Overview of Pedagogies

Process Pedagogy:

Focus is on writing as personal process that must be developed by each person individually. The instructor is removed from an authoritarian position and is more of a facilitator. Moves the focus away from what the final product is and more onto what is going on when it is being written.

Expressive Pedagogy:

Writing that is about finding an authentic voice for the individual, the idea being that if they are truly invested in what they are writing it will be more engaged and persuasive.  Smaller writing assignments are designed to give us much space for individual expression as possible (free-writing, journaling ect.)  A move away from Letter grades towards a more descriptive form of evaluation based on readers responses.

Rhetorical Pedagogy:

Focuses on the relationship between the writer and the context of his writing. Grounded in rhetorical history and strategies.  Highly concerned with the ideological forces behind argument and how writing is always engaging some form of discuourse

Cultural Studies:

Looks at contemporary cultural issues as a way of bridging the gap between the world of the academy and the world outside. Students are encouraged to engage with the cultural forms they are learning about and to think critically about their own connections with these cultures when they write. Value is put on diversity and creating dialogue.

Critical Pedagogy:

Focuses on getting students to engage in a way that makes them civically active democratic citizens. Looks at various political systems  and asks the students to think critically about what they are reading. By engaging in the discourse community students can then enact social change.

Feminist Pedagogy:

Vert focused on the identity of the individual and how gender informs/engages/empowers certain forms of discourse. Works to expose what are taken for granted ideas about gender and sexuality

Collaborative Pedagogy:

Looks at the ways that students are actively working together to create their texts and learn about writing. Also engages with ideas of group consensus versus dissension and how compromise can be created to help students prepare for “Real world” group work” Teacher becomes a meditator and facilitator.

Basic Writing Pedagogy:

Teaching that focuses on the fundamental aspects of writing to help bring students up to the appropriate college level.  The focus here is to make sure students are not being left out of the democratizing process of the university education due to a lack of literacy

Service Learning Pedagogy:

Asks students to engage with the community surrounding the school and create texts that are useful to those communities. Along with cultural studies it helps to break down the differences between academic writing and “Real-world” writing. Students must not only create documents to help the group they work with but must think and write about their experience within the community.

WAC Pedagogy:

An approach that looks at how writing is used in all disciplines in different ways and to get writing instruction to be something that all of the departments work with.

Writing Center Pedagogy:

The investment and creation of a large structure to help students learn to write. By providing the resources to allow for one-on-one tutors students are given a better environment to improve their writing. Also allows for writing programs to keep at the cutting edge of technological issues.

Multimodal Pedagogy:

Focus on media and technological literacy. Helps students to engage in the production of texts that are technologically up to date and media savvy while engaging in rhetorical analysis of the visual aspects of culture they are confronted with. Focus is both on reading and writing of digital and other multimodal texts.

Sustainable Teaching Pedagogy:

The focus on  creating a curriculum for writing classes that builds on itself and continues to be relevant for the students. Practices that will not burn the teacher or the students out but continue to engage with new materials as well.

Towards a Posthuman Composition

A Post-Human Approach

To live in western society today is to live as part of a complex and multi-leveled network. People have become more aware over time of their placement within the various physical and social systems of the world, but have also become aware of the degree to which they themselves are a complex network of systems: The nervous system interacting with the circulatory system interacting with organs. However, instead of becoming a homogenous society of unimaginative clones, we are opened up by the diverse possibilities of being Post-Human. The idea of a privileged human consciousness as the seat of control of the personslips away, and makes room for other ways of viewing our interaction with the world to come into the picture.

So what does being Post-Human mean for composition? For one it means a conscious placement of our writing within a conversation. We do not exist as solitary beings, writing in the dark for ourselves. Other people’s voices influence and are connected to our writing just as our writing engages with various systems itself.

Writing itself is part of a system but is also a system in itself. As writers we engage in a diverse range of practices, and no one process of writing is necessarily the same as the other. The key is to recognize that writing, to borrow a term from Guiles and Guttari, is like a Rhizome, growing out in many directions. Writing is becoming, not ever in a fully perfect and finished state. Our essays do not suddenly just appear as a finished product. Each writer must engage in the process of writing and discover for themselves what systems allow for their expression to grow. Because of this, it is important for instructors of composition to approach writing as  multi faceted process and make students aware of not just the ways they as writers will be interacting, but the ways that their writing with interact within network as well. The teacher should provide many different ways for the student to approach their integration within the writing networks that they place themselves in and not limit the class to any one process or approach proposed as the best way to write.

As writing is a process and a system it is through examination and practice that writing is best allowed to develop. Students should be given an ample amount of diverse reading material that provides examples of the various networks and how other writers have chosen to interact with them. This will also show them the various voices that are used and will allow them to begin to produce their own voice as a writer. This expressive voice will also be developed by giving them ample opportunities to write. A composition teacher should have students write in every class period, in some form or another. These daily writing exercises should include, but not be limited to, things like brainstorming, journaling, formal responses and creative work. Because writing does not simply exist in a vacuum it is important for the instructor to develop the student’s understanding of the system of the class as a discourse community. This can be done in several ways and while peer reviews and group work are the most likely choice there are other options such as individual conferencing with the teacher (so as to develop the writers understanding of that particular system [Teacher – student circuit]) or having them go out into the community and do service learning projects.

Noise versus Pattern

While any writing is able to transmit some sort of information and for some the most simple message may be the best, it is the messages ability to integrate the patterns of writing most relevant to the network it is involved with that make it good writing. To do this a writer has to take several different things into consideration, as there are many different levels of systems and form found within writing. While some are more crucial to good writing then others, an understanding of all of these systems and how the interact with each other in a larger network is necessary. Just because you know how to put the key in the ignition and start a car, doesn’t mean that you know how to drive.

At the most basic level, composition teachers must make sure that the understanding of the linguistic code of the system that the writing is created with (The language we choose to write in) is good enough that other participants in that system can understand what is being said. This is essentially having a working sense of the grammar of a language but it should be noted that this is just a basic understanding. At this level, the code of the system undergoes an almost constant change and is highly malleable between discourse communities. Using the examples of the English language, we find that any sort of definition of “good English” is extremely hard to pin down. Composition teachers need to recognize that they are using a particular form that is held up by most Academics and that it differs and can even be jarring or cryptic to the general public. Most common forms of writing (novels, letters, articles and more) use a simple form of grammar that allows for a focus on information and tries to not be distracted by what are often seen as arbitrary rules and encryptions.  These various levels of code or grammar should be acknowledged in the classroom and assignments should reflect the diversity of potential tones. It is ridiculous for composition teachers to assume that every student who takes a composition class is going to become an academic. Many students will go on to become writers in a much more public sphere with a very different grammatical system to its discourse community.

Once this basic set of codes is understood, an understanding of the structure of words and sentences within a language system can be developed. This ranges from how word choice affects a sentence to how sentences interact with each other in a sequence, to the overarching structure of their argument and paragraphs. Most students are familiar with the 5 paragraph essay and find it hard to escape from its comfortably simple pattern. Being stuck in this pattern or any one particular pattern will inhibit an ability to communicate and interact with different networks. The 5 paragraph essay may be great for a basic essay in a high school or college writing course but it may fall short when applied to complex arguments or mediums such as newspaper and magazine articles. This concept can be applied to word choice as well, as certain dialects and Jargon, even if very formal, are not always appropriate and can be detrimental to an argument. The teacher needs to develop a sense of how the argument of the paper and its organization directly affect each other and show how multiple options are available to the writer. While it may be tempting to teach specific formats for specific arguments, they should be presented as just one out of many possible choices.

Within the same vein of argument, the format or layout of the page is another system that is important to consider when writing. While there are the traditional views of what the page of an essay should look like, these views do not take into account the writings placement within a discourse community besides an academic one and often fail to take other helpful forms of media into consideration. It is important to open the doors to diversity and show how the student’s writing interfaces with the page and the technology that creates it. This consideration exists in the simple aspects of writing as well as the more complex network interactions within writing. The simple side of this includes things such as teaching students the various tools at their disposal when writing with a word processing program or how certain styles of headings may help a reader navigate the information on their paper. On the complex side, composition teachers should encourage students to consider what strategies they are using depending on the medium they are presenting their work in, whether it is a paper, a web page, a PowerPoint or some other form of technologically mediated discourse. From here the writer is able to place their work into the network in a way that allows for their message to be clearly received by potential readers.

Considering how writing interacts with the social systems of the world is a crucial step in examining the process of writing. Composition teachers can do this by making students aware of the various discourse communities that exist and how the various ways they may interact with them via their writing. The teacher may present themselves as an audience but should also point out the academic setting that the teacher is placed within. They should then include other potential audiences and have the students consider what sort of systems (cultural, economic, gendered, political) these audiences find themselves in. Even the term audience warrants examination in the composition class as it may imply that only a specific group of people may be viewing our writing. What sort of over-arching conversation is their writing being placed within? How is the audience going to be receiving their paper and what forms of reading will they consider. Audience is a part of what comprises the network of a discourse community but is only some of what needs to be considered by a writer.

The Network of the Classroom

It is important to not forget the very concepts we have applied to writing when we are looking at the classroom itself. The networks of classroom are as diverse and varied as the networks of writing. There are the interactions between the teacher and students, students to students, and even students to the physical location of the class and students/teacher to their larger college setting. These various interactions create the environment of learning and thus it is important to make sure that these channels of communication are open and explored. What place respective roles do teachers and students play in the class?

Keeping in mind that we are part of a network of learning, the teacher should act as a resource, whose information has been compiled from experience and their own research. The temptation to say “Truths” about writing, and demand that the classroom network focus  on the teacher at the front of the classroom is to re-enact the Liberal Humanist perception of identity being somehow separate from the world around it and privileged even when it does interact. Teachers do not simply impart knowledge from their mind to the mind of the student. The exchange is one that goes back and forth between teachers and students and for the teacher to be the sole example speaker or expresser in a writing classroom is to ignore the vast and vivid breadth of the potential forms of expression within the students.

It would be misleading to suggest that this philosophy suggests that anything having to do with the individual is bad. While writing and learning is placed within a network and is not an island to its self, this does not make the parts of the system somehow homogonous. There are gears, sprockets, levers, electrodes, diodes and much more to be found in this organic machine. There is something to be said for the expressive approach to writing. We must know our self before we can hope to be honest in our interactions with the world. When we ask our students to write and find their voice we are asking them to find their particular placement within the system of the class and within writing.

Technology in Composition

As technology develops, our culture and the ways we navigate our lives change. Communication and how we deal with information are a large part of this. Technology and writing are thus intrinsically linked. While many students may not have computers at home, the campus area they are a part of will have computers and they will undoubtedly have an email address that the school uses to send them information. As much as they might think they are not affected or can avoid the ever changing world of technology, they have entered it by writing and even by enrolling in post secondary education.

In a composition class it is important to address issues of technology and bring the students up to a competent level in their use of various communication technologies. In many ways, this use of technology will give them practice for professional settings. Papers will be turned in electronically and when possible writing exercises will be done in computer media classrooms where work can be written, explored and manipulated electronically. The use of PowerPoint and other media for presentations will be encouraged as a way of expanding their strategies for persuasion.

As new forms of media develop along side acts of composition, what we traditionally think of as writing and the essay will change. Internet blogs have become an extremely popular form of writing and a community of writers has begun to spring up around it. Text messaging has effects both the speech and writing patterns of many younger students and the internet has had quiet in impact in issues surrounding composition (such as plagiarism). To ignore the effects of technology in the networks of writing is to leave our students effectively writing with a stone tablet and chisel.

Link 1: Possibilities of Critical Pedagogy

by using the ideas presented by authors such as Anne George, Lisa Delpit, Cynthia Selfe and Richard Selfe (and in many ways Berlin), we can hope to show students how to recognize the dominant discourses, ideological forces, and mediations of power via technology that are at play in their day to day lives. By helping them to think critically about what they are reading and seeing in their lives we can then help them learn to write in a fashion that engages with the various spheres of influence and power that they will encounter in the rest of their lives. This involves not only getting them to question the very obvious powers-that-be but also the very ideological forces that have shaped them today and continue to shape them. One challenge that exists for the professor using this Posthuman theory is to be able to acknowledge their own placement in an system of power and ideology over the students how they can get the students to potentially recognize this system with out undermining all of their ability to teach at the same time.

Link 2: Service learning

One of the best ways to get students to realize that they are part of a larger system is to get them to do some form of service learning. One concern that is brought up by  Laura Julier in her essay “Community Service pedagogy” is that service learning lacks a sort of academic rigor because of its lack of a definable conceptual framework. A posthuman theory of composition can help provide this frame work as it gives the students a space to create a scaffolding or conceptual map of the connections that are required for the service learning project.  As Julier points out it makes students ask what counts in composition and why it counts.  Service learning is perhaps one of the most direct ways of drawing out some of the key-points of the posthuman composition theory that are inherent in the piece I have written. It gives the students a space to actualize what they are learning and to embody the actual practices. It also engages their writing skills in such a fashion that necessitates they interact with the systems they are a part of. This of course means that the instructor pay close attention to the students themselves and wether they are truly engaged in their large posthuman body or if they are simply choosing to close the circle of connections down to a more self contained one.

Link3: Process pedagogy

By highlighting the various systems that students are a part of, the instructor can also show how there are many different kinds of writing systems that the students may develop. This is directly in line with the idea of writing as a process. By turning the class into an examination of systems and the posthuman condition the students are encouraged to investigate the different process’s they each have developed, and to further develop and refine said processes.  The Instructor can also help give students more of a sense of control over their writing by highlighting the ways that the students own their process. The teacher can help students develop an algorithmic approach similar to the one proposed by Mike rose. The nature of examining a system would allow for students to do this sort of mapping of the process of writing.

Link4: Expression in the posthuman

Expressivism as put forth by Peter Elbow and others can come in handy when trying to get students to imagine the space they take within a system. Students should be encouraged to find their own voice within the larger contexts they are set into and the best way for the instructor to facilitate this is through a balance of graded riding and non-graded writing. Free-writing and other expressive forms should be used early on in the classroom to really cultivate the students abilities to communicate what they value and develop a sense of themselves as a writer. Students should also develop this skills so that when they find themselves unable to write they can return to this space to generate ideas and momentum.

It may seem that expressivism would be contradictory to a posthuman approach at first and many of the arguments against expressivism would support this. Certainly if expressivisim is the only approach used in a class the issue of the writer not engaging with important social factors such as politics and issues of power will arise. expressivisim should be viewed as a starting ground that allows the student to learn about themselves. From there you move onto other forms of pedagogy to help the student integrate that developed sense of self into the bigger picture.

link 5: Multi-Modal One

To get students to think about the different kinds of media that are used in different systems or discourses, teachers must engage with Multi-Modal Pedagogies.  Having students only engage the writing of alphabetic essays ignores the vastly complex world of composition as it has developed thanks to digital technologies. Even the writing process is deeply informed by the multi-modal system as most word processing programs use a highly visual form of interface.

Helping students realize the relationship between different forms of media can help them make rhetorically stronger choices as well. Often times student will shy away from using any sort of visual element in their papers as they have been taught that they shouldn’t rely upon these other mediums. By using a  multi-modal pedagogy  teachers will enable students to become technological literate, an important skill for future citizens to have, and help them make even stronger arguments that use all of the tools in the toolbox.

link 6: Cultural studies

Using cultural studies is one possible way to get students to look at the various systems of the world and how their writing can be a part of change.  Ellen Cushmans call to bridge the gap between the university and the community is one such example.  Teachers don’t need to be completely restricted to the local either though as cybercultures is a good avenue, particularly in posthumanism, to show students the various cultural forces they are engaged with.

Cultural studies will also help students realize that the systems they are engaged with are just as intellectually rich as the supposed high realm of academic studies.  By using contemporary issues as a focus point for a class, students will be more likely to find point of entry into the various cultural systems around them be be engaged once they do connect. The danger of creating student texts that do not engage critically or create generic populist ideas, as Scholars George and Timbur put it, can be avoided by using a posthuman lens, getting students to actively find their place and functionality within various cultural forces.

Link 7: Critical, cultural and feminisim, and collaborative!

By pushing students to explore beyond the first initial connections they find, teachers will engage in critical, cultural, feminist and collaborative pedagogy.

By using the idea of gender pedagogies put forth by  Gibson, Marinara and Meem, an instructor using the posthuman approach get get students to think about how these generally taken for granted aspects of their life can determine how and why they write, particularly when they begin to consider types of audience.  In what ways to they perform and how might they be pushed to perform in a certain manner?

Mckee’s idea of using an online discussion to engage these idea can help a teacher using a posthuman approach to talk about many issues, not just those involving heteronormativity and homosexuality. Students may certainly be touchy when it comes to those subjects but there are many other topics can benift from Mckees strategy of “listening, questioning, using research to augment opinions and maintaining a single discussion over time.

Students will also be encouraged to think of collaborative ways of thinking as they engage in online discussion and projects that necessitate they work together.  Students may readily find that the culturally engaged projects they want to create will be better implemented by a group working towards the end goal then one person. By using writing exercises such as peer response, small group writing, and group presentations a framework can begin to develop for larger group projects that engage with discourses outside of the classroom. The instructor will need to be conscious of the issues surrounding collaborative work that Rebecca Howard brings up, particularly those of the idea of the solitary genius as well as collaboration as a form of cheating.

John Timburs idea of Concensus and Difference will also help students see how not all systems work harmonisiously and how many in fact are in friction with other systems and even themselves. The posthuman aproach will help students learn how to navigate that friction

link 8: Multi-Modal Composition two

The ending paragraph of this piece really highlights multi-modal not just as a type of composition pedagogy but as really the future of composition itself.  This is something that DuffelMeyer and Ellerston highlight when they discuss what multimodal composition can do for writing across the curriculum. Underlying almost eveyr paragraph of their piece is the very idea that composition  has changed and that just teaching writing its most basic form is no longer adequate. When we as teachers engage students to write in rhetorically authentic situations we ask them to engage in systems that require t hat they compose in a multimodal way.  Additionally, by teaching students to recognize these media forms as a type of composition we open up their critical skills to examine the various media they will be confronted with for the rest of their lives, helping to expose the ideological framework behind not just the message but the way it is delivered as well.

Of course Palmeri’s OSU dissertation on multi-modility and composition studies does highlight the difficulty that teachers can have in justifying the inclusion of different media forms in composition courses. He brings up the idea of weaving composition through other pedagogy to show how multi-modality has always been a part of composition. I believe post-human theory can also help further these claims as it draws out the idea of composition and multiple forms into  an even wider field.