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7 r E i m ag i n i n g t H E n at u r E o f f y C Trends in Writing-about-Writing Pedagogies Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle [Composition courses] shouldn’t have some gratuitous or incidental content that serve[s] as a kind of alibi “occasion” for writing. Michael Murphy As far as I’m concerned, there’s no looking back; it seems that our discipline has crossed a threshold at which composition as an introduction to writing studies now offers the most compelling pathway. Andrew Moss As the introduction to this volume notes, the advent of the field of composition studies was marked by the emergence of specialized theory- and research-based knowledge about writers, writing, discourse, and textual production. But while that knowledge quickly began to shape first-year composition (FYC) processes and pedagogies, only recently has that knowledge about writing become an explicit focus of study or the subject of students’ own writing in FYC. In this chapter, we describe rationales and goals for making the knowledge of the field the studied content of FYC, and explore this “writing-about-writing” (WAW) pedagogy as an area of cutting-edge pedagogical research in composition studies. We begin our review with an overview of rationales for and theory underlying writing-about-writing pedagogy and its goals, and then describe a range of representative curricula. We conclude by summarizing early research regarding the efficacy of the approach, and suggest directions for further research on writing-about-writing curricula and their impact on composition studies. t HE suBj ECt and Et H o s o f Co m p o si t i o n st udi Es Hang around the discipline of composition studies long enough, and eventually (whether in two weeks or two years), you’ll find yourself asking, 124 ExP LORI N G C OM P OSI T I ON ST U D I ES “Why does it always seem to come back to teaching? Why do we seem unable to unhook the study of writing from the study of writing pedagogy ?” We want to begin our chapter, which is on a kind of writing pedagogy that is the study of writing, by posing this question: Why does composition studies seem to be so inevitably, in Joseph Harris’s terms, “a teaching subject”? Doing so allows us to offer an argument about the nature of this field you are beginning to investigate, and it lets us explain how we see “writing-about-writing” pedagogy as an embodiment of the field’s ethos. Composition studies as a field is at this point nearly fifty years old. Like other academic fields, it has a loosely defined (and continually redefined) set of central questions that create an area of research- and theory-based study. These questions include: How does writing work? How did a text get to be the way it is? How do writers get writing done? How is writing a rhetorical activity, and how are texts rhetorical discourse ? How is writing technological? How is writing learned, and what are better and worse ways of teaching it? Like other academic fields, composition studies (which also goes by writing studies, rhetoric and composition, rhet/comp, and comp/rhet) is characterized by paradigmatic waves of thought shifting one to the next, each a strong reaction to (and usually against) the preceding paradigm. Always, these paradigms of thought about writing are expressed foremost in the pedagogies that accompany them. Current-traditional rhetoric, with its modernist emphasis on forms of, and form in, writing, was accompanied by writing instruction that focused on formal correctness and theme-based writing. The process paradigm, beginning in the early 1970s, focused on writing as an activity of recursive invention of ideas through prewriting, drafting , and revising, and saw writing instruction turn to emphasize “process over product” and strong expression of writers’ own points of view. With the advent of the social turn in the late 1980s and early 1990s, researchers and theorists brought greater emphasis to the contexts in which writing takes place, reunderstanding writing not as simply emerging from a writer’s thoughts, but as a response to particular writing situations and audience needs and expectations. Writing instruction in the social turn has been characterized by a focus on textuality, the social nature of language , and the analysis of how texts are culturally constructed and thus constrain writers and readers. Today we see this emphasis evolving in a number...

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