Post-Process Pedagogy

On Tuesday we discussed Atkinson and post-process pedagogy. I’d like to write a little about it here to get it clearly set out in my mind.

On this view, literacy is more than reading and writing. It is the ability to critically “read” reality. Without the ability to look at reality in a critical way, students see themselves and the world as a result of inevitable and mysterious “natural forces” and “universal truths” which Berlin told us in “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class” don’t exist. Truth must be “continually decided by all and for all in a way appropriate to our own historic moment” (Berlin 490). As a result of this and other factors, composition becomes “a cultural activity by which writers position and repo¬sition themselves in relation to their own and others' subjectivities, discourses, practices, and institutions” (Atkinson 1532).

Atkinson doesn’t think solely in terms of post-process pedagogy though. He recognizes that process pedagogy is not a bad thing in itself. I mean, how can you conceive of writing instruction without thinking about pre-writing, drafting, feedback, and revision? Atkinson isn’t thinking in terms of a “basic ‘paradigm shift,’” but rather “in expanding and broadening the domain” of how we think about writing (1538). This way he can take advantage of the merits in process pedagogy, while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls that come with engagement in a purely process pedagogy.

That sounds pretty appealing. I like the idea of students learning to think critically about the world, and then learning to frame those thoughts in appropriate rhetorical terms. If we wanted to employ pedagogy like this in our own composition program at TTU, I guess we would have the students stop doing rhetorical analysis (at least as their main focus) and start engaging with article content. We might want to change the topic of assigned readings to something related to social issues that students would be interested in (I don’t think they are interested in the development of the English language).

I’m trying to imagine how our students would perform in a system like that. It’s difficult to do.