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last.updated 9.30.12

Process, Post-Process & Genre

Purpose

During the late sixties, scholars such as Donald Murray brought to the field's attention that a fixation on the written product was not a useful pedagogy; instead, writing instructors needed to help students work through the process of writing. Although the field's practical response to this theoretical approach has received criticism, teaching a writing process is still a central foundation of most composition classrooms.

Before Class

• Read Flower and Hayes "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing" [College Composition and Communication, 32.4]
• Read Hyland, "Genre-based pedagogies" [Journal of Second Language Writing, 12.1]
• Read Delpit "The Silenced Dialogue" [BB]
• Submit Blog Entry #2 on Blogger by the beginning of class

FreeWrite

Answer the following questions so that you can contribute to the class discussion. You have the first ten minutes of class.

Would you teach the writing process to your students? Why or why not? If so, how would you teach it?

Discussion: Literacy & Academic Discourse

The discussion today will address the following questions:

• What is the process approach? To answer this question we will study Flower & Hayes' process model.

• What does post-process refer to?
• What questions do you have about the readings?
• What objections are being made to process writing pedagogy?

Activity: Praxis

You will be divided into the three groups that will work in Google Documents or on a peice of paper.

Each group will be responsible for describing a process of moving from the action of reading a piece of scholarship, such as a research study or a theoretical discussion, to the classroom practices it influences.

As your group works on this, you may want to choose a theoretical concept (e.g., expressivism, collaboration) and either use it to 1) think about how you move from this theory to how you put it into practice in your classroom, or 2) to test the process that you have described.

When you are done, each group will have the opportunity to depict their process on the board and to explain what they did.