also objects to the universality of the classroom site. He contends there was no paradigm shift, that both writing process and current-traditional rhetoric share a limiting and disabling metaphor that defines both, namely, the classroom, whose nature is distinguished by the exigency of illiteracy mediated by abstracted, universalized conventions (27). Pullman concludes, however, that rhetoric is too complex to ever be codified; its teaching, therefore, “must serve only an introductory purpose and must never be mistaken for (or reconstructed as) real rhetoric as it is lived and practiced” (28-29). Russell, on the other hand, does not share Pullman’s presumption regarding the goal of universality. He believes that process was commodified. Still, he contends that most process research focuses on the classroom, rather than on what is of more interest: the relation between the writing processes of school and those beyond school. Russell uses activity systems theory to argue that we look beyond how “the writing process” is taught within our own school activity systems to “the plural sociologics of various networks of people and purposes and tools, including that most protean tool, writing, in the relation between school and society” (95). If our desire is to make substantive changes in writing, composition must broaden its “study of the microlevel circulation of discursive tools (and power)” between school and society and insinuate our own tools into those activity systems. “In doing so,” Russell says, “the commodification of writing processes is not an irony to be lamented but a sign of composition’s influence to be understood and used, one hopes, for good” (95).
The universality of process beyond the composition classroom is also a target of critique. Nancy Blyer reports that knowledge of writing in one situation does not ensure successful writing in another, nor can any pedagogy ensure such success (68). Russell critiques process in public schools with an anecdote regarding his and others’ attempts to have NCTE make changes regarding the description of process in their curriculum standards document. Russell has passionately argued, to no avail, to change the phrase “‘the writing process’” to the plural “‘writing processes.’” “Early on,” he writes, “researchers such as Applebee (“Problems”) pointed to problems with notions of the writing process, as a unitary psychological process that would be somehow more ‘real’—less school-bound—than previous ways of learning and teaching writing” (80). That a notion of “the writing process” has, indeed, become reified in public education is evidenced in Russell’s narrative about entering his third-grade daughter’s classroom to see four, large, commercially produced posters, each containing a one-word text: “PREWRITE. WRITE. REVISE. EDIT.” (80). Both Blyer and Russell attest to the problems of individuality and universality in process as it is applied in institutional contexts other than first-year composition.
Strand two post-process critiques differ from those in strand one, where scholars maintain that neither GWSI nor process is theoretically or pedagogically defensible, that GWSI is actually detrimental to students’ writing, and that it compromises our disciplinary security. In contrast, strand two advocates must explicitly critique process in order to self-identify as post-process. Their critiques, therefore, focus on aspects that process valued in its turn away from current-traditional rhetoric: (1) a focus on the student, which this group of scholars translates to the privileging of individuality over the social; (2) a focus on the cognitive models of process, which is maintained to have continued a two thousand year-old tradition of essentializing rhetoric as techne; (3) a focus on a universality that process is said to have valued but was unable to achieve; (4) and a critique of the value process placed on the teacher-student relationship, which is argued to have constituted a system of mediation inherently flawed by its overdetermined, always-already commodified epistemological assumptions. But it must also be said that while these critiques are, indeed, more specific and directed than those in strand one post-process, they nevertheless seem very familiar.9
Calls for Reform within Strand Two Post-Process
As anticipated, contributors to this edited collection use broad strokes to paint a post-process landscape. Many of these also resonate with great familiarity, while others call for more radical disciplinary (re)imaginings. All agree, however, that change is needed. Most familiar are calls for particular sorts of reform. These might be said to subscribe to a mild version of Kent’s paralogic hermeneutic theory. For example, Couture writes that by treating writing as design, we can “fulfill the [process] movement’s original promise” (31). This would be realized through the use of textual theory, with its deconstruction of foundationalism, along with critical genre theory. These complementary theories, she believes, are sufficient to help students understand writing as personal agency and as a way to become better people. Debra Journet also endorses genre theory as enabling us to rethink the relation of the social and cognitive in composing, the relationship between composing processes and composed products, and the extent to which composing is communal or individual. Focusing on disciplinary and interdisciplinary genre relationships, she argues, has implications for how we understand the intellectual factors involved in all composing practices.
John Schilb, who critiques the role of the essay, particularly the centrality of personal and exploratory essays in many composition courses recommends reform based on a reconceptualization of the essay. He contends that we and students ought to critique the signifying practices essay writers use to “simulate” experience in their writing. He is also concerned with the role of the social in the essayist’s experiences, whether the experiences depicted in the essay itself or those that surround the writing of the essay. The circulation and reception of essays also merit critical attention. The point, Schilb says, is that we ought not view essays as virtual re-enactments of experience but as constructed representations. Such an understanding can lead students not only to better appreciate the craft of essay writing, he believes, but also to imaginings of how their own texts might influence different situations (“Reprocessing”).
A stronger affiliation with Kent’s concepts of writing as public, interpretive, and situated, is evident in Helen Rothschild Ewald’s “A Tangled Web of Discourses: On Post-Process Pedagogy and Communicative Interaction.” She articulates how post-process pedagogies steeped in the notion of communicative interaction might influence discourse away from a transmission model and toward the transactional, a move that might suggest ways for students and teachers to interact as subjects. The organizing principle she nominates for this pedagogy is discourse moves, that is, rhetorical strategies enhanced by students’ prior knowledge and social differences. Because post-process places a high “exchange value” on teacher contributions to their student communicants, a writing class would explore writing studies’ disciplinary content (e.g., “writing skills and pedagogical methodologies”), along with “the contingent nature of instructional advice” (129). This pedagogy would function, she says, to demystify both the explicit and tacit content students confront in the classroom, enabling more successful communicative interaction with the classroom, the teacher, and their fellow students. Ewald concludes, however, that the potential to realize this post-process classroom depends “in large part on our ability to research and re-envision the educational paradigms and speech genres that currently shadow our efforts” (130).
Sidney Dobrin most explicitly sympathizes with Kent’s theory, even as he admits that paralogic hermeneutic theories fail to account for power and ethics. Therefore, his goal is to make these theories, if not consonant with, at least resonant with liberatory and radical pedagogies (“Paralogic”). Other contributors likewise recognize this need. Blyer, for example, advocates a critical research approach that rejects the process research mode and focuses on interpretation and meaning. In addition, her approach insists that a focus on domination and power is prerequisite to critique and social change. She says that while critical research may not be on the post-process agenda, such research is consonant both with post-process scholars’ view of communicative interaction as hermeneutic and paralogic and their goal of communicants engaging in a “‘hermeneutical journey of self-discovery’” (79). Just such a journey of self-discovery is illustrated in John Clifford and Elizabeth Ervin’s account of their own moves to post-process. Though Clifford and Ervin do not share generation, gender, or geography, they do share the common experience of having embraced process, only later to become disaffected with it in favor of a post-process model that engages both teacher
