Process Pedagogy - Lad Tobin

Tobin's premise that process pedagogy is "reminiscent of 1960's political battles" and that "process pedagogy was decidedly anti-establishment, antiauthoritarian, anti-inauthenticity" (4) is an interesting line of thought to take for discussing the history behind the shift to process pedagogy. My memory of the 1960's is that most any "anti-establishment" movement didn't need too much action to take root. This period produced much cultural and political change in the United States and I'm not surprised to learn that traditional composition pedagogy was among the long standing establishments that came under fire during this period.

As a student in 1960-ish classrooms, I recall teachers wanting an outline in Roman numeral format and a thesis statement before a writing project could ever be started. It's odd to think now that the starting point was never a clean sheet of paper where thoughts could be written in random order and held for later organizing and development or that a paper was never seen by anyone but the teacher.

While Tobin's article lays out his own discovery process as a composition teacher and scholar, he identifies not only the movers and shakers of the process movement but its critics as well. As a believer in the model offered by early process practitioners, he admits to drawing "on current-traditional rhetoric or postprocess theory" (16) at times, but strives to keep his students' sense of themselves at the center of the writing courses he teachers.