When I first approached the idea of post-process pedagogy, after reading through the Breuch and Heard essays, I was in the camp of why do we need a name for this and isn’t this just all the best parts of expressivist and epistemic theory without the potential limitations of the social sphere? Then I began to think about the potential of what it could mean to be an instructor who teaches first year writing for a college composition program that subscribes to the tenants of post-process pedagogy, and I got goosebumps.
What if, I asked myself, I stopped trying to get my students to understand why it’s important for their arguments to adhere to a standard, to come from a certain place? So I thought, if I am to teach writing without process, I would have to eliminate process from the very start. I would have to forgo the writing prompt. What chaos might ensue without the boundaries of the writing prompt! No, I thought, I could never do it. That’s just too much freedom. No student can learn in such liberal environs. Then it hit me. I never had a writing prompt in FYC.
Neither of my first year composition courses (same professor) were taught with writing prompts. In fact, the only thing I learned about the vison and revision process of writing, was that most people do it. I am the result of a post-process pedagogy. And I absolutely loved my writing classes, partly because I felt like what I was doing was normal, natural, not new or alien. I wasn’t asked to conform. I was asked to communicate. The classroom, at that point, became simply a space for me to do what I felt I needed to do in order to convey and support my ideas about the world. I have to admit, looking back on my work from those courses, I wasn’t an impressive writer. I was barely passable by my own FYC standards. But I’m still writing. Maybe that’s enough to convince me about the merits of post-process.