CCC 61:1 / september 2009
Ronald Clark Brooks
Historicizing Critiques of Procedural Knowledge:
Richard Weaver, Maxine Hairston, and Post-Process
Theory
Because the ideological and methodological aims of post-process theory could distort
the progressive agenda that has been connected to composition since the early twentieth century, we must look at this theory through the historical lens that Weaver and
Hairston provide in order to maintain the progressive potential of post-process theory.
I suspect we’re stuck in the realm of “recurrent-traditional rhetoric.”
—Larry Christy, graduate teaching assistant
I
n 1948, Richard Weaver, then a professor at the University of Chicago, published “To Write the Truth,” a critique of what was known at the time as “Freshman Composition.” Like many pundits today, Weaver began by bemoaning the
current state of writing instruction in the United States. Arguing that most
composition courses either taught students to speak and write correctly or to
speak and write usefully, he asserted that first-year composition courses should
teach students “To Write the Truth.” By arguing so, Weaver pushed aside the
concerns of communication scholars and General Semanticists to present a
pedagogy with a Platonic foundation. In Weaver’s world, a composition teacher
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was not someone concerned with objectives and outcomes for instruction, and
certainly not someone who wanted to bring about a more equitable social order,
but was instead a successor to Adam, the first figure to name the universe:
Now every teacher is for his students an Adam. They come to him trusting in his
power to bestow the right names on things. . . . The naming of the beasts and the
fowls was one of the most important steps in creation. Adam helped to order the
universe when he dealt out these names, and let us not overlook what is implied
in the assertion that the names stuck. There is the intimation of divine approval,
which would frown upon capricious change. A name is not just an accident; neither
is it a convention which can be repealed by majority vote at the next meeting; once
a thing has been given a name, it appears to have a certain autonomous right to
that name, so that it could not be changed without imperiling the foundations of
the world. (“To Write” 27–28)
At a time when Kenneth Burke and other prescient scholars were illustrating
ways that objects slip free of their significations, Weaver insisted that names
had intrinsic meaning, and during a time when many pedagogues were investigating less authoritarian modes of instruction, Weaver attempted to shore
up a teacher’s authority in the classroom by situating the teacher’s role at the
center of Western civilization.
For Weaver, the focus on names was paramount because the authorities
who held the right names of things needed to pass on the culture unchanged,
or needed to restore culture to its traditional roots because “those engaged
in separating reality are in effect ordering the universe” (28). This restorative
function meant that
the burden of some teachers is in fact heavier than Adam’s, for teaching the names
of imponderables is far more difficult and dangerous than teaching those of
animals and rocks. The world has to be named for the benefit of each oncoming
generation, and who teaches more names than the arbiter of the use of language?
With the primer one begins to call the roll of things, and the college essay is but
an extended definition. (“To Write” 28)
By focusing on the broader implications of what college writing could do,
Weaver hoped to bring more meaning to the teaching of writing. Like progressive educators, he believed that teachers had an important social function to
play. Unlike progressives, however, who hoped to use their instruction to bring
about a more equitable social order, Weaver hoped to use his instruction to
undo a great deal of the damage that he believed progressives had already
done, damage that would eventually lead, he predicted, to the decay of mod-
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ern culture. Throughout “To Write the Truth,” Weaver accused progressives of
doing “immeasurable harm” to their students by telling them that “‘history’
is the name of our recollection of the past adjusted to suit our feelings and
aspirations” (28), and he concluded by asserting that progressives lie to their
students about the nature of the world.
Weaver’s critique of progressive education parallels contemporary critiques of one of the central pedagogical premises of our field today, namely that
the best way to help students learn how to write is to give them the means of
transferring declarative knowledge about writing into procedural knowledge—
procedures that are centered around inquiry for both teachers and students.
Rooted in the progressive educational project of the early twentieth century,
this premise has been continuously contested by conservative and liberal educational theorists alike. During Weaver’s era, the resistance to giving students
procedural knowledge was politically motivated, part of a greater attack on all
forms of progressive politics and education in the United States. Pedagogically
speaking, this resistance is no different today, even though a part of it comes
under the guise of post-process pedagogy. Although the political stance of many
post-process theorists is diametrically opposed to Weaver’s, the ideological
and methodological aims of post-process theory could distort the progressive
agenda that has been historically connected to the composition movement
since the early twentieth century.
We can begin to see this possibility, first, by imagining how Weaver would
have to adjust his critique to the theoretical climate of our times. Contemporary
arguments for “speaking correctly” are most often contextualized by having
students think about grammar rhetorically or by introducing them to the central
tenets of English for Specific Purposes. Likewise, scholars who wish to argue
that first-year writing should be “useful” must first address the prevalent body
of research that critiques the socioeconomic and sociocultural aspects of utility.
Today, the ideas of “correctness” and “usefulness” have taken on a complexity
that makes Weaver’s complaints seem unsophisticated. There are few, if any,
scholars today who would neatly fit into Weaver’s facile classification system.
Furthermore, it seems hardly necessary to point out that many scholars in our
field have taken on the label “sophist” as a badge of honor, as a way of pushing back against the hegemonic tendency of truth claims. This insistence on
contextualization makes any idea of “speaking the truth” and giving students
“the right names of things” seem naive.
But Weaver was not naive. He stubbornly chose, instead, to live in a world
of traditional ideals. Politically, Weaver was influenced by his Southern Agrar-
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ian mentors, who believed that the South’s feudal structure was a preferable
form of government, despite the “historical accident” of slavery (Bailey 33–36).
Although many recent critics have taken Weaver to task for his racism and
sexism,1 most have acknowledged his contributions to rhetorical theory.2 As
Walter Beale has commented, it was Weaver’s idealism that made him believe
without qualification that “rhetorical education is an attempt to shape a certain
kind of character capable of using language effectively to carry on the practical
and moral business of a polity” (Beale 626). The rhetorician’s role, as Weaver
saw it, was to engage in cultural criticism, and Weaver envisioned a rhetoric
that would work in tandem with an internalized dialectic to restore modern
culture to its more conservative roots, a culture based on religion, hierarchy,
and first principles (Beale 626–34). Weaver, therefore, resembled progressive
educators in that he believed education played a vital cultural role, but as a
conservative he objected both to the political agenda of progressive educators
and to their pedagogical methods.3
This hostility suggests that a focus on rhetoric alone does not guarantee
that one will be sympathetic with progressive goals. Although he had once
been a member of the socialist party, Weaver had rejected the socialist dream
of greater equality for all. “To Write the Truth” applied this philosophical rejection of equality to the classroom. Explicitly attacking three of the primary
tenets of progressive education—namely that educators should (1) concern
themselves with the immediate needs and values of their students; (2) engage
their students in social interactions to help build a better, healthier democracy;
and (3) ground their observations about teaching empirically—Weaver used
a primarily Platonic theory of rhetoric to help maintain the more traditional
role of teacher authority in the classroom. “Student-centered education” had
gained some influence in writing classrooms, and by the mid-twentieth century
the communications movement was more explicitly a part of first-year writing
curricula.4 Arnold Needham, one of Weaver’s contemporaries, had argued for
“permissive education” in first-year classes. Under Needham’s plan, courses
would contain “student-selected, student-planned, individually planned, activities in communications, as distinct from committee-planned and committeeimposed assignments” (Needham 13). He further stated that
the permissive also denotes . . . an “atmosphere” or classroom setting in which the
instructor and the members of the class accept, and do not reject, each other at
their current levels of achievement in the language arts. A two-way, or interpersonal, relationship prevails; all those concerned are taken where they are and as
they are. All truly student-centered work in communications would have to begin
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at this point and work outward, as if along the radius of a series of concentric
circles. (Needham 13)
Needham, a proto-critical pedagogue, saw enormous educational potential
in the permissive atmosphere. Weaver, on the other hand, believed it would
lead to educational impotence. “There are two postulates basic to our profession,” he argued. “The first is that one man can know more than another, and
the second is that such knowledge can be imparted. Whoever cannot accept
both should retire from the profession and renounce the intention of teaching
anyone anything” (“To Write” 28). As is often the case in his polemical tracts,
Weaver allowed for no middle ground: professors were either “definers” for their
students, imparting wisdom that descends from an ideal world, or they were
completely powerless to teach.
While the progressive movement claimed that effective instruction began
with the experiences and interests of the students in the classroom, it also
claimed that instruction needed to help students interact with the broader
social realm. Jane Addams, for example, once noticed that a group of urban
schoolchildren, who had been bored by a lecture on flowers, sprang to life when
they saw a passing ambulance. By starting with experience, she believed that
she could lead students toward a deeper understanding of the culture in which
they lived (27). Weaver, however, was explicitly hostile to bringing students
to this type of cultural understanding, so he used the fact that progressives
focused on experience to attack their larger social agenda and also to mask
his own, which was to restore an older social order. “The dialectician works
through logic,” he quipped,
which is itself an assurance that the world has order. True enough, there will not be
much student-centered education here, and knowledge will take on an authority
which some mistake for arrogance. The student will learn, however, that the world
is not wholly contingent, but partly predictable and that, if he will use his mind
rightly, it will not lie to him about the world. (“To Write” 30)
This predictability arose from tradition and from authority, and Weaver used
his belief in tradition to narrow the definition of how authority works.
By doing so, he willfully misread the progressive agenda. In Experience
and Education, John Dewey had already acknowledged the limits of a solely
student-centered teaching philosophy. “The belief that all genuine education
comes about through experience,” he argued,
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does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. Experience
and education cannot be directly equated to each other. For some experiences are
mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or
distorting the growth of further experience. (13)
Weaver believed that dialectic (as defined by the teacher) introduced students
to the truth about the world. He also believed, as he makes clear in “Rhetoric
and Dialectic in Dayton, TN,” that the teacher could and should use rhetoric
to impart the truth that has been discovered through the dialectical process.
Under the progressive system, however, the teacher was not a definer for his
or her students but was instead a mediator between the student’s experience
and the broader social experiences to which she or he hoped to bring students.
Despite Weaver’s contentions to the contrary, progressive educators were concerned with exposing their students to the truth about the nature of the world,
but they wanted to do so by looking more thoroughly at the ways that authority
arose from the interaction between teachers, students, text, and language. In
addition, progressive education was “an extension of political progressivism,
the optimistic faith in the possibility that all institutions could be reshaped to
better serve society, making it healthier, more prosperous, and happier” (Berlin
58). By focusing on “the immediate needs and the characteristics of the student”
(Applebee 191), progressive educators could then move their students toward
the goal of bettering culture and society.
For Weaver, truth was discovered through dialectic and imparted through
rhetoric to students. For progressives, experience and education were mediated
through empiricism, which was the final tenet that Weaver found abhorrent in
progressive educational philosophy. Progressives believed that the empirical
method was effective, both as a method of inquiry and as a method of grounding one’s assertions. In Experience and Education, Dewey emphasized “the
organic connection between education and personal experience” (12) as well
as a commitment “to some kind of empirical and experimental philosophy”
(13). Empiricism, i.e., “the attempt to describe human behavior (or other phenomena) according to a definable, limited system” (Wallace 103), proved to be
important to composition studies because, although it is a limited system, it
rendered phenomena measurable.
As a thinker who believed that truth could only be discerned through
dialectic, Weaver saw no value in the empirical method.5 In fact, he believed
that empiricism was connected to the decline of Western civilization. In Ideas
Have Consequences, Weaver traced the history of the liberal tradition back
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to the nominalists of the fourteenth century and presented “a long series of
abdications” (3) to the empirical method, which he connected to the inability
of liberalism to offer cogent plans of action for the betterment of society. “It is
very hard after a century of liberalism, with its necessity of avoiding commitment, to get people to admit the possibility of objective truth, but here again
we are face to face with our dilemma: if it does not exist, there is nothing to
teach; if it does exist, how can we conceive of allowing anyone to teach anything
else?” (“To Write” 24). Weaver’s either/or position precludes at least two other
possibilities. If objective reality does not exist, the progressive educator would
argue, there is still plenty to teach. In that case, the teacher should help the
student engage the subjective reality that is offered by a particular discourse
community. If objective reality does exist, the progressive educator would argue, the teacher should lead the student to a fuller understanding of objective
reality from his or her particular subject position.
Turning directly to Weaver’s focus on definitions, a student-centered educator would have chosen to work with the subjective experience of students and
their understanding of definitions in order to move that subjective experience
into conversation with different authorities. Weaver, however, anticipated this
pedagogical technique when he wrote:
Those who argue that teachers should confine themselves to presenting all sides of
every question—in our instance, to giving all the names previously and currently
applied to a thing—are tacitly assuming that there are sources closer to the truth
than are the schools and that the schools merely act as their agents. It would be
interesting to hear what these sources are. (“To Write” 29)
In the progressive cosmology, truth was in the interaction between “subject,
object, audience, and language” (Berlin 15). In Weaver’s cosmology, the schools
were the seat of an authority which contained ideal truth.
At the level of theory, post-process scholarship has more in common with
the progressive tradition than the Weaverian one. Thomas Kent asserts that
while individual post-process theories are widely divergent, they do share three
assumptions, namely that writing is “public, interpretive, and situated” (1).
Having these assumptions at its core, post-process theory should not have any
relationship to Weaver’s cosmology, which insists on an idealized formulation
of knowledge. At the level of practice, however, post-process critiques of the
process movement run parallel to Weaver’s critiques of the progressive movement. Generally speaking, post-process theorists critique the process movement
on two grounds: first, the process movement attempts to make generalizations
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about the writing process, which is far too complex a phenomenon to measure
empirically; and second, the method of teaching that has emerged from the
process movement too often ignores social and cultural factors of writing. Although his political and epistemological stances were different, Weaver would
have agreed with both of these critiques of the process movement because he
was hostile to empiricism and also believed that writing instruction should
play a broader cultural role than the utilitarian role of improving the quality
of student writing.
Were Weaver writing today, he might, like David Russell, lampoon the
way that “process theory” has been applied in primary and secondary institutions. It would be anathema to Weaver, as it would be to any responsible writing teacher, that education about writing be reduced to the memorization of
stages in the writing process. Like any reasonable writing teacher, he would
object to simply giving students quizzes over the stages of the writing process,
as if that activity could in any way produce good writing or good thinking. The
second concern of post-process theory would have been even more significant
to Weaver, however, because like post-process theorists Weaver wanted writing instruction to address broader rhetorical, social, and cultural concerns. As
Sidney I. Dobrin explains, post-process pedagogy asks us to shift our “scholarly
attention from the process by which the individual writer produces text to the
larger forces that affect that writer and of which that writer is a part” (132). In
other words, Weaver, like post-process theorists, would not have been satisfied
with helping students master the writing process without first interrogating
the students’ beliefs.
If the cultural concern lies at the heart of post-process theory, then the
term “post-process” is a misnomer because it obscures the social and historical
forces that have shaped writing instruction for more than a century. Because
many practitioners of composition have fought to enact the tenets of progressive education for well over one hundred years,6 and because post-process
theory is not “always already” progressive, the linear historical explanation
that the term post-process theory implies is far too simple. We must, therefore,
examine the ways that contemporary practices relate to the production of procedural knowledge. To do so, I would like to investigate more thoroughly the
post-process belief that all writing should be public, interpretive, and situated.
Even though the definitions of these terms vary wildly within different writing
epistemologies, these three terms continue to be an ideal lens for considerations
of whether or not a writing theory will help to improve a student’s writing in
meaningful and productive ways.
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Post-process theory argues that writing instruction should be public
because the reception of writing is judged through its interactions with audience; interpretive because the production of text relies on the judgments
of the writer(s); and situated because both writer-related judgments and
reader-related judgments rely on sociohistorical contexts, the writers’ and the
audiences’ places in history (Kent 1–5). Progressive educators also believed
that writing should be public, interpretive, and situated: public because they
attempted to engage their students in social interactions to help build a better,
healthier democracy; interpretive because they argued that writing instruction
had to begin with the experiences of their students; and situated because they
believed in the transactional interaction between subject, object, audience,
and language. Progressives and post-process theorists, therefore, share the
same general epistemological beliefs, but the progressive belief in a public,
interpretive, and situated philosophy differs from post-process theory in two
significant ways. First, progressives respond to the fact that writing is interpretive by insisting that instruction should be student-centered. Second, they
respond to the situated nature of writing by insisting that truth-claims about
writing should be grounded empirically.
The student-centered and empirical nature of the progressive project,
to which the process movement was an heir, may have reached its peak in the
mid-1980s when George Hillocks, in his well-known meta-analysis, provided
empirical proof that the environmental mode was the most effective form of
teaching. At the height of the process era, few people would have been surprised
that the presentational mode, “where the instructor dominates all activity, with
students acting as the passive recipients of rules, advice, and examples of good
writing” (247), was found to be the least effective. What was evocative about
Hillocks’s study was his discovery that the environmental mode of instruction
was also more effective than the natural process mode, “where the instructor
encourages students to write for other students, to receive comments from
them, and to revise their drafts in light of comments from both students and
the instructor” (247). By isolating one of the process movement’s premises—i.e.,
the importance of requiring multiple drafts with feedback—and measuring it
separately, Hillocks was able to show that, while helpful, this requirement was
not enough. Hillocks’s study asked teachers to engage students not only in
procedures that lead to better writing but also procedures that center around
inquiry for both students and teachers. To effectively give students the best
procedural knowledge about writing, the teacher had to “plan and use activities which result in high levels of student interaction concerning particular
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problems parallel to those they encounter in certain kinds of writing” (247).
Like progressives, Hillocks believed this “certain kind of writing” was argumentative—the kind that allowed students to form “arguable assertions from
appropriate data” and to predict and counter oppositional claims (247).
When we consider this turn in the empirical data, it may seem ironic that
it would be the argumentative turn in writing instruction that would become
objectionable to many empirically-minded process theorists. Those who are
familiar with controversies about making first-year composition an overtly political course will remember that in the early 1990s Maxine Hairston responded
to what she believed were the excesses of such moves by attempting to resituate
composition studies more squarely with its process-based, student-centered
tradition. Although she did not use the term post-process pedagogy, she had
noticed a new direction for first-year composition. “It’s a model,” she wrote,
“that puts dogma before diversity, politics before craft, ideology before critical thinking, and the social goals of the teacher before the educational needs
of the student” (180). Scholars who were proposing the new type of writing
courses, Hairston pointed out, were arguing that teachers needed to move
beyond methodology (i.e., become post-process), that rhetoric was inherently
connected to social change, and that teachers should use their rhetorical force
to help bring about more social change in the classroom (180–83). At the heart
of these new courses was the assumption that the political issues at stake
warranted a more directive approach on the part of the teacher. “The teacher
can best facilitate the production of knowledge by adapting a confrontational
stance toward the student” (qtd. in Hairston 181), one scholar had argued,
and another argued that “political commitment . . . is a legitimate classroom
strategy and rhetorical imperative” (qtd. in Hairston 182). Weaver would have
agreed. If Weaver had not been writing fifty years prior, Hairston could have
included quotations from his work to clarify that when one connects political
commitments to rhetorical imperatives in the classroom, the door opens to an
entire spectrum of political stances on the part of teachers.
More important to Hairston, however, was the impression that “those
who advocate such courses show open contempt for their students’ values,
preferences, or interests” (181). As a corrective, Hairston argued that “students’
own writing must be the center of the course” (186) and that we must remain
in our area of expertise, “helping students to learn to write in order to learn,
to explore, to communicate, to gain control over their lives” (186). Hairston
attempted to bring the political goals of progressive pedagogy back in line
with the pedagogical means of progressive educators. Although many people
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perceived Hairston’s argument as reactionary at the time, it was clearly a
principled reaction. Hairston maintained that although post-process political
goals were progressive, their means of achieving these goals were pedagogically
regressive. Leaving behind Hillocks’s description of the environmental mode,
which requires the teacher to provide students with argumentative data that are
diverse enough to address both a position and many viable counter-positions,
some post-process teachers were becoming definers for their students, and like
Weaver they were not beyond using their rhetorical power to do so.
Although the goal of post-process theory was to free writing scholars from
having to focus solely on the now commonplace knowledge that “writing is a
process,” the effect, as Lad Tobin discovered when he was attending a workshop
on post-process pedagogy, was actually the supplanting of student-centered,
process-based courses with teacher-centered, content-based ones. While at
the conference, Tobin had wanted to say 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. (14)
It would have been more precise to argue that the type of course planning
that Tobin saw at that conference was entirely at odds with the progressive
agenda because the student-centered focus in progressive pedagogy was what
had made the movement radical, ethical, and effective. If we accept Hillocks’s
data, though, we could argue that in a writing course a teacher could choose,
even control, a collection of readings in the course, as long as that collection
is deliberately structured in such a way that students will be able to find their
own concerns and values addressed within it. Nevertheless, the heart of Tobin’s
critique is sound. “If we learned anything from Murray, Emig, and Elbow, we
know that you don’t teach students to write,” he remarks, “by telling them that
their views on issues that concern them . . . don’t count as content or count
only as naive opinions to be corrected during the course” (14). To reject what
we learned from process scholars about the importance of student-centered
pedagogy, in other words, is to be at odds with the procedural, inquiry-driven
methods that have always been at the heart of the progressive movement.
These methods, I contend, should remain at the center of the field of composition because they are what will give students the greatest access to mastery
over the writing process. In a post-process age, however, we must define the
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concept of mastery as precisely as possible. In his argument for post-process
pedagogy, Gary Olson argues that “typical discourse, especially academic
discourse, entails what Lacan called ‘the discourse of the master’” (8). In his
argument, Olson asserts that post-process pedagogy allows us to look more
thoroughly at the ways that academic discourse can serve the interests of those
in power. This critique has been productive for scholars in our field throughout
the 1990s and well into this decade, but in Lacan’s cosmology critiques of academic discourse are only a part of the equation. Academic discourse does not
entail the “discourse of the master” but falls instead under its own category.
Pointing out Olson’s lack of clarification between the “discourse of the master”
and the “discourse of the academy” would be merely pedantic if it were not for
the fact that the confusion closes off possibilities for writing teachers. When
we confuse academic discourse with the master’s discourse, we are left with
a forced choice: either we put our efforts into teaching students to write like
masters or we put our efforts into teaching our students how to critique the
master’s discourse. In either case, we become servants, explicitly in the case
of helping our students write like masters or implicitly in the case of allowing
the master’s discourse to shape our own teaching.
Although many welcome the ways that post-process theory has allowed
us to use the academy to critique the master’s discourse, we must consider
what it means to focus on this possibility at the exclusion of all others. At
worst, the master’s discourse needs academic discourse because those in power
utilize the knowledge that the academy produces for their own authoritarian
ends. In these cases, we should resist the ideas of “mastery,” “clarity,” and “effectiveness” in order to interrogate the social forces that define those terms.
We have reached a point now, however, where we need to ask ourselves what
this resistance achieves for our students—marginal or otherwise. By rejecting
mastery, can teachers enact enough social change to warrant a loss of focus
on the procedures that lead to better student writing? No academic, as Richard E. Miller argues, likes to become the means to a corrupted power’s end.
In a public, situated, and interpretive world, however, there are places where
academic discourse brings about significant improvements in our culture
and, more importantly, in our students. There are, as David Metzger implies
in “Teaching as a Test of Knowledge,” many styles of discourse in the academy.
As academics, we should foster the styles of university discourse that are most
ethical and avoid the forced choices that lead us to narrow our visions of what
our teaching can accomplish.
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Although student-centered teaching remains at the heart of this affirmative project, it may also be true that post-process theory has emerged as a result
of many teachers’ dissatisfaction with the progressive assumptions that are
inherent in the process and environmental modes of teaching. In my experience
as a writing program administrator, I have learned that these matters are in
no way settled in the hearts and minds of composition teachers. There is still
a great deal of resistance to the progressive idea that our instruction should
be student-centered and that we as writing teachers have a responsibility to
help students gain procedural knowledge. Some graduate students, many of
whom I only teach for one semester before they move on to study in the fields
of literature, screen studies, and/or creative writing, wholeheartedly respect
Weaver’s argument that the teacher should be an absolute authority in the
classroom. “Let there be no mistake,” Weaver writes,
this is an invitation to lead the dangerous life. Whoso comes to define comes
bearing the sword of division. The teacher will find himself not excluded from
the world but related to it in ways that may become trying. But he will regain
something that has been lost in the long dilution of education, the standing of
one with a mission. He will be able, as he has not been for a long while, to take his
pay with honor. (“To Write” 30)
In my interactions with new and experienced teachers, I have discovered that
the seductiveness of Weaver’s argument about teaching and “the dangerous
life” cannot be ignored. “How many of us,” a student of mine once argued (even
asking for a show of hands), “gravitated toward teaching because we wanted to
‘build networks which would provoke better inquiry,’ and ‘provide scaffolding
which would help students make the right decisions to improve their writing?’”
These particular moments of resistance are never easy to encounter.
Punctuated by air quotes and so effectively parroted back to the class, my words
seemed hollow in comparison to Weaver’s. Nevertheless, as a teacher committed to progressive philosophy, I had created an environment that allowed for
this type of questioning, and encouraging and addressing arguments from our
students, even if they strike at beliefs we hold dear, still remains at the heart of
what the progressive movement teaches us to do. In that particular moment,
with no one in the class raising a hand and everyone falling silent and turning
toward me to see how I would respond, I realized that I too did not become
a teacher in order to step out of the way of my students’ learning processes.
The student-centered focus only came to me as a result of seeing empirical
proof about the effectiveness of environmental modes of teaching and as a
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result of first hand experience, i.e., discovering the effectiveness of progressive
practices in my pedagogical life. But at this moment in our history, if we who
believe in the effectiveness of progressive pedagogy are going to survive the
critiques of procedural knowledge that are being mounted on all sides of us,
we must remain aware of the premise that is at the heart of Weaver’s critique of
progressive pedagogy, namely that by failing to focus on truth we fail ourselves
and our students.
Barbara Couture’s Toward a Phenomenological Rhetoric: Writing, Profession, and Altruism attempts to realign writing instruction with the pursuit of
truth. Hers is not a Platonic Truth, as it was in Weaver’s conception, but like
Weaver she does reject relativism. Relativists, she claims, “deny that the classical
quest to seek truth is a viable goal for rhetoric and dismiss the idea that truth
is attainable,” but she further contends that the “the relativist interpretations
of truth and writing that these theorists propose reflect a rather narrow belief
that truth is an immutable interpretation that corresponds to a static reality” (183). From this assertion, she argues that “a more positive relationship
between truth and writing can be construed if we conceive of them both as
processes rather than static declarations, processes in constant motion, growth,
and development” (183). More than many post-process theorists, Couture is
explicit about the importance of keeping process at the center of post-process
thinking. Truth must be “located in subjective experience, that is, within one’s
own consciousness,” (184) but it must also be “an outcome of intersubjective
understanding, that is, of the interplay of one’s conscious reckonings against
another’s” (184). Finally, this intersubjective understanding must progress
“toward truth through expression, that is, speaking or writing” (184). These
criteria for truth-seeking do a great deal to help restore a particular purpose
that many new and experienced teachers seem to want, a purpose that may, as
Weaver put it, help teachers take their pay with honor, or at the least something
approaching that ideal.
If we are going to realign post-process theory more squarely within its
progressive tradition, however, there is one final step that we need to address.
While it is important that we consider what college English should be, it is
equally important to consider how college English should be taught. Like the
progressives who came before us, we must consider the way that we ground our
theoretical assertions about teaching. If the current trend in our field continues,
it may well be that the next generation of composition and rhetoric scholars
will look at the body of empirical evidence that proved the effectiveness of
procedural teaching as a curious relic from our past, if this body of research
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is studied at all. From a progressive standpoint, we must recommit ourselves
to grounding our theoretical assertions in actual practice if we really want to
claim to be engaged in public, interpretive, and situated pedagogy. As we ask
what types of content we should bring into and outside of the classroom, we
must continue to reflect on the ways that these decisions relate to the modes
of instruction we use. To do so, we must find ways to measure what effects
these decisions have on our students and on the public.7 The primary danger
still lingering in post-process pedagogy is its desire to resist what Lee-Ann
M. Kastman Breuch calls “the pedagogical imperative”: the insistence that a
theory have practical applications in the classroom. If we believe that writing and writing instruction are public, interpretative, and situated, then like
the progressives who came before us we must be willing to have our theories
grounded in the realm of observation and practice. If post-process theory is
given the luxury to resist pedagogical application, then it will itself remain an
idealized hierarchical principle, one that contradicts the central premises that
it claims to be purporting.
Notes
1. See Crowley.
2. See Foss, Foss, and Trap for a thorough description of Weaver’s contributions.
3. For a thorough discussion of Weaver’s relation to rhetoric and politics, see Giles.
4. See the special issue of CCC titled A Usable Past, particularly George and Trimbur,
and also Heyda.
5. See Connors for a thorough discussion of Weaver’s position on the relationship
between science and composition.
6. There are many excellent histories that tell the stories of these progressive educators. Among these are Adams, Brereton, and Kates.
7. For pragmatic reasons, English studies should consider a more empirical tradition because many who care little about effective writing instruction are now
using the authority of empiricism to impose objectivist state-mandated writing
assessments on teachers. While both the progressive and the process movements
used empiricism to help find what teaching methods lead to better writing from
students, it is now, unfortunately, the opponents of any form of progressive education (process, post-process, or otherwise) who claim the authority of empirical study.
This co-opting has had an effect on the students who enter our classrooms. Those
who oppose the tenets of progressive education may target higher education next.
If they succeed, not only will our students be stifled by four more years of overly
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formal instruction and state-mandated writing assessments, but our teaching will
be circumscribed as well.
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Ronald Clark Brooks
Ronald Clark Brooks is an assistant professor and associate director of first-year
composition at Oklahoma State University.
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