Process Pedagogy

The Process Pedagogy (late 60's), Considerations, process vs. product

1. The Process
Pedagogy
Jeanette Carrasquillo

2. Content
•Reflection
•What is Process
Pedagogy?
•How did it begin?
•Key Assumptions
•Description of the
process-oriented
classroom?
•How to achieve process
pedagogy?
•Teaching methods
•Critiques
•Reality in our classrooms
•Summary
•Shared Opinion
•Videos

3. “What is the process we should teach? It is
the process of discovery through language.
It is the process of exploration of what we
know and what we feel about what we know
through language. It is the process of using
language to learn about our world, to
evaluate what we learn about our world, to
communicate what we learn about our
world.”
-Donald Murray,
“Teach Writing as a Process Not Product”

4. What is Process Pedagogy?
•It focuses on writing as a process rather
than a product.
•It is centered on the idea that students
determine the content of the course by
exploring the craft of writing using their
own interests, language, techniques,
voice, and freedom, and where students
learn what people respond to and what
they don't.

5. Process Pedagogy
Believes students should be treated
like real writers.
A course designed with process
pedagogy is centered around the
production of student texts, emphasizing
in-class workshops, conferencing, peer
review, invention and revision
techniques, and reading that supports
these goals

6. How did Process Pedagogy begin?
•As a reaction against the formalism
composition methods, sometimes called
"current-traditional" methods, that
encouraged adherence to established
modes of writing, such as the five-
paragraph essay.

7. Background
•In the late 1970 and early 1980 you were either
one of the process-oriented teachers arguing
for student choice of topics and forms; the
necessity of authentic voice; writing as a messy,
organic, recursive form of discovery, growth,
and personal expression
•or you were a teacher who be-lieved that we
needed to resist process' attack on rules,
conventions, standards, quality, and rigor.

8. What were they called?
If you listened to what each side said
about the other, you were either a soft-
headed, mush-minded mystic clinging to
1960s nostalgia or an old fuddy-duddy
schoolmarm or master clinging to
canned assignments, dying forms, and
outdated autocratic methods

9. Mid -1980’s
Process pedagogy was so prominent that
you were either on the bus or off it.

10. Key Assumption
Students are writers when they come to the
classroom(even in kindergarten) and that the
writing classroom should be a workshop in which
they are encouraged through the supportive
response of teachers and peers to use writing as
a way to figure out what they think and feel and
eventually to "publish" their work to be read and
celebrated by the community of writers they have
become.

11. Key Assumption
The process pedagogy worked
on the assumption that all students
could write if the curriculum were
designed on a pedagogy that built on
the skills, strengths, and interests
students already possessed.

12. Key Assumption
Process teachers did not hate all written
products; they only hated the kind of written
products they claimed the traditional process
inevitably produced-the canned, dull, lifeless
student essay that seemed the logical
outcome of a rules-driven, teacher- centered
curriculum that ignored student interests,
needs, and talents.

13. How is the Process oriented
Classroom?

14. How to achieve “process writing”?
–Believe that students have something
original to say
–Give them the freedom to choose their own
material
–Show them you are interested in what they
have to say
–Help them gain access to their “real” or
“authentic” voice and perspective

15. Teaching Methods
•Teacher is a facilitator
•Peers interact and share ideas, do
plenty of free writing, explore, edit,
revise and ask for feedback. There is
freedom of choice guided by their
particular interests
•The writing process is divided into neat
stages of prewriting, writing, and
revising.

16. Critiques
•Critics against the process approach:
–This approach was not new or revolutionary but
simply another “step” in the traditional pedagogy
–Suggested that the idea lacked consistency and
structure
–Claimed that proponents of the process
pedagogy were simply looking at “shock” value
–Believed that the process pedagogy was
irresponsible because it failed to teach basic and
necessary skills and conventions

17. Reality
• This orientation encourages us to
facilitate learner choice and individual
development.
•It is challenged by the current educational
climate, which considers accountability
and assessment a priority.
•Discrete features of the communication
and learning processes become pre-
specified learning outcomes, which are to
be observed and assessed.

18. Summary
I threw a tantrum. "I refuse to develop a post-process course," I told
my group mates, "because I refuse to accept the whole premise of this
conference-that process is dead. These courses are fine as electives or as
units within a writing course, but how can anyone seriously argue that they can
replace process pedagogy as our core?"
I could have gone on. I could have said 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. And I could have said, if we learned anything
from Murray, Emig, and Elbow, we know that you don't teach students to write
by telling them that their views on issues that concern them or their narratives
about events that shaped them-their experience caring for a grandparent with
Alzheimer's, their solutions for the problems of homelessness, even their
stories about winning the big game or pulling a great Halloween prank-don't
count as content or count only as naive opinions to be corrected during the
course. Lad Tobin

19. Something to think about
Let them be!!!!!

20. Shared Opinion
There are many language-teaching
methodologies said to be the most
effective, but I think teachers should use
them as tools in their repertoire.
Bell, D. (2009)

21. Videos
Heather Adams discusses process-oriented pedagogy.mp4
Process Pedagogy.mp4

22. References
Bell, D. (2009). Another breakthrough, another baby
thrown out with the bathwater. ELT Journal (63), 255-262.
Oxford University Press.
“Process Pedagogy,” A Guide to Composition
Pedagogies. Eds. Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt
Schick. New York: Oxford UP, 2001: 1-18.
Murray, Donald. Learning by Teaching: Selected
Articles on Learning and Teaching. Portsmouth, NH:
Boynton/Cook, 1982.