Competing Pedagogies

Growing up and going to school, we learned, or didn't learn, how to write. Our teachers most likely taught us to write the way they learned how to write, which means the teacher who'd been teaching for forty years taught it one way, the way since, according to her, cavemen had been her students. The teacher who'd been teaching for thirty years taught it the way he learned it while marching in protests against Vietnam and nukes. The teacher who'd been teaching for twenty years taught it with an eye to corporate America and a return to basics. The teacher who'd taught for ten years taught it the way she learned in the ever-consuming world of AP. And the new teacher? The new teacher just wants to make it to December and prays that her kids at least pass the state exams. What the new teacher has, though, is a world of choices, pedagogy philosophy on top of pedagogy philosophy. Which to follow and teach is the question that must be answered.

For this new teacher and the one who has been teaching for forty years and all of the ones in between, Amy Lee makes a strong case for what pedagogy actually is and which to follow. In creating a working definition, she says that "[t]raditionally, pedagogy is understood as theories and practices" (8). Following this tradition, she argues that "how and why we teach . . . is as important as what we teach" (3). This concept, the focus on "the how and why we teach," has lead to "[h]egemony" because "[o]nce we teach or understand our teaching in certain ways, or once we consciously adopt and enact a specific pedagogy, it becomes difficult to critique our assumptions and practices" (9). Lee makes it quite clear that we cannot create a theory and then just go and practice it, whether or not the theory works (11). She also cautions teachers against stating and believing one type of theory but practicing quite another (8). To guard against these situations, she believes that "pedagogy is also constituted by reflection and action" (9). It is an idea that "Freire refers to as 'praxis'" (George 94), and one that Lee reiterates several times because it does carry much truth. No matter what pedagogy a teacher decides to follow and study, Lee believes that the teacher must continually critique her work, "both in and outside the classroom" (12). With praxis as her foundation, she asserts that teachers don't have to be "oppositional" but that "a range of choices exists," and even if some of the "choices might appear mutually exclusive in theory, as practice they serve the context of a class" (192). Now, this argument centered on how the critical classroom should be run (whether or not to be "'nurturing'"), but it easily transcends this argument to the one that surrounds which pedagogy is the "correct" one to use in the classroom.

Now that the new teacher realizes what pedagogy is and that she must continually be aware of what she's doing, she must be conscious of what pedagogies are out there for her to bring into the classroom, understanding that it is not a one-stop world, but a one full of possibilities and combinations. These choices include process, expressive, collaborative, and critical, all of which have positive and negative attributes to their practice in the classroom.

The first, and probably most prevalent, pedagogy used in the contemporary English classroom is the process pedagogy. Lad Tobin paints a clear picture of his writing days in school, a painting to which so many of us can relate. He creates a list of things he never did in his class, all of which seem so foreign to us today:

We never wrote during class; never read our own essays aloud; never peer reviewed, workshopped, or even read each other's essays; never were asked to write before we outlined; and never talked about how writers found their ideas, got unstuck when they were blocked, or used revision to discover new meaning, focus, or form. (1)

What is amazing is that after writing like this, so many still decided to continue to study this field and write. If the new teacher walks through the halls of the English department in her school today, she will most likely not find classrooms like this. The reaction to this lead to process writing, which incorporates all the activities that Tobin did not do while in school. This anti-authority way of teaching writing has become the authority for good reason. Students become actively involved in their writing, become members of a community who desire to write well and better, become writers with voices rather than students with assignments. For the first time in a long time, the writing became personal and important to the student writer.

This praise is not to say that there aren't problems. Two kinds of opponents really stand out. One is the pre-process teacher who desires "to resist process' attack on rules, conventions, standards, quality, and rigor" (4). The other is the post-process teacher who argued that process "had left us with no content" (13). A varied group of teachers with competing ideals caught on to this. Some felt that there needed to be an academic focus in the writing, others an understanding of the multi-cultural world around us, and still others who see the world through Marxist-colored glasses. These theses and antitheses have a created a synthesis that he describes, a synthesis that I use in my own classroom:

On the other hand, preprocess and postprocess teachers are apt to assign more reading and to devote more class time to discussions, interpretations, and assessments of the work of professional writers, to the identification of the characteristics of effective writing, to the teaching of rhetorical conventions and strategies, and to writing assignments designed to support the students as readers. (16)

This is the integrated English language arts classroom where writing is just one of many skills that get taught, and usually as part of or in response to the reading that is being done. The critique of the reading usually involves some New Criticism, leading to writing about the literary texts rather than personal, expressive writing.

The Expressivists are the ones who will pull for this more personal writing. They believe in "assigning highest value to the writer and her imaginative, psychological, social, and spiritual development and how that development influences individual consciousness and social behavior" (Burnham 19). In the students writing, expressivists do not focus on the academic or practical world, but instead "[v]oice is a central concern" as "[i]t symbolizes the expressivist value system" (23). With this pedagogy, students really do stop