whether it can continue to secure a space for rhetoric and composition in the academy and, if not, whether we ought not begin to attempt to create spaces more congenial to current theory and research (xii).
Addressing the issue of the intellectual defensibility of GWSI, some suggest that there is a paradox in how the GWSI course is constructed and conducted in its disciplinary and institutional space and what we now commonly acknowledge as part of our disciplinary knowledge about writing. This disciplinary knowledge is abstracted by Lil Brannon:
The act of writing is a complex sociocognitive interaction with the world that entails, beyond mechanical control, such subtle practices as establishing and maintaining social positions, adapting to variable discursive conventions, and constructing ideas and relationships for oneself and others. It is not separate from one’s life or from one’s culture. Our [. . .] responsibility then [is] to ensure not that students receive some essentially alien technology, some “correct” set of language practices, in order to proceed through the university, but rather that they learn to use, with greater subtlety and control, the language they bring with them, adjusting the register, the cadences, the vocabulary, the social codes, the nuances, and the intellectual moves, as they confront the demands of writing. (240–41)
In light of what this passage represents about our disciplinary understanding of writing, contributors find the GWSI classroom, as constructed in this edited collection, to be deficient.
For example, Dan Royer maintains that the rhetorical situation of the GWSI course cannot accommodate the range of student experience needed for a genuine practice of invention. He also believes, however, that the course can be improved with a new theory of invention as guided phenomenology, which he articulates. David Kaufer and Patricia Dunmire address the lack of content in the GWSI course and offer a course they developed and based on Sylvia Scribner’s notion of knowledge design for teaching analysis and analytic writing. To address his criticism of the theoretical thinness of the GWSI course, David Jolliffe recommends we reconsider the multivocal and interreferential nature of discourse. With his critique that the GWSI course is not so much bad pedagogy as pedagogy effective at producing “the wrong results,” Fred Kemp recommends a postmodern-informed pedagogy based on electronic texts, which he believes would offer us a way to literally rethink what it means to write (181).
Others, however, are not so optimistic regarding the potential of reform. David Russell studies the course as a paradoxical activity system that attempts to teach writing as part of activity systems of which neither teachers nor students are actually part. For writing to have genuine meaning and purpose, it must occur within the complexity and richness that can only be offered, he says, by a specific activity system (“Activity Theory and Its Implications”). Aviva Freedman’s research on genre echoes this idea. Her findings indicate that students acquire the discipline-specific features of genres routinely taught in GWSI classrooms in their content courses without resort to either models or to explicit teaching. Furthermore, not only does the explicit teaching of the underlying rules of genre in the GWSI classroom fail to facilitate learning, Freedman says, it often impedes it. Petraglia concurs, writing that formal instruction of genre conventions and principles may well be “counterproductive.” Such instruction may suggest to students that rhetorical situations are governed by rules and conventions. This impression diminishes the complexity and richness of rhetorical situations students will be expected to navigate in their futures. Petraglia maintains that evaluating students on their performance in the impoverished contexts of GWSI is not just “unrealistic” but is also “unethical” (90–91).
Criticism of GWSI also considers contexts that would better facilitate students’ writing. “The combined evidence from many studies” Freedman reports, “pointed compellingly to the powerful facilitative effect of establishing a richly textured and finely managed discursive context” for students (141). This, she continues, “is what we saw typically in the disciplinary classes observed, where students did indeed learn to write, and learn to write extraordinarily well” (141). Her suggestion for an alternative to GWSI is “a specialized model of WAC” that might function in a variety of ways, for example, with writing centers, “sheltered courses,” and/or writing-intensive courses (140). Suggesting that writing cannot be taught but that we can nevertheless locate environments for students in which writing “naturally occurs,” Petraglia, too, suggests guidelines analogous to WAC (94). Lil Brannon, who reports on The University at Albany, SUNY’s move away from compulsory first-year composition to a WAC model, along with their rationalization for doing so, says that first-year composition continued to function so long as they conceived of literacy and writing in strictly functional terms, as “something basic, a skill to be mastered, a technology to be applied” (239). Having critiqued that assumption, an assumption that constructs students in terms of lack and deficiency, they were able to “move away from ghettoized general writing skills instruction” and toward a model of literacy that views students as developing writers (240). This move was accomplished, she says, by a group of faculty across the curriculum understanding that the first-year composition requirement was based on a “‘skills’ concept of writing that was losing professional currency” that contradicted what those responsible for SUNY’s composition program believed about writing and what “major researchers in the field found credible” (240). This vein of criticism of GWSI suggests programmatic changes that will provide students with more rhetorically sound environments. Such changes, of course, also have implications for disciplinarity.
Many in this collection advocate for reform in first-year composition; others call for its abolition. Many are sympathetic to Freedman’s position that “in the end, I am arguing against stand-alone GWSI classes” (140). While they argue for reform rather than abolition, even Kaufer and Dunmire, write that “the question of a college writing program’s goals and cultural legitimation has to be answered better than we have so far answered it” (218). In terms of activity theory, the writing done in GWSI courses must meet the objectives of each of the activity systems served by the course; the activity system of the GWSI course, on the other hand, simply does not exist beyond the confines of the course. Petraglia says, too, that the real question is not whether the GWSI course “could be doing something better but whether it is attempting to do something that needs to be done at all” (89). “Baldly stated,” he writes, “general writing skills instruction—perhaps the very notion of the composition classroom—is an idea whose time has gone” (97).
This strand of post-process also distances itself from early process theory, as it tacitly envelops process theory and practice into its critique of the ubiquitous GWSI approach. It also presumes to envelop the scholarship of the social and cultural turn of the mid-1980s on as part of its domain. These scholars appropriate this scholarship as theoretical ground upon which they offer additional theoretical formulations to render the composition course more consonant and amenable to the social/cultural turn. Still, some within this post-process strand believe the course to be hopelessly compromised by its disciplinary and institutional context, and they call for its abolition (“The New”).
Interestingly, Robert Connors opens this edited collection with a historical account of calls for both the reform and abolition of composition, so that we can, he says, better understand how the current abolitionist movement compares with those of the past. Historically, he says, calls for abolition have come from those outside the field, whereas the current one is being proffered by insiders. Because insiders do have knowledge of the local circumstances of our disciplinary situation, Connors suggests the current abolitionist movement warrants greater scrutiny and consideration on our part.
Strand Two Post-Process, Comprised of Those Who Explicitly Self-Identify as Post-Process but Appropriate from Kent’s Theory of Paralogic Hermeneutics Only Specific Concepts, Which They Mediate
This strand of post-process theory includes those who explicitly self-identify as post-process but appropriate specific concepts from Kent’s theory, which they then mediate. While Kent’s position might be said to constitute a strong version of a particular concept, most in this group do not fully share Kent’s conviction. Kent acknowledges
