Changing the question: Should writing be studied?

Composition Studies, Spring 2003 by Trimbur, John

And this is precisely what the then emergent process movement went on to do. It worked out a way to teach what cannot be taught by reorganizing social relations in the classroom, shifting the role and identity of the teacher from, in Kenneth A. Bruffee's words, a "donor of knowledge" to someone who sets up the conditions in which students can learn. In a kind of trickster operation, the process movement answered the question "Can writing be taught?" by changing it into the question "How can writing be learned?"

To my mind, this shift is one of the many valuable legacies of the process movement and its workshop model of teaching writing. I do not mean to suggest that no one before the process movement had ever used writing workshops, for that is certainly not the case. Rather the process movement made the writing workshop-with its repertoire of collaborative learning, drafting and revising, freewriting, peer response, and so on-central to writing pedagogy. For process teachers and theorists, the writing classroom is where students work on writing, and the writing workshop became, in effect, the habitus of writing instruction with an accompanying rhetoric of location and symbolic geography that distinguished the workshop from, say, the lecture hall or the seminar room as our place-where we turned the rows of traditional instruction into learning circles.1

Shifting the question from that of whether writing can be taught to that of how writing teachers can design courses and set up conditions in which students can learn to write brought with it a suspicion of direct instruction, for explicit teaching had already been identified with what current traditionalists such as Genung thought could be taught-conventions and mechanics. I remember, for example, when I had just started teaching writing in the early 1970s, the great revelation that grammar instruction could help prepare students for grammar quizzes but that it did not help them learn to write. More generally, process teachers and theorists resisted not only skill-based approaches and the three-tiered composition sequences at the community colleges where I was teaching that began with a semester on the sentence and then went on to a second semester on the paragraph and finally a third one on the essay. The process movement was also resisting that old image of the teacher who "drones on" or "likes to hear himself talk"-there are many unflattering ways to describe direct instruction-because it valued student experience, contextual learning, situated practice, and learning by doing. The writing workshop thereby became the main vehicle and the symbol of the process movement.

Subsequently, of course, there have been any number of doubts raised about the process movement's suspicion of direct instruction-from Lisa Delpit's critique of the disempowering indirection in process teaching to Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Columb's "The Case for Explicit Teaching: Why What You Don't Know Can't Help You" to the New London Group's multiliteracy pedagogy that treats situated practice and overt teaching not as opposites but as complementary moments that can lead further to "critical refraining" and "transformed practice." Still, I think it is fair to say that writing teachers' investment in the workshop as vehicle and symbol remains a defining feature of contemporary writing instruction, even in an era we are starting to call post-process. In turn, however, this investment in the writing workshop as an answer to the question "How can writing be learned?" has made it difficult to think of writing as a subject to be taught, to imagine a place in the curriculum for the study of writing as a legitimate field of inquiry.