When English Language Arts educators reference process pedagogy, they are often referring to the movement begun by Donald Murray and Peter Elbow in the early 1970's which moved students toward free-writing, encouraging students to wander down the messy road of revision with an eye on the journey rather than the final published destination. With 21st. Century lenses this might appear a quaint and nostalgic notion, but in its historical context, process pedagogy was a revolution within the discipline. As composition and rhetoric scholarship has evolved, one constant remains: attention to the process of writing. Process is now defined as a discursive method, rather than a linear movement across six or seven steps from drafting to publishing. As writers we reflect and revise across the continuum of the writing experience; each part of the experience occurs in a sometimes cyclic and other times chaotic fashion. As I often tell my students, it is by over-writing and making a mess on the page that we often write our way to the best ideas.
With new tech tools freely accessible to those with consistent and reliable internet access, Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way we process and present information. As teachers across multiple disciplines, however, we often still require essays and research papers published in a fairly traditional format as the end product. Whether these papers are published by hand on loose leaf paper or printed off the computer or published on a blog, they still share the same formal characteristics: an articulate thesis backed by well analyzed evidence. Paragraphing and sentence fluency remain central conduits to the way an idea is expressed by the writer and understood by the reader. As more technologies emerge, we need to curate and catalog the tools that will help our students to not only, my apologies to Steve Jobs, think differently, but to think more deeply and to write with increased clarity and grace. The tech tools of today offer possibilities to read, review, and revise the words we write in ways that were not possible with pen and paper alone. At the end of a project, our words can be published anywhere, but process-tech will enable us to produce better projects because the ideas behind them rest upon deeper analysis and divergent thought.
Between Twitter, Edcamps, PLN, conferences and other professional development opportunities, there seems to be an unending list of the latest tools and apps to enhance our writing lives, but how do we begin to assess what combination of tools can be used to ignite the thinking that will lead to more dynamic writing?
I am imperfect in my practice and teaching, but it is this imperfection that drives me to continually tinker with and explore new technologies that will offer my students ways of reading and thinking that were not accessible to me when I was a student their age. As teachers across disciplines and levels, I encourage you to share with me and with others how you are using tech tools, whether they are emerging or familiar tools, to foster the reflective thinking that will make all of our students more articulate and powerful writers of the 21st Century experience.