ENGL 402 - Week 4

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"Process Pedagogy and It's Legacy" by Chris M. Anson

"'our job is to produce better writers, not better writing'" (qtd in Anson 218).

Early process pedagogy refocused the attention onto the students' writing process. It was not enough to simply evaluate a finished product. Rather, by evaluating and facilitating peer review throughout the writing process, students are able to address weaknesses and seek support from their instructors.

People became more interested in composition as a field of study. "Whatever its driving source, the process movement soon generated intense interest in the empirical investigation of writing" (220).

"Hardly a well-informed composition program exists whose curriculum, teacher-development program, and daily routines do not engage students in the activities of writing and help them to become more conscious of themselves as writers and the strategies they use to produce text" (226).

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"Teach Writing as a Process Not Product" Donald M. Murray

"No matter how careful our criticisms, they do not help the student since when we teach composition we are not teaching a product, we are teaching a process" (3).

"It is the process of discovery through language. It is the process of exploration of what we know and what we feel about what we know through language. It is the process of using language to learn about our world, to evaluate what we learn about our world, to communicate what we learn about our world" (4).

Three Stages:

1. prewriting - everything that takes place before the first draft - Research and daydreaming.
2. writing - the act of producing the first draft.
3. rewriting - a reconsideration of subject, form, and audience - the real editing.

"We have to be quiet, to listen, to respond. We are not the initiator or the motivator; we are the reader, the recipient" (5).

Murray goes on the describe Implications which would exist should an effort toward process pedagogy be made. The focus, in each, is directed inward on the student; the writing which the student produces should reflect its creator because the creator has gone to a lot of effort to reflect in it. Other modes of writing are considered worthwhile as a means to work through what the student is trying to communicate. Mechanics are addressed at the end - it's more important that the student get words on paper than worry about how it sounds in the first draft.

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Reading Response - Week 4

I am, without a doubt, a product of the process movement. Glad to be so! Writing was made easy for me because my English teachers helped me find ways to make my writing relevant to my interests. They helped me communicate my meaning through multiple modes, sometimes asking me to write poetry or short fiction. I honestly can't think of a year where I didn't have an awesome English teacher. The only time I struggled, was in Freshman English 101 and it was because we were reading products and avoiding our process. In fact, I went through a period in my undergrad when I really struggled with writing and it was because I was getting bogged down in the literature. It wasn't until I started working in the writing center and began listening in on student's meetings with the instructors there that I remembered the importance of making a mess. I was too fixated on the best way to say what I was thinking, but I had no way of organizing the thoughts without first getting them out on paper.

The MUDDLE project foregrounds process as a means to make meaningful connections with an evolving community of peers. We had conversations about what our mission was going to be and they resembled Murray's Implications a great deal. We believed that asking individuals to describe the process of doing the things they love in an environment geared toward positive peer review would help those individuals understand themselves and others better. Sometimes we evert these processes through line-by-line commenting on drafts, through social media engagement, tagging on issues boards, or simply through simple email exchange. Regardless of platform or device, we are connecting and composing our thoughts for each other. I feel this is may be the best outcome we could ask of our students; to be able to communicate their thoughts and emotions effectively to others through many means of expression. The MUDDLE project doesn't just stop at writing. We accept any type of creative composition, for instance: digital illustrations, spoken word, music, video games, giphs, etc. The only requirement is that the user enters a commit message with every contribution and, through our mediation, participates in some form of peer review where they annotate their creative process further. Later, we find a way to creatively and dynamically represent the sum of those interactions in a digital publication, essentially completing the arc of review. It has been a very rewarding season, despite having only a few active MUDDLErs, because the individuals who have taken to it have done so with such gusto it’s obvious that the project is having a positive impact. I can’t wait to attempt to bring MUDDLE’s mission into a cohesive composition curriculum.

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Murray_Week4.pdf