Book Reviews
Issue 34.2 Fall 2006
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Process This: Undergraduate Writing in Composition Studies, by Nancy C. DeJoy. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004. 184 pp.
Sundy Watanabe, University of Utah
It’s fall: time to update first year composition syllabi in preparation for undergraduate composition courses. I imagine colleagues attending to the protocol in a thousand different ways. I imagine they’ve gathered ideas from various templates in order to compile a document stamped with their own unique imprint. If they have read Nancy DeJoy’s Process This, they might be laboring a little harder because they will be thinking not only about the face of the document but also about its underlying historical presumptions. As I stare at the course overview currently on my screen, the cursor remains stuck and blinking on one line that has never troubled me before: “Writing is not a course of study.” According to DeJoy, writing is a course of study. It is not ancillary. It is content.
DeJoy challenges readers to rethink theoretical and pedagogical approaches to teaching writing as process on the basis that many have implemented it mechanistically (prewrite-write-rewrite) and have thereby reinscribed hierarchical positions between theory/practice and between scholar/teacher/student. The unfortunate consequence of such a hierarchy has situated students as objects of study, disallowing participation in and contribution. This is especially disturbing because it occurs in a space where student actions produce content in the form of understanding and insight critical to the field. DeJoy rightly describes this as appropriation. Not that she advocates abandoning process completely; rather, she suggests we view traditional conceptions as “first wave,” “expressivist,” and then “revisionary” (cultural criticism/community-based literacies/writing for audiences outside the field) in order to attend more deliberately to a third wave which she terms “Invention, Arrangement, and Revision.”
Because of her experiences with an undergraduate professor who included students as participants in professional study (discussing disciplinary issues and texts, presenting at professional conferences, co-creating developmental workshops), DeJoy came to view composition studies differently than most first year students. The experience propelled her into the field as a graduate student and gave rise to research positing those who engage in composition studies in classed positions, positions that necessitate struggle. She argues for interrogating the fundamental structure of the field that keeps student and scholarly work separate, that keeps Us talking about rather than with Them. Today, she says, we are poised for a revision that understands student writers as important contributors to disciplinary knowledge and advancement rather than merely consumers, students who are able to identify positions rather than merely identify with them. Extending process in this way encourages students to study and develop complex heuristic processes rather than consume them.
DeJoy’s 2002 project was informed as she studied 617 first year composition student placement essays that prompted students to explain their strengths as writers, what they thought they could contribute to their Critical Writing, Reading and Research course, and what they hoped to gain from the course. Findings indicated that incoming students were primarily concerned about possible negative consequences for poor writing performance. Additionally, they were worried their work would not meet instructor expectation, assuming these expectations would largely center on surface structures and correctness. The responses reflect an image, “a representation of how [students] have been taught to act as writers” and what they expect to be valued (35).
This representation establishes the basic problem explicated in chapter 1, that certain student/teacher images are embedded in process and post-process theories, images that position students as either unable to perform in school, becoming subject to despair and ridicule, or as playing the game well and, consequently, being defined by how they please the teacher rather than by actual writing performance. In becoming the subjects of composition studies, DeJoy asserts, students are objectified, things in service to “higher” outside forces. This subject position has, in turn, created a genre of “student writing” that has no relevant future. These images restrict student agency and discourse, inhibit participation in and contribution to the field, and should be revised. “Alternative Reflections,” then, should mirror elements of rhetorical situatedness, especially as they impact the “disciplinary spaces of composition studies, its theories, pedagogies, and practices” (65). Students must direct attention to Composition’s scholarly products as well as its processes.
In Chapter 2, “Revising (Re)visions,” DeJoy includes a very helpful two-column chart identifying “Things That Encourage Participation and Contribution as Valuable Literate Activity” and “Things That Discourage Participation and Contribution in Relation to Composition Studies” (64). The chart explains how Berlin, Bacon, Herzberg, Flower, and McComiskey pedagogies have simultaneously opened and closed spaces for participation and contribution. DeJoy notes that while these scholars have effected positive change in the field, no one has worked to understand and revise the “unequal relationships that drive a situation in which literacy is, by definition, primarily an act of consumption and adaptation for some [student writers] and primarily an act of participation and contribution for others [teacher/scholars]” (9). Participation and contribution, readers soon understand, is DeJoy’s mantra. Why, she asks, do we not ask students to do what we do: approach writing scholarship as contributing members of the field? They have “significant contributions” to make (64).
Chapter 3, “Revising Invention, Arrangement, and Revision,” is pivotal to understanding DeJoy’s project. If readers are persuaded to understand the problem as offered from her perspective, they are ready to hear an explanation of how it might be resolved. “[T]he move from mastery to analysis, the break between identification of and identification with, shared strategies for the analysis and generation of texts, and positioning something other than analysis or critique as the end of composition studies” (67) she says, are necessary to make the field’s discourse more important and more appropriate for everyone and everything connected to first year writing. For this to occur, students as well as teachers must explore the major concepts relevant to the field: the history of literacy and the history of writing studies. DeJoy gives an example of this approach, a “Theories of Grammar and Composition” course she created for English secondary education majors. Experiences there provide the basis for a first year writing course based on her definitions of Invention, Arrangement, and Revision.
At this point, readers understand enough to begin to ask questions. I did. In fact, typical Process baby that I am, I used Elbow’s Believing/Doubting method in an attempt to understand this often-difficult text; I admit resistance came easier, at least initially. I wondered if this approach might actually reinscribe “use” of students. DeJoy’s approach was useful for pre-service teachers of English and writing (Honors students at that), but what about students who have no interest in participating in or contributing to the field? Is this method predicated on the assumption that all students are interested in the field because its author was? Do students need writing as a content course (as we assume they need History) even though they won’t all participate in the field as their life work? Such a course might produce knowing, but can (will) it produce doing? What about funding, territory, staffing, and all the larger curricular goals and university contexts? Terminology was tricky for me as well. For instance, to agree with DeJoy one would have to buy in to “prewrite-write-rewrite” in its most reduced and ineffective form as the actual process which most practitioners use. This bypasses the complexity of process work completely and to some degree paints practitioners as mindless. I understand the urge, even the necessity, to simplify in order to make change understandable, but much can be lost in nailing down definitions. That said, my appreciation increased the more attention I gave and readers’ understanding will as well.
The approach facilitates a transition in thinking, agentive in nature, that is true to DeJoy’s purpose. People, as she explains, make transitions; they get transformed. Exploring DeJoy’s reworked Invention, Arrangement, and Revision allows readers to re-see transitional possibilities not only for students/teachers highly invested in composition studies, but also for more traditional first year writing students. It is helpful to rethink the terms via another helpful chart (84-85) that explicates “What’s being invented? (“A picture of the differences among literacy practices and definitions across cultures and time periods.”) What’s being arranged?” (“Literacy criteria and social needs of the time are being put in relationship with one another.”) and “What’s being revised?” (“Our idea of literacy—that lots of people are not literate when really our standards are just extremely high now”). Any discipline concerned with literacy (i.e. education, philosophy, sociology, history) would be interested. In fact, it becomes apparent how closely linked DeJoy’s project is to New Literacy Studies (Gee, Street, Ivanic, Collins and Blot) especially in terms of language and power struggles. Understood in this light, it is important to understand “the assumptions, histories, habits, traditions, rebellions, conflicts and common grounds that inform the literacy lives of people who constitute the field” (87). Resistance is easy. “Sitting” with a new idea long enough for it to become comprehensible requires patience, time, and generosity. Processing DeJoy’s project, I have found, is worth the sitting, and the mindfulness required from readers of this text will be fruitful.
Salt Lake City, UT
