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137 7 WhatIsWritingInstructionandWhy IsItSoProblematic? IN , GARY TATE, AMY RUPIPER, and Kurt Schick edited a collection entitled A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. The collection included twelve chapters, each devoted to a different pedagogy used in the teaching of writing :“Process Pedagogy,”“Expressive Pedagogy,”“Rhetorical Pedagogy,”“Collaborative Pedagogy,”“Cultural Studies and Composition,”“Critical Pedagogy ,”“Feminist Pedagogy,”“Community-Service Pedagogy,”“The Pedagogy of Writing Across the Curriculum,”“Writing Center Pedagogy,”“Basic Writing Pedagogy,”and“Technology and the Teaching of Writing.”These chapter titles give us a fair indication of the many different ways writing is taught in our colleges and universities. Now what I find interesting about these twelve different ways of conceptualizing writing and writing instruction is that they have very little in common ; they do not agree on the kinds of writing that should be taught or the methods to be used in writing instruction. Even more interesting, they do not agree on what courses in writing should ultimately accomplish. Process and collaborative pedagogies seem to be based on a method of instruction whose primary goal is to make people sensitive to audience and to give them practice in revision. Likewise, writing centers focus on a particular method of instruction—tutorials—whose ultimate goal would seem to be helping students accomplish any writing task they find themselves engaged in at the college level, and pedagogies that use technology focus on what we might call a “delivery system” for instruction that has no specified subject matter or content and can be used to promote any other philosophy or theory of instruction. 138 Diagnosis and Proposal The remaining pedagogies are not so“neutral”about their ultimate goals. Expressive pedagogies seem to use a variety of strategies whose ultimate point is to unlock students’inherent insight and knowledge. Rhetorical pedagogies also seem to use a mix of methods but for a different purpose: to make students aware that writing varies according to the constraints of the rhetorical triangle. Cultural studies and critical pedagogies use a variety of critical strategies to help students analyze a variety of content and genres, everything from literary narratives to artifacts of popular culture; the ultimate goals of these pedagogies seem to be to promote “committed citizenship ” and democratic power-sharing. Feminist pedagogy uses many of the techniques associated with process and collaborative teaching to further its “investment in a view of contemporary society as sexist and patriarchal, and of the complicity of reading, writing, and teaching in those conditions”(Jarratt ). Community-service pedagogy involves students in studying and working with and for community service organizations, in order to make students more aware of how writing works outside the classroom and to promote, if possible, some concrete social good in the world. And finally, writing-across-the-curriculum pedagogies promote both writing-to-learn and the use of particular genres in particular disciplinary contexts. This cacophony of voices in writing pedagogy has necessitated a new area of study for the field of composition studies: the development of taxonomies to account for all the conflicting assumptions and points of view. Perhaps the three most well known are by James Berlin (“Contemporary”), Richard Fulkerson, and Lester Faigley (“Competing”). In many ways, the essays in A Guide to Composition Pedagogies epitomize the kind of conversation that has been going on in composition studies for the past few decades about how writing should be taught. In general, the participants in the conversation have not made their case by arguing how people learn to write and then citing relevant evidence. Rather, they have aligned themselves with a particular theory or philosophical position focused on a particular kind of discourse or a particular epistemology, and argued the merits of the theory. As a result, all of the discussion of “theory” and “philosophy” has tended to obscure the fundamental questions I have been trying to raise. The essayists in A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, for example, make their case entirely by asserting that the pedagogy they advocate is good for students. Although they offer reasons for the teaching methods they favor, the reasons they give are entirely theoretical and, in a sense, self-evident: it is obvious that students will be better writers, better people, better citizens if they can revise substantially or critique patriarchal society or write well in a particular academic discipline. These essayists cite no evidence as to the efficacy of their particular pedagogy; they in effect use the device of exhortation to rally supporters of their particular point of view to their side...

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