Sorry about the lateness of this--I just signed in to Blogger for the first time.
The aspects of Tobin’s article which made me sit up and pay attention were the dates involved in the development of the process pedagogy movement. As Tobin relates it, the movement was first described in the late 1960’s, discussed widely in the 1970’s, related to the college training of teachers in the late 1970’s and 80’s, theorized in scholarly journals through the late 1980’s and 1990’s, and finally put away as naïve or passé in the late 1990’s. Apparently, the process pedagogy had whizzed by my elementary school classmates and I without leaving a trace. I imagine that as my classmates and I turned in our finely tuned five-paragraph essays long on excellent grammar and short on ideas, there were messy, loud, (fun!), classrooms out there in which the students were wildly exploring themselves through language.
My elementary and secondary school writing teachers, to a person, had not been in a college classroom since the 1970’s and my small-town district did not send many teachers to conferences to update theories and practices. So, it is not strange that the process pedagogy as an academic theory was not effective in my early classrooms. However, the basic principles behind the theory—to teach the writing, not the writer; teach how to write instead of how not to write—are so common-sense and practical that to be avoided so wholeheartedly seems almost conspiratorial. In a way, it is—perhaps not conspiratorial, but institutional.
It occurred to me in reading Tobin’s article that those wild, messy elementary classrooms may not have existed in many places outside a college workshop for teachers. To find out if the movement has been implemented by new elementary or secondary teachers I spoke to my sister-in-law who teaches second grade and a couple of friends who are involved in secondary education. All of them agreed that the ideas behind process pedagogy were sound: to provide the skills to write well in any real-world situation, instead of an inflexible formula which only works perfectly when a writer is called upon to write a five-paragraph essay, which is to say almost never. When I put to them another of Tobin’s binary pedagogical question: “should a writing course be organized around production or consumption (15);” each answered that the consuming and internalizing of expressive skills—the writing, in other words—was more enjoyable and ultimately more effective for both student and teacher.
The challenge to teaching process instead of product is that the educational system is built in such a way as to reward perfect product, no matter what process is involved. Teachers don’t have a lot of time to spend working out the skills needed for each student to enjoy and be effective in expressing themselves. Instead, teachers are asked to keep pushing their students towards a year-end goal: testing or final papers. My sister-in-law teaches second grade in which most students are able to begin simple sentences. There is one student, however, who has moved into the area from another district and cannot write his own name. My sister-in-law spends a lot of time working with him to learn those basic skills—a process which she does not object to but which leaves the rest of her class bored and waiting.
My other friends expressed their frustration in having to get their students prepared to be turned over to the next level of education: not through a method that provides students with useful writing skills, but through grade- and goal-oriented exercises. Donald Murray’s description of process pedagogy as a celebration of “surprise, discovery, even failure” describes a process that could be disastrous in an unimaginative, uncommitted classroom.
Were a school district to be committed to pure process pedagogy they would have to implement it at every grade level so that students would not be pushed into shock in the change from five-paragraph essays to free-form thought development. Teachers would need to be retrained and hired from colleges that encourage the process method. The shift would be difficult, even impossible given state regulations. So, the solution at an elementary or secondary level may ultimately be one teacher committed to teaching in such a way that his or her students develop the skills to write effectively in any situation, especially in a prescribed, directed environment—the kind most of us non-novelists experience in an average workday. Tobin argues that what makes an effective writing classroom is a teacher who is seasoned enough to understand when to step back and when to step in. Just as the purpose of the process pedagogy is to provide enough writing experience that a student will be able to grow out of a process, the purpose of training teachers to teach writing should be to enable them to teach from their own experience as writers and not from a formula.
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