Perhaps composition is in a paradigm shift. Personally, I’m basing the frameworks of my teaching philosophy on how I was taught composition. I don’t have any other model. As Hairston says in “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in Teaching Writing,” we teach “systematically from prewriting to writing to rewriting.” We teach that each paragraph should be able to be neatly summarized in a topic sentence, and we teach editing as writing. But staying within a standard mode of teaching because it’s comfortable and familiar may not be a strong defense.
Hairston cites an increase in nontraditional students as the cause for this paradigm shift to process-based learning. It’s clear that the needs of college students are changing. Many are older, many have jobs or families, many are first-generation college students, and many don’t speak English as their first language. A Bachelor’s degree is becoming the baseline requirement for a large majority of careers, encouraging a new kind of student population with different needs.
The text’s encouragement to “intervene during the act of writing if we want to affect its outcome,” and focus on process is well taken. It makes sense to focus on the sources of problems instead of proscribing fixes. Encouraging process over product and writing to discover purpose would encourage student engagement and a movement to discussion and involvement. What does this look like in a classroom level? I’d like to be part of this paradigm shift, but I need a model.
For my class, I try to encourage process over product by talking to my students during their exercises. I try to remind them to relax, let their hair down, and try to write “without thinking or judging what you’re doing.” I remind them of how they felt when they were in Kindergarten and they used to color in their coloring books. “Remember how your brain felt when you got ‘into the coloring zone? That’s how you want to be when you’re writing.'” Most of my students have a lot of difficulty letting their judgemental minds relax enough to get ‘into the zone.’ Hopefully by the end of the semester, they’ll have a better grasp of how to turn off their inner judgement.
What good advice! I might to create the same atmosphere in free-writing exercises with my students.