A Guide to Composition Pedagogies - Gary Tate et al

Tate, Gary, Amy Rupiper, Kurt Schick, and H. Brooke Hessler, eds. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

In their introduction, the editors highlight characteristics of pedagogy such as being theoretical, research based, rhetorical, and personal.  Crucially, they identify pedagogy as critically reflective practice and a normalizing and/or revolutionary social force.

In "Basic Writing Pedagogy: Shifting Academic Margins in Hard Times," Deborah Mutnick and Steve Lamos identify five key principles and practices that characterize BW pedagogy.  These include the following:

1. student engagement, rather than "remediation" (intellectual, not skill-and-drill)
2. extra student-centered work (conferences, feedback, scaffolding, etc.)
3. higher-order alongside lower-order issues
4. integrating writing & reading
5. negotiating student incomes with outcomes

They further identify four BW approaches including Error-Centered (Shaughnessy), Academic Initiation (Bartholomae), Critical (Horner, Lu, Gee, Street), and Spatial (Bartholomae).  They ultimately see that "BW has from its inception been a response to political and economic pressures, changing demographics, and local conditions" which can provide diverse access to higher education or perpetuate and reify racial, cultural, and linguistic stereotypes (32).

Contrasting collaboration approaches to a Romantic model (writing as a gift one has or not) of humanistic thought, in "Collaborative Writing, Print to Digital," Krista Kennedy and Rebecca Moore Howard build on Bruffee's three principles (social constructionist) of collaborative learning to show that writing is a social, rather than individual activity. These principles are that thought is internalized conversation, writing is externalizing thoughts or conversation re-externalized, and peer/community context socially justifies knowledge. They later outline strategies for successful collaborative writing projects including delaying collaborative writing, group design instead of redesigning individual tasks, choosing collaboration type (dialogic or hierarchical), student initiation and group autonomy, transparent grading, and preparing for resistance and dissent.  They also recognize that digital networks and media have facilitated new opportunities for collaboration.

In "Critical Pedagogies: Dreaming of Democracy" by Ann George, she works through the challenges in trying to apply Friere's principles to a US higher education institutional setting, but ultimately shows that Burke provides a framework using identification and deflection that can be a more useful pedagogical guide along with stasis theory to drive critical analysis and rhetorically respond to student resistance to leftist politics.  Indeed, the chapter "Cultural Studies and Composition" by Diana George, Tim Lockridge, and John Trimbur trace how CS came from the New Left in the UK in the 1950s and 60s and further how composition has taken on so much of cultural studies as an object of inquiry that it is no longer remarkable to talk of the two separately in cultural studies' relation to composition.  Relatedly, in her chapter on "Feminist Pedagogies," Laura R. Micciche draws on the second-wave feminist assumption (but doesn't stop there) of "the personal is political" (129) to show how teaching and mentoring are forms of professional activism; identities are intersectional; systemic analyses of inequality uncover power, knowledge, and meaning production; writing is a tool for "self revelation, critique, and transformation; and collaboration and alternative classroom arrangements can distribute agency.  All three of these chapters are related to recognizing power, and by extension (rather than explicitly by the authors) discourse analysis.

Chris Burnham and Rebecca Powell define expressive pedagogy as "assigning the highest value to the writer's imaginative, psychological, social and spiritual development and how that development influences individual consciousness and social behavior, [...] employ[ing] freewriting, journal keeping, reflective writing, and small-group dialogic collaborative response to foster a writer's aesthetic, cognitive, and moral development" (113).  Student engagement, empowerment, voice, and inclusivity are underlying values of those who take this approach and although it has been attacked for not being theoretically or rigorous through a body of research, its tenets and practices can be seen in the widely used and accepted process pedagogy.  Chris M. Anson identifies a paradigm shift between current-traditional approaches (pedagogy of transmission and remediation) to process approaches.  The image below outlines key distinctions between the two:

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Pre-writing in process pedagogy, which can take up 85% of writing time, is related to rhetoric's concept of invention.

In "Rhetoric and Argumentation," David Fleming draws attention to two definitions of argument as "a set of propositions consisting of a claim and one or more reasons offered in its behalf" and "a social interaction characterized by disagreement," and reasoning with others is "the process of making an argument in the context of having an argument" (249).  He points out that in classical rhetorics, difference was seen as inevitable, but the audience was not an opponent to be vanquished, but a third party council that would make decisions, which may differ from modern conceptualizations of argumentation.  Isocratean and Aristotelian strands emerged with Isocrates suggesting preparing texts "by anticipating their performance" with a common scheme of introduction (exordium), statement of facts (narratio), division (partitio), proof (confirmatio), refutation (refutatio), and conclusion (peroratio).  Aristotle focused on stages of preparation including invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery with three sources of persuasion in a rhetorical situation including speaker (ethos), subject (logos), and audience (pathos).  He also introduced the rhetorical syllogism, or enthymeme, concerning contingencies and moving towards judgement.  In contemporary rhetorics, some of these concepts have been recovered, and Toulmin introduced the need to identifying warrants that authorize arguments, adding qualifiers and rebuttals into the relationship between evidence and a claim. 

Despite the usefulness of many of these principles, Fleming finds rhetorical approaches to be ill-matched or at least not widely accepted by current cultural and political climates of public argumentation and discourse that are largely non-rational.  Research shows that argumentation may be difficult and late to develop compared to other language development:

• Both orally and written, children produce more words in narrative tasks than argumentative ones.
• A large jump in argument skill takes place between ages 11-15.
• Children tend to view argument as justification, not refutation, even after 12 years of age. 
• Teenagers begin producing counterarguments at 15-17 years of age (259).

It is probably safe to say that argumentation based on the premise of public, rational deliberation is socially and cognitively complex while valuable for both critical inquiry and action.

As he has argued elsewhere, Paul Kei Matsuda is joined by Matthew J. Hammill in the chapter "Second Language Writing Pedagogy" to address monolingual and multilingual norms in composition as assumptions about students (and dominant varieties of English) lead to practices that are less appropriate to the actual diversity of students.  In reference to second language writers, they highlight the difference of experience between international and resident students; different proficiencies in spoken and written modes of English; differing background knowledge and experience based on subject matters, cultural contexts, educational systems, literacy practices, and genre-specific transfer.  Encouraging students to tap into, yet evaluate the appropriateness, of their available linguistic and cultural resources instead of focusing on topics related to dominant student culture and social issues can help with student engagement.  Strategies and resources that can be useful include learner dictionaries, translation, writing centers, and "patchwriting" to scaffold language and help students acculturate to culturally acceptable approaches to plagiarism. 

They distinguish between mistakes as performative and errors as reflections of deviant internalized structures than dominant norms (my emphasis added).  This draws on the idea of interlanguage as a continually evolving mental grammar (assuming mental grammars can also be more fixed, less fluid).  They also draw on Ferris to distinguish rule-governed errors that are treatable and idiosyncratic errors (idiomatic) that are un-treatable.  Regarding negotiating language differences, they offer guiding principles to help students including teaching dominant as well as nondominant language forms and functions, the boundaries between the two, principles and strategies for negotiating discourse, and the risks of using deviational features (277).  It is important to note that this approach, while acknowledging the diversity of student experience, is multilingual, rather than translingual.

In "The Pedagogy of Writing in the Disciplines and Across the Curriculum," Chris Thaiss and Susan McLeod point to the 1970s as the birth of the WAC movement (closely tied to process writing approaches) responding to first generation college students trained more in multiple choice tests than extended writing tasks.  In refining the relationship between WAC and WID, the authors clarify that "where WAC implies the institutional move to have teachers from across fields become involved in helping students learn through writing, WID emphasizes the distinct disciplines, the discursive and rhetorical features that characterize them, research that studies these characteristics, and appropriate genres and writing pedagogies" (284).  Both approaches could be combined productively with Basic Writing's academic induction approach, but the level of critical engagement will probably depend on the teacher and institution.

In her synthesis of "Genre Pedagogies," Amy J. Devitt outlines three broad pedagogical approaches to genre theory/practice including teaching particular genres (explicit teaching), genre awareness (applied analysis), and genre critique (identifying inequalities of access).  From the contributions of each of these, she further demonstrates complementary goals of such approaches for college writing instruction, which are included below:

• students access and control particular genres
• students learn strategies for encountering new genres across medium and context
• students recognize the cultural/ideological nature of genres in order to critically engage with them

To these ends, drawing on Wardle's idea of writing about writing as well as Reiff & Bawarshi's "boundary crossers" and "boundary guarders," metacognition and reflection are key elements for transfering genre knowledge to new situations.  This approach is very inclusive and can be combined productively with WAC/WID, BW, SLW, Rhetorical, and Expressivist approaches to writing pedagogy.

The book overall provides an overview of various approaches and strands of conversation within the pedagogies of composition, seeing these as multiple.  Each chapter has compressed and synthesized an immense amount of scholarship and research, and touches on many concepts that were later configured or represented slightly differently in Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts in Writing Studies.