The Process Pedagogy

Jeanette Carrasquillo

Content

• Reflection• What is Process

Pedagogy?• How did it begin?• Key Assumptions• Description of the

process-oriented

classroom?

• How to achieve process pedagogy?

• Teaching methods• Critiques• Reality in our classrooms• Summary• Shared Opinion• Videos

“What is the process we should teach? 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.”

-Donald Murray, “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product”

What is Process Pedagogy?

• It focuses on writing as a process rather than a product. 

• It is centered on the idea that students determine the content of the course by exploring the craft of writing using their own interests, language, techniques, voice, and freedom, and where students learn what people respond to and what they don't.

Process Pedagogy

Believes students should be treated like real writers.

A course designed with process pedagogy is centered around the production of student texts, emphasizing in-class workshops, conferencing, peer review, invention and revision techniques, and reading that supports these goals

How did Process Pedagogy begin?

• As a reaction against the formalism composition methods, sometimes called "current-traditional" methods, that encouraged adherence to established modes of writing, such as the five-paragraph essay.

Background

• In the late 1970 and early 1980 you were either one of the process-oriented teachers arguing for student choice of topics and forms; the necessity of authentic voice; writing as a messy, organic, recursive form of discovery, growth, and personal expression

• or you were a teacher who be lieved that we needed to resist process' attack on rules, conventions, standards, quality, and rigor.

What were they called?

If you listened to what each side said about the other, you were either a soft-headed, mush-minded mystic clinging to 1960s nostalgia or an old fuddy-duddy schoolmarm or master clinging to canned assignments, dying forms, and outdated autocratic methods

Mid -1980’s

Process pedagogy was so prominent that you were either on the bus or off it.

Key Assumption

Students are writers when they come to the classroom(even in kindergarten) and that thewriting classroom should be a workshop in which they are encouraged through the supportive response of teachers and peers to use writing as a way to figure out what they think and feel and eventually to "publish" their work to be read and celebrated by the community of writers they have become.

Key Assumption

The process pedagogy worked on the assumption that all students could write if the curriculum were designed on a pedagogy that built on the skills, strengths, and interests students already possessed.

Key Assumption

Process teachers did not hate all written products; they only hated the kind of written products they claimed the traditional process inevitably produced-the canned, dull, lifeless student essay that seemed the logical outcome of a rules-driven, teacher centered curriculum that ignored student interests, needs, and talents.

How is the Process oriented Classroom?

How to achieve “process writing”?– Believe that students have something

original to say– Give them the freedom to choose their own

material– Show them you are interested in what they

have to say– Help them gain access to their “real” or

“authentic” voice and perspective

Teaching Methods

• Teacher is a facilitator

• Peers interact and share ideas, do plenty of free writing, explore, edit, revise and ask for feedback. There is freedom of choice guided by their particular interests

• The writing process is divided into neat stages of prewriting, writing, and revising.

Critiques• Critics against the process approach:

– This approach was not new or revolutionary but simply another “step” in the traditional pedagogy

– Suggested that the idea lacked consistency and structure

– Claimed that proponents of the process pedagogy were simply looking at “shock” value

– Believed that the process pedagogy was irresponsible because it failed to teach basic and necessary skills and conventions

Reality•  This orientation encourages us to facilitate

learner choice and individual development.• It is challenged by the current educational

climate, which considers accountability and assessment a priority.

• Discrete features of the communication and learning processes become pre-specified learning outcomes, which are to be observed and assessed. 

SummaryI threw a tantrum. "I refuse to develop a post-process course," I told

my group mates, "because I refuse to accept the whole premise of this conference-that process is dead. These courses are fine as electives or as units within a writing course, but how can anyone seriously argue that they can replace process pedagogy as our core?"

I could have gone on. I could have said that organizing a course around a huge collection of readings that are chosen and controlled by the teacher and that reflect the teacher's interests and agendas sets back composition pedagogy thirty years-no matter how hip or leftist or progressive the readings are meant to be. And I could have said, if we learned anything from Murray, Emig, and Elbow, we know that you don't teach students to write by telling them that their views on issues that concern them or their narratives about events that shaped them-their experience caring for a grandparent with Alzheimer's, their solutions for the problems of homelessness, even their stories about winning the big game or pulling a great Halloween prank-don't count as content or count only as naive opinions to be corrected during the

course. Lad Tobin

Something to think about

Let them be!!!!!

Shared Opinion

There are many language-teaching methodologies said to be the most effective, but I think teachers should use them as tools in their repertoire.

Bell, D. (2009)

Videos

Heather Adams discusses process-oriented pedagogy.mp4

Process Pedagogy.mp4

References

Bell, D. (2009). Another breakthrough, another baby thrown out with the bathwater. ELT Journal (63), 255-262. Oxford University Press.

“Process Pedagogy,” A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. Eds. Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick. New York: Oxford UP, 2001: 1-18.

Murray, Donald. Learning by Teaching: Selected Articles on Learning and Teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1982.