Sarah's post on paths to improvement

I have to start out by writing that I love how many times Casanave asks us, as teachers, to question our assumptions throughout this chapter. For example, she challenges teachers to question what they believe constitutes “writing improvement” and furthermore, what they believe constitutes “good feedback” and how that feedback reifies those believes about improvement. I loved this sentence: “Underlying the responses that teachers make to writing are beliefs, tacit or overt, about what improvement in writing means and what students need to do to improve” (70). I am always about people (myself included) making tacit belief systems more apparent to themselves, despite the fact that this is a very difficult process in a lot of ways (cognitively, emotionally, spiritually, etc.). I want to further reflect on Casanave’s useful chapter by relating one of her points to my previous teaching training. Casanave quotes Raimes, writing: “[t]he issue of what university writing is and what kind of writing ESL students should be doing is a thorny one, and the use of the term real relates to this issue in practice as well as in theory” (78). I wholeheartedly agree with this quotation and Casanave’s broader point in this section of the chapter. Many of the professors who taught the English education courses that I took throughout my Bachelor’s degree focused on the term real, insisting that we must find ways to give our students real-world writing assignments with real audiences. As a twenty year old who remembered writing mostly five-paragraph essays throughout high school, I thought this was revolutionary at the time, and I jumped on the real bandwagon with both feet. Then I was introduced to the genre studies approach and began to realize how vague the concept of “real writing” is. “Real” by whose standards? In what field/discipline? Following what set of cultural and social values? And does this “real” writing even align with the kinds of writing my students will need to do in the future? After reading Atkinson’s article, in particular, I have a much better sense of what “post-process” means—a term that I had heard before, but never understood. Yet, I still feel that I have a vague understanding of this theory in a lot of ways. I understand and support its goals in developing more socially and culturally nuanced views towards writing and writing-as-a-process. But I am confused, first, about how this plays out in the classroom. (I know, this is always my question.) What would post-process theorists have us do with our students to develop this awareness within them? I think I have a sense of what these activities might look like, but in actuality, they develop out of my awareness of a different theory, Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), which I perceive to have similar aims in terms of pedagogical approach. Is this an appropriate conclusion to draw? To what extend are post-process and CHAT connected? And if they’re actually not that similar, then how is post-process different, and what would it have us and our students come to understand? I also just have to add that I’m pretty sure I was taught, especially throughout parts of high school by some teachers, using variations of the process model. And I was totally the kid that Atkinson is describing when he writes: “students often reinscribed the authority that process teachers were trying to vacate, for the very simple reason that they knew their composition processes would eventually result in a product for evaluation, and the canniest among them recognized that sincerity and authenticity of voice were the privileged means of symbolic exchange . . . . If process teachers were reading what they took to be direct and unmediated prose of personal experience, the most successful students were hard at work constructing the authorial persona of self-revelatory personal essays written in a decidedly non-academic style” (7). Lastly, I would like to try to articulate an idea that is pretty vague in my mind right now, but I think, kind of important. After reading Matsuda’s article, I am reminded of the complexities of the process of “defining” a field of study. Every discipline has a history, and that history (including the way that it drives research and enculturates new members) is defined somewhat arbitrarily by lines drawn in the sand, so to speak, separating (sometimes false) “paradigms” and “theories” that in reality, as Matsuda points out, overlap in complicated and important ways. But it seems that the histories of disciplines also intertwine with one another in complicated and important ways. Specifically, right now, I am thinking about the “disciplines” of English Education, Rhetoric and Composition, and Second Language Writing. It is difficult in my mind to even characterize these as three separate fields, for all the reasons I just mentioned, but in reality, they are conceived of as different in some way by scholars who characterize themselves as parts of these fields, and indeed by “outsiders” (like me, I guess) who aren’t necessarily “within” any of these three fields. Yet, as I read the assigned readings for this course, which are supposedly “within” the field of SLW, they read a lot like the things that I have read in my previous work in English ed. and rhet/comp. These readings “feel” the same to me in many ways as the work in these other fields—it almost feels like “review” to me. And we know, of course, that all three of these fields are quite interdisciplinary, indeed, with one another. But, I think, my question is this: how am I to read this work and understand it to be uniquely about second language learners and writers? Especially after reading a chapter like Casanave’s that ultimately offers more questions than “answers,” how can I apply this research and theory specifically to the needs and teaching of students who are learning English? Surely the theories “from other disciplines” (whatever you take that phrase to mean) cannot be unquestioningly applied to SLW, and yet it all “feels” the same to me, and moreover, much of what we have read so far has started to make connections to the SLW classroom, but these applications seem tenuous and, in a lot of ways, to be the same kinds of applications that you might think of for an L1 classroom. Surely these theories, concepts, and paradigms are being (and should be) taken up differently in L2 classrooms, as Matsuda writes, for example, “Yet it [the process approach] hardly reached the status of a paradigm [in the field of SLW]; process pedagogy was by no means whole-heartedly embraced by all L2 writing teachers” (78). But how?