Post-Process

Breuch's article about Post Process Pedagogy really made me consider how teaching works in the classroom. The idea that we need to go beyond prewriting, writing, and rewriting in the sense that we need to teach students that writing is more than a system (it's a discovery) is very much like Murray in that way.

Personally, like Murray, I think writing should be an exploration rather than a means to an end, but in a classroom, it becomes difficult to qualify to students what they're actually learning. For students who consider themselves writers, like me, the free-for-all system sounds great. Just write until you discover something about your writing and yourself - that's great. But I think it needs to be reined in for the classroom.

However, I do believe there is a way to make Post-Process work in the class. I try to pose this idea to my students (more last semester than this semester). I tried to teach my 103 students that writing is not just working toward an end-goal. You keep writing until you feel like it's done. But for some writers, their version of "done" is that it fulfills the minimum for the prompt. And in that case, it doesn't require rewriting or revision. Most of my students fell into this camp. They were writing for a grade.

On the flip side, post-process is hard to grade. How do I give students an A if their assignment can ultimately be better with every revision? If I give an A, that signal, in the academic setting, that the paper is good and doesn't need any more work. How do I justify that with post-process?

I think in creative writing classes, post-process is probably a utopia. But in FYComp, we need a grade-able system. So yes, that means have an open revision policy - let them keep working on things over and over - but know that they're probably just working toward an A (the teacher's stamp of approval) rather than their own approval.