BEYOND POSTPROCESS

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface: Righting Writing Thomas Kent.....................................................................................................................xiIntroduction: A New Postprocess Manifesto: A Plea for Writing Sidney I. Dobrin, J. A. Rice, and Michael Vastola...........................................11 Writing and Accountability Barbara Couture..............................................................................................................212 What Constitutes a Good Story? Narrative Knowledge in Process, Postprocess, and Post-Postprocess Composition Research Debra Journet.....................413 Putting Process into Circulation: Textual Cosmopolitanism Joe Marshall Hardin...........................................................................614 Reassembling Postprocess: Toward a Posthuman Theory of Public Rhetoric Byron Hawk.......................................................................755 The Page as a Unit of Discourse: Notes toward a Counterhistory for Writing Studies John Trimbur and Karen Press.........................................946 Folksonomic Narratives: Writing Detroit Jeff Rice.......................................................................................................1177 Old Questions, New Media: Theorizing Writing in a Digital Age Kyle Jensen...............................................................................1328 Postconflict Pedagogy: Writing in the Stream of Hearing Cynthia Haynes..................................................................................1459 Being Delicious: Materialities of Research in a Web 2.0 Application Collin Brooke and Thomas Rickert....................................................16310 First, A Word Raúl Sánchez...................................................................................................................18311 The Salon of 2010 Geoffery Sirc........................................................................................................................19512 Postpedagogical Reflections on Plagiarism and Capital Rebecca Moore Howard.............................................................................219Index......................................................................................................................................................232Contributors...............................................................................................................................................236

Chapter One

Barbara Couture

Writing has a material focus for scholars and teachers in the academy. Students in writing classes expect to be given writing assignments and to have papers, e-journals, and other such experiences graded. They also expect to be told whether their writing is grammatically correct and effective and whether it meets expectations. Beyond our students, testing agencies, peer reviewers, and school and college boards also expect faculty to materially demonstrate how they have improved students' writing through test scores, portfolio assessments, or other evidential means. At the same time, in this postprocess era, our scholarly attention to writing has invited us to attend more completely to writing as a phenomenon, that is, to how writing works in the contexts of writers, readers, and their cultures. This approach calls into question assumed correlations between the material processes of writing or the material form of written products and how writing "works" as communication—correlations often taken for granted in the writing classroom.

In fact, postprocess theory has told us that writing may not "work" at all, in the sense that it predictably accomplishes some preconceived notion of its intended outcome. And this, in turn, calls into question the everyday practice of teaching writing, whether we emphasize the process of writing or the structure of the written product. If little about writing is predictable, what lessons can teachers give? What models of written products should students study? What can be said about writing in the classroom if indeed we cannot nail down hard data that we can teach to our students about the product and the way it is produced? In short, how can we be accountable to our students as writing teachers, and likewise, how can they be accountable to us as writers, if we ask postprocess theory to guide us as writing teachers?

In some ways these are silly questions. As experienced writing teachers, we all have rubrics, models, prescriptions, and handbooks aplenty to help guide students in becoming more skilled as writers. And, too, we can invent writing tasks, scoring guides, and metrics to provide evidence of whether student writers have learned something. Our material means of teaching and evaluating writing "beyond process" or "beyond post process" continue to develop much in the ways they always have, responding to new demands—such as new technologies or legislated requirements—regardless of our more sophisticated understanding of writing as a phenomenon and our knowledge that the teaching of writing has limited impact on the meaning or success of any given writing event.

In short, despite the postprocess movement, writing as a phenomenon continues to be taught in terms of specific material processes to be emulated or verbal forms to be imitated. And students continue to be held accountable for responding to this teaching as writers. Similarly, despite the postprocess movement teachers will continue to be held accountable for what they teach by being asked to produce evidence that what they are doing is valuable, through state-wide testing or evidential means. Federal initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and the Spellings Commission on Higher Education have demonstrated that accountability is "top of mind" for those who perform public scrutiny of educational practices. Teachers and school administrations know well that the call for teacher accountability has spawned a host of institutional demands to assess and evaluate every aspect of educational practice as it meets a standard, increasingly one externally defined and measurable. And this situation stands to remain for teachers as long as we can predictably assume.

Given continuing calls for such material accountability, what in the way that we teach writing really can change or should change as a result of the so-called postprocess movement in writing theory? What can and should change, I think, is the philosophy that directs the material practices teachers, students, and others associate with writing and accountability in educational settings. To elaborate this claim, I will first characterize briefly how we have been talking and thinking about writing in the classroom prior to our engagement with postprocess theory, and second, explain how postprocess theory changes that conversation. In doing so, I will argue for a philosophical approach to the practices of teaching and evaluating writing that complements postprocess theory and reenvisions our obligations toward educational accountability.

HOW WE TALK ABOUT WRITING IN THE CLASSROOM NOW

During the last two decades and then some, theoretical scholarship in writing, composition, rhetorical theory, literary criticism, and a host of other fields of study has been adopted by teachers of writing as lessons or even rubrics for how writing should be taught. As a veteran writing teacher and composition scholar, my...