Teaching Composition As A Social Process

Children's patterns of composition and their reflections on their composing processes

“…Each child in the sample was classified as high‐achieving, average‐achieving or lower‐achieving in writing, using the class teachers' assessment of writing performance against the National Curriculum level descriptors in Year 9 and General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) grades in Year 11 (often the Original Writing coursework grade). The sample was stratified by gender (and the gender implications of this study are reported elsewhere: Jones & Myhill, 2007), but no attempt was made to seek ethnic representativeness as the schools were predominantly white. The observations were timed to coincide with normal classroom opportunities for writing, where writing was the focus of the teaching.…”

“…Graves ' (1983) notion of the conference is potentially an opportunity to engage in metacognitive discussion about writing, but his descriptions of conferencing appear to be more focused on the writing produced, rather than on the process of writing. Indeed, this focus on the writing produced at various stages is equally characteristic of the post-process movement in composition studies, although the emphasis shifts to the ways in which meanings are created and interpreted in written texts: McComiskey (2000), for example, frames the process of writing as rhetorical enquiry, which encourages writers to think about their writing in terms of the cycle of production, distribution and consumption. Whilst consideration of what is written and how meanings are made is important and valuable, building explicit opportunities for writers to discuss how they write, their composing patterns and their thinking strategies, might be beneficial in exploring the most productive and efficient ways for an individual to approach a writing task.…”

Digital Storytelling Viewed though a Post-process Lens: Reflections from the Fulbright-Hays 2010 China Seminar

“…"Focusing on the work of students means interesting ourselves in the tensions involved both in the acts of producing and in the products themselves; not on rules" (Harris, 1997 as cited in Taylor, 2000, p. 49). McComiskey says that this kind of negotiated view forms both the theoretical and pragmatic foundation of post-process composition studies that extend rather than reject its own history (McComiskey, 2000). and told from only one perspective, that of the narrator.…”

Process and post-process: A discursive history

“…Once the term was in place, theorists began to use it in exploring this notion and its implications from a variety of perspectives (Dobrin, 1997;Kent, 1999b;McComiskey, 2000;cf. Tobin, 2001).…”

“…Schilb (1999) notes, for example, that ''a post-'process' approach to composition studies would not necessarily ban the term' ' (p. 198). Responding to Kent's definition of post-process, McComiskey (2000) has sought to define post-process not as the rejection of the process movement but as its extension. Kent (1999a) also acknowledges in his introduction to Post-Process Theory that contributors to the volume ''may disagree about the nature of the 'post' in 'post-process' theory,'' although ''all of them agree that change is in the air'' (p. 5).…”