Composition: History & Theory: 1990 - 1999
Trimbur, John. “Taking the Social Turn: Teaching Writing Post-Process.” College Composition and Communication 45.1 (1994):108–18
Description
This is adapapted directly from John Whicker’s article “Narratives, Metaphors, and Power-Moves: The History, Meanings, and Implications of “Post-Process.” JAC (Forthcoming 2011)
John Trimbur’s 1994 review essay, ‘Taking the Social Turn: Teaching Writing Post-Process,’” while interesting in itself, has become more important for rhetoric and composition than most reviews because it introduced the term “post-process” into the literature. Trimbur uses the term to describe
“the “social turn” of the 1980s, a post-process, post-cognitivist theory and pedagogy that represent literacy as an ideological arena and composing as a cultural activity by which writers position and reposition themselves in relation to their own and others’ subjectivities, discourses, practices, and institutions” (109).
Trimbur, however, does not use the term as a category or intended movement. He does classify the reviewed books (Bizzell’s Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness, Knoblauch and Brannon’s Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy, and Spellmeyer’s Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition) as originating “from a crisis within the process paradigm and a growing disillusion with its limits and pressures” (109).
Trimbur indicates in his review that he bases the “post” of post-process in the fact that these authors “make their arguments not so much in terms of students’ reading and writing processes but rather in terms of the cultural politics of literacy” (109). In other words, by “post-process” Trimbur means a turning away from process as the primary framework for understanding writing. Trimbur critiques process for ignoring the social aspects of writing (which allows later “post-process” scholars to connect post-process to all social critiques of process). Trimbur’s “post” does not seem to indicate any level of rejection of process, but only a complaint. Trimbur even explicitly states that his purpose is “not to accuse the process movement of self-deception” nor “to slight the contributions that composing researchers have made to the way we understand and teach writing” (110). Trimbur is not seeking to replace process pedagogies but to privilege social theories and pedagogies, many of which also make use of process pedagogies.
Author
John H. Whicker
Date of Upload
4/21/11