly in academic genres; to refrain from doing so is to deny them access to particular forms of discourse that could prove indispensable in the future. Mitchell does not think requiring underprivileged students to learn SWE is unfair or Imperialistic; she sees it merely as a tool for advancement. Indeed she appears to draw from Spivak’s answer to her own question at the end of “Can the Subaltern Speak?”: yes, but only through the dominant discourse. But Mitchelle does not believe the two (a student’s home discourse and the dominant discourse) to be mutually exclusive. Like Elbow, she encourages a classroom space where students’ home dialects are safe but where they are also learning to use translate their writing into the dominant discourse.

Geneva Smitherman

Smitherman discusses the “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” the document that worked toward wider social legitimacy of underprivileged and foreign students’ languages and dialects and to bring about mainstream acceptance of marginalized cultures, history, and language. The goals of this document are to 1) Heighten awareness of language attitudes, 2) Promote the value of linguistic diversity, and 3) Convey facts and information about language and language variation that would help teach nontraditional students more effectively. Smitherman’s discussion goes well with Elbow’s and Mitchell’s (and really, Foster’s and Pratt’s as well) because, even though this document has been in effect since 1974, it addresses a language issue with which comp studies still struggles today.

How I would answer a question on this theme

Pretty much as I have here, except I would add one more connection among the resources. In order to enact Pratt’s contact zone classroom in a way that would not bring pain and hurt to students (as Foster fears), the teacher would need to adapt Elbow’s and Pratt’s notions about nontraditional discourses in the classroom.

Composition Pedagogies

Major Approaches to Composition Pedagogies

Belletristic (19^th C): using literature to teach writing

Blair: the key to learning to write well is reading the best authors in order to develop taste

• Imitate their style (Connors)

The problem with the belletristic tradition is that it focuses too much on the product of writing

• Students always compare themselves to literary greats – look like failures by comparison

Another problem is that the kind of critical thinking you use when analyzing lit, while important, is not the only kind of critical thinking

• They must develop the ability to think/write in/about other genres

Current-Traditional (19^th C – now): Fogarty (1959) coined it; Young (1978) refined it

• Knoblauch pointed out that it doesn’t mean anything – no one is a member of the “CTR paradigm” (Connors)
• Emphasis on final product – loves the 5-paragraph essay
• Major focus on error-free prose as part of the final product
• Static abstractions: Unity, Mass, Coherence, Denotation, Metaphor, etc (Connors)
• Four genres: exposition, description, narration, and argument (EDNA) (Crowley)
• Truth exists prior to language (Berlin)
  • Language is a distorting mechanism that either alters the original perception or captures the original experience so it can be reproduced exactly (Berlin)
• There is no invention – ideas for texts are given, or other texts are imitated
• 19^th C’s pedagogical concern with clean texts are a reflection of a greater cultural attempt to convince the masses of their dirtiness while saving them from it
• Conservative – resistant to rule changes – reinforces traditions and lines of authority
  • Conservative: respect for human proclivity to go wrong; point of education is to acquaint new generations with old traditions (Crowley)

Blair, Campbell, Whately, Bain: Good style requires purity and propriety

• Invention does not exist – genius supplies the topic

Berlin and Inkster show how the CTR method restricts writer engagement with audience

• It also diminishes the importance of the author
• It focuses too much on the product

Process Theory (1972): developed as a response to CTR

• Professionalized the teaching of comp (Crowley)
• Reconceptualized students as writers (Crowley)
• Gave comp teachers something to study – a substance on which to base a field (Hairston)
• Main genre is expressive/expository essay (Crowley)
• Liberal – encourages novice writers to write freely as individuals
  • Liberal: humans are inherently good; point of education is to help individuals get better at what they do (Crowley)

Donald Murray: Three stages: prewriting, writing, rewriting

• Gives students the chance to own their writing, subject/truth, language
• Multiple drafts with focus on mechanics coming last
• The process is individualized

Janet Emig: teaching in intervention into a process to improve the process or the product of that process – the process is internalized and deliberate (not arbitrary)

• Two modes of intervention: 1) proffering freedoms; 2) establishing constraints

Peter Elbow: Freewriting as a means of invention

• Generating raw material and figuring out what to say

Susan Miller points out that PT did not create some major paradigm shift – shares a lot with CTR

• Both describe a student-centered but independent individual
• Both assume a “goal text,” or final version,” that could accurately represent intentions
• Both see words as having settled meanings
• Still, she acknowledges that it stabilized the field and gave scholars a subject to study

Lisa Ede argues that the Process Movement is not responsible for legitimizing the field

• Many other things were happening at the same time that worked to professionalize Comp
• She also argues that we use the term “Process Movement” in much the same way that we use “CTR”: no one in the “movement” referred to it as a movement, and it was named after the fact as a derogatory term against which define the new theories and make them look better

Post-Process Theory/ies argue against Process (see below), but David Foster defends it

• It legitimized the field of Comp and kept admins from over-enrolling classes in the 80s
  • Relationships between teacher and students are individualized, yet regularized
• He cautions that PPT’s turn toward the social endangers this progress and threatens to invalidate writing programs

Post-Process Theory: Actually a collection of (sometime conflicting theories) that are a reaction to process theory

• Three assumptions: 1) Writing is public, 2) Writing is interpretive, 3) Writing is situated (Kent)

Nancy Blyler: Flaws of PT: 1) The belief that composing is a systematic, codifiable entity that we can isolate and examine, 2) Assuming that understanding and mastering the codifiable entity are necessary prerequisites to learning how to write

• PPT scholars believe mediation of process is unnecessary – knowledge of the world/writing results directly from interpretation
• PPT entails hermeneutic guessing as paralogic: writing can never be codified or reduced to a comp process – writers guess until they find a fit between their strategy and another’s in order to create understanding

Helen Rothschild Ewald: PPT acknowledges that teachers are tools of the dominant culture – to hide that is to hide traces of power, tradition, and authority present at the scene of writing

• PPT exposes that power
• PPT situates communicative interaction in writers’ existing cultural, local, personal forces
  • Students make their own knowledge through writing

David Russell: Activity Theory – analyzing writing processes in terms of different networks of human activity can help us understand how writing works and people work with writing, individually and collectively

– An activity system is a unit of analysis of social and individual behavior

Fulkerson and Bloom both say that there is no such thing as a Post-Process Theory

• It is an oxymoron – there is no agreed-upon meaning for it – it is just a way of seeming au currant
• There are three meanings:
  • 1) Field no longer researches processes
  • 2) (Kent) “Process” implies regular, sequential procedures, but writing is discursive and messy
  • 3) Process is an isolated writer making personal meaning alone, and we are beyond that

Cognitive Process Theory (1981): developed by Flower and Hayes to describe how writers approach a writing task

• Thinking exists in the mind apart from language
• Concerned with how language is developed from the mental processes of the mind
• Concerned with goals of the writer, and decisions made during composing

Sondra Perl: examined unskilled writers moving through three stages of prewriting, writing, editing

• Found that composition is not linear
• Focusing on fixing surface errors intrudes in the process
• Teachers need to find aspects of each student’s process facilitate/inhabit writing

Flower and Hayes – four points:

• Writing is a set of distinctive thinking processes orchestrated by writers while composing
  • The process is recursive and nonlinear
• These processes have a hierarchical, highly embedded organization in which any given process can be embedded within any other
• Composing is the goal: directed thinking process, guided by writer’s own growing network of goals
• Writers create goals in two ways:
  • 1) Generating high level and sublevel goals that embody the writer’s developing sense of purpose
  • 2) Changing major goals or establishing new ones based on what has been learned in the act of writing
• Theory emphasized writers’ powers of invention
  • It puts the credibility (exploring idea; developing, acting on, testing, and generating goals) in the writer’s hands

Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman dismantle Cognitive Process Theory

• The belief on which it is based (that writing is thinking and therefore an essentially cognitive process) obscures many aspects of writing we have come to see as not peripheral
• Language and texts are social activities that depend on social structures and processes
• Flower and Hayes’s model is too underspecified to be testable
  • Testing their central hypothesis (that writing is a goal-directed process) requires a definition of goals and a discussion of the distinctions and relationships between at least goals and plans if not also between goals and scripts
• Flower and Hayes claim that protocols give direct access to writers’ cognitive processes
  • But this claim cannot be granted on both theoretical and methodological grounds
  • Any research methodology that ignores the context in which writing takes place cannot produce valid data
• But Cooper and Holzman emphasize the importance of F and H’s work – they have identified the proper goal of research, but they have not given an ecologically valid, replicable research methodology
  • Cognitive psychology could still help us understand the recursive and complex writing process

Expressionism: Truth can be learned, not taught, through the act of writing

• Goal is to find your one true voice and to learn to use that voice in all areas
• Personal narratives are the best way to find this voice, along with journals, freewriting, and imitation practices (Elbow)
• Concentrate on process, not product

Donald Murray: writing is a process of discovery and experimentation

• It is a search for truth in a specious world
• Writing is an exploration of what we know and feel about what we know through language using language to learn about our world, evaluate that knowledge, and communicate it

Maxine Hairston: calls for a non-prescriptive atmosphere in teaching, including less focus on grammar and syntax

–     Instead, focus on the process of growth experienced by the writer

Peter Elbow: Emphasizes freewriting as a way to translate the messy chaos of though to the page

• Helps writers explore what they want to say
• Supports private writing and low stakes assignments in general
  • This allows writers to write for a variety of audiences and find their voices
• Wants to provide a classroom space that makes “mother tongues” feel safe, but also trains students to survive in the real writing world by teaching them SWE

James Berlin: Critiques Expressionism in “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Classroom” (1988) – says that the fragmentary nature of expressionism and its emphasis on the individual and her resistance to dominant “economic, political, and social arrangements” deprived expressionsists of real political power.

• Expressivists ran a depoliticized classroom that ignored social, economic, and political circumstances of its students/institutions
• Berlin is dismayed at the notion that all humans have the same common core (a collective or shared experience)

Social Constructionist/ Epistemic Rhetoric/ New Rhetoric: language and the mind are inseparable – and individual needs language to think

• Writing is inherently political in nature and writers are part of a discourse community with an assumed set of principles and a distinct language of its own

Patricia Bizzell: attacks cognitivists’ belief that writing can be understood as distinct sets of mental processes

• These theories focus too much on the individual writer’s language and learning processes and overlooking the importance of society and discourse communities in composition

• Instead, Bizzell believes writing takes place within a community
  • In order to improve composition, teacher’s need to explain what the community’s conventions are

James Berlin: Rhetoric is epistemic – it is a means of arriving at truth

• Truth itself is dynamic and dialectical
  • It arises out of the interaction of writer, language, reality, and audience
• Rhetoric determines what is considered reality/knowledge
  • The writer is the creator of meaning, not the passive receptor
• Truth is not discoverable via sense impression – it must be interpreted to have meaning
  • It is impossible without language since language generates it
• It’s the most practical approach to teaching and studying rhetoric
  • It emphasizes invention via heuristics to discover truth
  • Attention to arrangement and style is more fastidious than in CTR
    • Structure/language as the center of discovering truth, not just dressing up thought
  • Closer to classical rhetoric in written language than CTR, Neo-Platonic, or Neo-Aristotelian

Kenneth Bruffee: Reflective thought and social conversation are related functionally

• Thought is internalized conversation, so they act the same way
• Thought is an artifact created by social interaction
  • To understand how we think requires us to understand the nature of conversation
    • Which requires us to understand the nature of community life that generates and maintains conversation
  • To think well individually, we need to learn to think well collectively (to converse)
  • Therefore, writing is internalized conversation re-externalized
• The ways students talk with each other determines the way they will write
• Knowledge is established/maintained by communities of knowledgeable peers – it is what we agree it is, for the time being
• Collaborative learning challenges authority of knowledge by revealing that authority is a social artifact

Social (Process/Action) Theory:

Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman argue for composition as a social action

• Writers bring entire communities with them when they write
  • To ignore these communities is to ignore the complexities of social structure and dynamic that characterizes writing
• Social means real interaction among social groups and individuals – Writing is a way of interacting with others
• The purpose of FYC is to convince students of the value of using writing to criticize and change their social world
  • Students need to see the immediate value of what we are asking them to do
• C and H do not like the use of the word “discourse community”
  • A discourse community is useful for characterizing a group of people who have certain assumptions, knowledge values, and interests that its members hold in common and who use certain language conventions
  • But it is also a way of labeling individuals as insiders or outsiders
    • It can regulate who has access to power, resources, even discourse itself, and creates gatekeepers to make sure that the right people get in and all others are excluded

Bruce McComiskey: Social theory offers a wealth of critical methodologies for interrogating social institutions and cultural artifacts

• He proposes a cyclical model of the writing process that accounts for the composing strategies of individual and collaborative writers as well as the socio-discursive lives of texts
  • 1) Cultural production; 2) Contextual distribution; 3) Critical consumption of cultural values
  • Careful rhetorical interventions into this cycle make reforms possible
    • The process of intervention turns useful knowledge into shared knowledge and enhances the potential for social change that is less likely to occur if students end their composing processes with critical essays
    • Critique alone leaves students feeling helpless – there is no way to change the world
    • Students need to learn to produce their own values/identities, not just to critique texts that promote other values and identities
    • They learn that individual texts participate in larger contexts of institutional discourses that are steeped in cultural and social values, and the success of any text relies ultimately on its interactions within these discursive environments

Critical Cultural Studies / Feminist Approach: Both deal with critiquing culture, dominant discourses, essentialism, and identity politics (especially feminism for the last one)

• Both have an activist proclivity and background
• Both articulate differences and show privilege/erasure of some categories by others
• Credentials for CCS courses: 1) cultural activity is interpretation, 2) multiple texts reflect one theme, 3) interpretive move assumes artifact/text reveals deep structural truths about power in American society, 4) Students write papers interpreting social artifacts, 5) course goal is to empower and liberate students (Fulkerson)
• Philosophy of composition questions:
  • 1) teacher cannot be oppressor
  • 2) knowledge is socially constructed through dialectic exchanges (Fulkerson)

Sally Miller Gearhart: recognizes that students have varied backgrounds and languages, not all of which are accepted by the academy

• Feminism rejects the notion that these students must give up their “home” language and instead adopt traditional academic discourse

Pamela Annas: women’s writing should be grounded in the self and women’s lives – marginalized students should not have to ignore these aspects of themselves in order to achieve academic discourse

• For many it is impossible
• They should use writing to validate their lives instead – as instructors, we can help them

Gearhart and Annas represent a politicized approach that combines feminism and composition in order to create a place where all aspects of the self come together to stimulate and create change

Patricia Sullivan: Comp studies it too slow in examining how gender informs writing

• She examines research/teaching practices, classroom/mentoring experiences, and student published writing – she finds a pervasive androcentrism in comp studies
  • She asks how gender shapes the writing situation

Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede: Found two kinds of writing

• Hierarchical (masculine): writing delegated by superior and implies bureaucratic writing – values efficiency; sees multiple voices and shifting authority as problems
• Dialogic (feminine): values fluidity of meaning, openness, and creative tension – writing as producing (not discovering) knowledge – has potential to challenge phallogocentric, subject-centered discourse

Catherine Lamb: Favors a negotiative, mediating rhetoric (cooperative approach to resolve conflicts) over the divisiveness of a monologic argument (emphasizes its own interests and only acknowledges opposition to refute it)

• Power is not a quality to exercise on others, but a force that energizes and enables competence and reduces hierarchy
• The goal is to see knowledge as collaborative, cooperative, and constructed

Nancy D. DeJoy: feminist discourse allow us to accommodate critical practices within the dominant frame

• She calls for the revision of process in order to allow for the opportunity for critical understandings
• As it is, process forces students to recognize stereotypes and recreate them (to appeal to audience) rather than break them down
• Reposition writers as participatory subjects – rearrange context and challenge its limitations

Patricia Bizzell: the instructor should be true to herself (and her social/political/economic beliefs) in front of the class without inundating her students

• Composition can make the world a better place
  • Do the proper work of teaching comp – helps students succeed beyond college
  • While doing this, raise issues of social justice and foster reflection on rhetorical methods of engaging them
  • Help them connect with professor’s personality and values

David Foster is against challenging cultural cites in these ways

• Students want to avoid conflict in classrooms, not seek it out
• He warns that PPT scholars/teachers need to think carefully about the effects of dissonance in the writing classroom
  • 1) Difference must be framed in and interactive structure and laid out for all participants
  • 2) Teachers must prepare themselves/students for personal tensions created by dissonance/conflict
  • 3) Classrooms valuing difference – articulating differences is risky, stressful, and potentially painful

Richard Fulkerson also argues against it – he thinks they seem inappropriate

• The reading, analyzing, and discussing upon which course rests are not conducive to actual writing instruction – there is no time to do it all
• And the likelihood of indoctrination is high – cannot accept opposing viewpoints or register contemporary relevance

The Process Movement in Composition Studies

The Process Movement in Composition Studies

Murray, Crowley, Elbow, Flower and Hayes, Sommers, Perl, Emig, Kent, Foster, Miller, Ede

The process movement is traditionally thought to be the salvation of Compositions studies that was developed as a response to current-traditional rhetoric while both professionalizing the teaching of comp and reconceptualizing students as writers (Crowley). Hairston has said that it gave composition teachers something to study, something vaguely scientific, upon which to base a field. The main genre is considered the expressive/expository essay. One of the biggest debates in Comp Studies is whether or not a paradigm shift called the “process movement” really occurred, or if it just reinforced old notions in a new way.

Advocating Process

Donald Murray outlined the three stages of the process in his “Teach Writing As Process Not Product”: prewriting, writing, revising. He argues that such a process gives students the chance to won their writing, subject, truth, and language – they are in control of what they produce because the process is individualized to what each student needs. Students produce multiple drafts with a focus on mechanics coming as the last step. Peter Elbow advocates a similar process and has promoted freewriting as a means of invention that can serve as part of the prewriting stage. While prewriting, students generate raw material and figure out what to say. Elbow asserts that freewriting makes revision easier for students later because they have not yet crafted their writing in any way; thus, they are less attached to it and will be less likely to resist moving, deleting, and/or adding new material. Janet Emig also adds onto this original notion of process by advocating intervention: a teacher should intervene into a process sin order to improve the process itself or the product it produces. There are two modes of intervention: proffering freedoms or establishing constraints.

Other proponents of a kind of process are Linda Flower and John Hayes. Flower and Hayes developed the cognitive process theory to describe how writers approach a writing task. They argue that thinking exists in the mind apart from language, and they are concerned with how language is developed from the mental process of the mind. They posit a model of cognition that focuses on how the writer sets goals and makes decisions during the composition process.

One contemporary defender of process is David Foster. He uses the process movement to argue against cultural criticism in the composition classroom, which he argues is too politically charged and is likely to, through exposing and exploiting difference, offend and hurt some students. Instead, he argues that we should stick to process because it not only legitimated our field, but that a turn to the culture may even threaten to undo all the progress we made through using the process movement to establish ourselves.

Neutral?

Perl and Sommers examined revision processes of both unskilled novices and adults; their findings contradict the notion of a linear process. Perl examined unskilled writers moving through the three stages, and found that composition is recursive: the writers continuously moved back and forth among the three stages. Likewise, Sommers’ study of student writers and experienced adult writers found that each demographic revises in drastically different manners: the students focused on local revision only, but did not focus on conceptual, global matters, while the adults saw composing as constantly writing and rewriting. These findings suggest that there is no “Process,” but perhaps a series of “processes” that are individualized to each writer, and perhaps even assignment.

Post-Process

Thomas Kent developed the term “post process” to refer to a collection of sometimes conflicting theories that are a reaction to process theory. These theories maintain three assumptions: Writing is public, it is interpretative, and it is situated. In other words, it works against the notion that writing (via process) implies regular, sequential procedures and that it is an isolated writer making personal meaning along. We have come to understand writing as a messy and discursive process and that meaning is created socially (Bruffee, Cooper, McComiskey). I tend to agree with Richard Fulkerson and Lynn Bloom that there is no such thing as post-process theory. Fulkerson and Bloom argue that the term is an oxymoron and there is no agreed-upon meaning for it; indeed, it seems as if Kent’s definition of post-process is broad enough to encompass any pedagogy that is not considered current-traditional or process, such as critical cultural approaches and social epistemic/constructionist approaches.

No Such Thing As Process Movement

Susan Miller and Lisa Ede go one step further and propose that there never was anything such thing as a “Process Movement.” First, Miller points out that, though process stabilized the field, there was no major paradigm shift: Process Theory shares a lot with Current-Traditional: Both describe a student-centered by independent pedagogy, both assume a “goal text” or final version that could accurately represent intentions, both see words as having settled meanings.

Ede agrees, going so far as to assert that there was never anything as unified and coherent as a “process movement.” As she points out, the very scholars often attributed to the process movement (Emig, Perl, Sommers, Flower and Hayes) do not themselves use the term “process movement.” Further, there is no such thing as “post-process” because, not only was there never a process movement, but also elements of process are everywhere in our pedagogies: drafting, revising, etc). Finally, process was the not the primary engine of comp’s professionalization; there were multiple movements underway at the same time, such as seminars, institutes, conferences, workshops, and the rise of basic writing. Ede argues that the term “process movement” functions in much the same way “current traditional” does in that it is a “floating signifier”: everyone recognizes it in its context, but a concrete definition is difficult to pin down. However, it enables scholars to pit new theories against a generalized and devalued past that poses a threat to current efforts.

How would I answer a question on this theme?

I would do it in much the same way I do here. I set up the process proponents, then the neutral side, then post-process, then those who think the process movement never existed. I’d side with Ede’s argument. As I was reading all of these texts on process, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I was uncomfortable with it conception. It wasn’t until I got to Ede’s text that I realized Process had been CTRed: vilified and denigrated despite it never once articulating itself as a coherent theory or pedagogy.