BEYOND POSTPROCESS

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-831-2

Contents

Preface: Righting Writing Thomas Kent.....................................................................................................................xiIntroduction: A New Postprocess Manifesto: A Plea for Writing Sidney I. Dobrin, J. A. Rice, and Michael Vastola...........................................11 Writing and Accountability Barbara Couture..............................................................................................................212 What Constitutes a Good Story? Narrative Knowledge in Process, Postprocess, and Post-Postprocess Composition Research Debra Journet.....................413 Putting Process into Circulation: Textual Cosmopolitanism Joe Marshall Hardin...........................................................................614 Reassembling Postprocess: Toward a Posthuman Theory of Public Rhetoric Byron Hawk.......................................................................755 The Page as a Unit of Discourse: Notes toward a Counterhistory for Writing Studies John Trimbur and Karen Press.........................................946 Folksonomic Narratives: Writing Detroit Jeff Rice.......................................................................................................1177 Old Questions, New Media: Theorizing Writing in a Digital Age Kyle Jensen...............................................................................1328 Postconflict Pedagogy: Writing in the Stream of Hearing Cynthia Haynes..................................................................................1459 Being Delicious: Materialities of Research in a Web 2.0 Application Collin Brooke and Thomas Rickert....................................................16310 First, A Word Raúl Sánchez...................................................................................................................18311 The Salon of 2010 Geoffery Sirc........................................................................................................................19512 Postpedagogical Reflections on Plagiarism and Capital Rebecca Moore Howard.............................................................................219Index......................................................................................................................................................232Contributors...............................................................................................................................................236

Chapter One

WRITING AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Barbara Couture

Writing has a material focus for scholars and teachers in the academy. Students in writing classes expect to be given writing assignments and to have papers, e-journals, and other such experiences graded. They also expect to be told whether their writing is grammatically correct and effective and whether it meets expectations. Beyond our students, testing agencies, peer reviewers, and school and college boards also expect faculty to materially demonstrate how they have improved students' writing through test scores, portfolio assessments, or other evidential means. At the same time, in this postprocess era, our scholarly attention to writing has invited us to attend more completely to writing as a phenomenon, that is, to how writing works in the contexts of writers, readers, and their cultures. This approach calls into question assumed correlations between the material processes of writing or the material form of written products and how writing "works" as communication—correlations often taken for granted in the writing classroom.

In fact, postprocess theory has told us that writing may not "work" at all, in the sense that it predictably accomplishes some preconceived notion of its intended outcome. And this, in turn, calls into question the everyday practice of teaching writing, whether we emphasize the process of writing or the structure of the written product. If little about writing is predictable, what lessons can teachers give? What models of written products should students study? What can be said about writing in the classroom if indeed we cannot nail down hard data that we can teach to our students about the product and the way it is produced? In short, how can we be accountable to our students as writing teachers, and likewise, how can they be accountable to us as writers, if we ask postprocess theory to guide us as writing teachers?

In some ways these are silly questions. As experienced writing teachers, we all have rubrics, models, prescriptions, and handbooks aplenty to help guide students in becoming more skilled as writers. And, too, we can invent writing tasks, scoring guides, and metrics to provide evidence of whether student writers have learned something. Our material means of teaching and evaluating writing "beyond process" or "beyond post process" continue to develop much in the ways they always have, responding to new demands—such as new technologies or legislated requirements—regardless of our more sophisticated understanding of writing as a phenomenon and our knowledge that the teaching of writing has limited impact on the meaning or success of any given writing event.

In short, despite the postprocess movement, writing as a phenomenon continues to be taught in terms of specific material processes to be emulated or verbal forms to be imitated. And students continue to be held accountable for responding to this teaching as writers. Similarly, despite the postprocess movement teachers will continue to be held accountable for what they teach by being asked to produce evidence that what they are doing is valuable, through state-wide testing or evidential means. Federal initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and the Spellings Commission on Higher Education have demonstrated that accountability is "top of mind" for those who perform public scrutiny of educational practices. Teachers and school administrations know well that the call for teacher accountability has spawned a host of institutional demands to assess and evaluate every aspect of educational practice as it meets a standard, increasingly one externally defined and measurable. And this situation stands to remain for teachers as long as we can predictably assume.

Given continuing calls for such material accountability, what in the way that we teach writing really can change or should change as a result of the so-called postprocess movement in writing theory? What can and should change, I think, is the philosophy that directs the material practices teachers, students, and others associate with writing and accountability in educational settings. To elaborate this claim, I will first characterize briefly how we have been talking and thinking about writing in the classroom prior to our engagement with postprocess theory, and second, explain how postprocess theory changes that conversation. In doing so, I will argue for a philosophical approach to the practices of teaching and evaluating writing that complements postprocess theory and reenvisions our obligations toward educational accountability.

HOW WE TALK ABOUT WRITING IN THE CLASSROOM NOW

During the last two decades and then some, theoretical scholarship in writing, composition, rhetorical theory, literary criticism, and a host of other fields of study has been adopted by teachers of writing as lessons or even rubrics for how writing should be taught. As a veteran writing teacher and composition scholar, my experience has been that theory that has been interpreted for the writing classroom has been interpreted largely as prescriptions for the material processes of producing writing and structuring the product.

As a writing teacher entering the profession in the early 70s, I followed the "turn theory into prescription" pedagogical urge and responded to the research trends of the times. In the early 70s, linguists dominated the conversation about how to improve students' writing skills. In response, teachers like me paid attention to how sentences were constructed and generated, giving students exercises to help them develop more complex sentences which were thought to demonstrate more complex ways of thinking. As the writing world became more aware of international scholarship that focused on social structures and how they influence communication, rhetoricians began to develop complex theories about audience analysis which teachers then translated into rubrics for designing compositions and reports for specific purposes. Developmental psychology played a role as well, urging teachers to adopt a progressive pattern of asking students to write narratives first and from there to build skills incrementally, step-by-step marching through more challenging rhetorical forms (e.g., description, process, comparison) until they reached the highest, most intellectually demanding form of prose, analytical argument. Similarly, educational research on the importance of self-actualization focused teachers' attention on developing student writers' "personas"; scores of teachers—me among them—urged students to assert a "genuine voice" and give a personal stamp to their writing. As new populations of adult learners and ethnic minorities filled our classrooms and sociolinguists and cultural theorists started examining how writing and speech are valued in different communities, writing teachers began to pay attention to how writing communicates social status and how cultural expectations for writing affect student empowerment. Qualitative research, in turn, inspired writing researchers to look at how writing is practiced within defined social environments, such as the science and engineering professions, and to describe effective practices in these professions and in organizational settings. Along with many other teachers, I invited my students to emulate these practices as well.

The process movement repeated our tendency to translate research into models for writing in the classroom. Researchers' attention to how student writers and master writers tackle a writing project revealed the messy and iterative nature of the writing process, to be sure. But being eager to find a method that "worked," teachers soon took researchers' studies and categorizations of writing phenomena as models for teaching processes such as inventing, planning, drafting, revising, and editing. It was not uncommon to see classrooms of students in the primary and secondary schools doing "inventing" on Monday, "planning" on Tuesday, and so on through the laundry list, following prescriptions for engaging in each of these processes. In short, the very messiness of the writing processes examined by researchers (which in itself suggested something very "postprocess" about the nature of writing) clearly yielded to rubrics for teaching that very process, the so-called process paradigm.

It is true that the "process movement" compelled teachers to consider elements in the writing situation that go beyond the structure of the text, such as the individual writer and his or her cultural and social context, the readers a writer hoped to reach, the way the writer went about writing, the setting in which the writing was read, and so on. But adoption of process research to the classroom did not remove our pedagogical urge to regard all these elements as things "like the writing itself" that together can be analyzed, parsed, defined, and taught through rubrics for improving writing and writers' ability to write.

HOW POSTPROCESS THEORY CHANGED OUR CONVERSATIONS ABOUT WRITING

The "postprocess movement" parts from the history I sketched above of how scholarship on writing and its modes of production have translated into the classroom. Unlike scholarship that focused on the written product and scholarship that examined the contextual elements of the writing process, postprocess scholarship does not easily lend itself to addressing an element of the composing situation. It doesn't speak specifically to kinds of written products, their form, or how and why they are evaluated. It also doesn't speak to the developmental growth of writers, their social contexts, or the stages of their production of writing. Rather, the "postprocess movement" is ontological in its focus: it speaks to how writing is.

In the discipline of composition studies, postprocess theory was crystallized as a movement with the publication of Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm (1999), and in his introduction to this edited collection of essays, Thomas Kent identifies three principles that characterize the scholarship identified with it. Kent tells us: "Most post-process theorists hold three assumptions about the act of writing: (1) writing is public; (2) writing is interpretive; and (3) writing is situated" (1). Each of these assumptions makes it problematic to theorize or describe writing in terms of processes or products. If writing is public and not conceived as the private act or invention of an author, then exclusive control over authorship or meaning assumed by an author is immaterial. Since writing both interprets and is interpreted, assumptions can't be made about its depiction of reality as accurate or about an author or reader's perception of this. And, finally, because writing is situated, its function, purpose, or meaning can't be nailed down, elaborated, or interpreted in precisely the same way as it was or is at any given moment in time by the authors and readers interacting with it. In short, writing is in the sense that we as human beings are, present in an instance, but ever changing as time and circumstances change with us. It therefore makes sense to think about writing in the way we think about ourselves when we try to talk about what is essential to our very being.

Postprocess theorists have concluded that what is essential both to ourselves and to writing is this: "being" and "writing" are relational. Writing creates an occasion for our interaction with others and is fundamentally associated with how we make our way in the world by relating to others. As such, writing is inextricably associated with our part in world making with others in the "now" where we are together with others interacting and simply "being" in the world. If this view of writing is correct, it makes sense to say that writing has an ontological relationship to the way we conduct our lives as human beings, to our philosophy of being in the world. It is in teaching writers how to explore and enable that relationship that postprocess writing theorists can and should make a mark in the writing classroom. And they can do so alongside or even in spite of teachers' tendencies to translate theory into rubrics for practice.

In declaring writing relational, we now invite writing teachers to direct students' attention to how they are preparing themselves to address the relational character of the writing situation, to become more substantively aware of the place writing has in their ontological development. While teaching students to become more skilled in their production and more conscious of the role process plays in achieving that skill, writing teachers can also teach them to be more comfortable with uncertainty in communication situations and with their roles in maintaining the tenuous social relationships their writing develops. Teachers can do so by examining the elemental components of writer and reader as agents in a potential relation, one that will be successful or not dependent in part on the writing shared between them.

This approach to teaching writing suggests that in addition to the usual "bag of tricks" that composition teachers have for addressing developmental skill in using written language, they need to create occasions for students to become more overtly aware of the link between writing and the way they are in the world and to become more critically attuned to this dynamic. As with all teaching, there is an ethical dimension to this awakening of students' understanding, and that is for teachers to do good—or at the very least, do no harm. In the writing classroom, helping students understand the roles they and their writing play in their "being in the world" should result in some good for themselves and for others.

As I noted earlier, in declaring writing as public, interpretive, and situated, postprocess theorists do not dismiss the specific material dimensions of writing. For instance, when applying the work of Donald Davidson to writing, Kent (1993) notes that both writers and readers have "prior theories" about how writing works in certain situations. These theories are grounded in knowledge about how linguistic or rhetorical constructions typically indicate something predictable about the communication situation. Good writers usually have a pretty good idea of what kind of communication works in particular social settings, and readers, in turn, develop "passing theories" about how such material signals contribute to the meaning of a given communication event. Postprocess theorists do acknowledge that we have a set of linguistic expectations—solidified through experience and being taught how to behave as writers and readers—that help us construct meaning. Teachers, of course, spend their time with students helping them develop the tools to understand and meet these expectations through practice with various writing styles, assessments of the requirements of certain social and work situations, and so forth.

But "postprocess" theory also speaks to the character of the relation between writer and reader that must exist for communication to succeed in developing a relationship between them. Again, applying the philosophical theory of Donald Davidson, Kent asserts that communication succeeds because both writers and readers are willing at some level to believe others are trying to make sense when they write or talk to them, a state of readiness that Davidson calls the "principle of charity" (1993, 105). Through asserting that a charitable attitude toward the communication event must persist in order for it to succeed, postprocess theory challenges writing teachers to identify material components of the writing situation that contribute to that outlook of charitable reception required for all communication events.

My own contribution to postprocess theory has been a theory of phenomenological rhetoric, outlined in Toward a Phenomenological Rhetoric: Writing, Profession, and Altruism (1998). In this work, I push further this notion of "charitable exchange" to assert that the writer's ethical obligation is to engage in the writing situation with the main objective of doing good. Hence, an evaluation of the success of the communication would necessarily include some assessment of the material components of the communication as they did or did not add to conditions where the "principle of charity" could be reasonably applied as writers attempt to make sense, or as they attempt to "do good" for all involved. In short, "accountability" in the writing classroom has some relationship to that end.

(Continues...)

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