historicizing critiques of procedural knowledge: richard weaver

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I suspect we’re stuck in the realm of “recurrent-traditional rhetoric.”—Larry Christy, graduate teaching assistant

CCC 61:1 / september 2009

Ronald Clark Brooks

Historicizing Critiques of Procedural Knowledge: Richard Weaver, Maxine Hairston, and Post-Process Theory

Because the ideological and methodological aims of post-process theory could distort the progressive agenda that has been connected to composition since the early twen-tieth century, we must look at this theory through the historical lens that Weaver and Hairston provide in order to maintain the progressive potential of post-process theory.

In 1948, Richard Weaver, then a professor at the University of Chicago, pub-lished “To Write the Truth,” a critique of what was known at the time as “Fresh-man Composition.” Like many pundits today, Weaver began by bemoaning the current state of writing instruction in the United States. Arguing that most composition courses either taught students to speak and write correctly or to speak and write usefully, he asserted that first-year composition courses should teach students “To Write the Truth.” By arguing so, Weaver pushed aside the concerns of communication scholars and General Semanticists to present a pedagogy with a Platonic foundation. In Weaver’s world, a composition teacher

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was not someone concerned with objectives and outcomes for instruction, and certainly not someone who wanted to bring about a more equitable social order, but was instead a successor to Adam, the first figure to name the universe:

Now every teacher is for his students an Adam. They come to him trusting in his power to bestow the right names on things. . . . The naming of the beasts and the fowls was one of the most important steps in creation. Adam helped to order the universe when he dealt out these names, and let us not overlook what is implied in the assertion that the names stuck. There is the intimation of divine approval, which would frown upon capricious change. A name is not just an accident; neither is it a convention which can be repealed by majority vote at the next meeting; once a thing has been given a name, it appears to have a certain autonomous right to that name, so that it could not be changed without imperiling the foundations of the world. (“To Write” 27–28)

At a time when Kenneth Burke and other prescient scholars were illustrating ways that objects slip free of their significations, Weaver insisted that names had intrinsic meaning, and during a time when many pedagogues were inves-tigating less authoritarian modes of instruction, Weaver attempted to shore up a teacher’s authority in the classroom by situating the teacher’s role at the center of Western civilization.

For Weaver, the focus on names was paramount because the authorities who held the right names of things needed to pass on the culture unchanged, or needed to restore culture to its traditional roots because “those engaged in separating reality are in effect ordering the universe” (28). This restorative function meant that

the burden of some teachers is in fact heavier than Adam’s, for teaching the names of imponderables is far more difficult and dangerous than teaching those of animals and rocks. The world has to be named for the benefit of each oncoming generation, and who teaches more names than the arbiter of the use of language? With the primer one begins to call the roll of things, and the college essay is but an extended definition. (“To Write” 28)

By focusing on the broader implications of what college writing could do, Weaver hoped to bring more meaning to the teaching of writing. Like progres-sive educators, he believed that teachers had an important social function to play. Unlike progressives, however, who hoped to use their instruction to bring about a more equitable social order, Weaver hoped to use his instruction to undo a great deal of the damage that he believed progressives had already done, damage that would eventually lead, he predicted, to the decay of mod-

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ern culture. Throughout “To Write the Truth,” Weaver accused progressives of doing “immeasurable harm” to their students by telling them that “‘history’ is the name of our recollection of the past adjusted to suit our feelings and aspirations” (28), and he concluded by asserting that progressives lie to their students about the nature of the world.

Weaver’s critique of progressive education parallels contemporary cri-tiques of one of the central pedagogical premises of our field today, namely that the best way to help students learn how to write is to give them the means of transferring declarative knowledge about writing into procedural knowledge—procedures that are centered around inquiry for both teachers and students. Rooted in the progressive educational project of the early twentieth century, this premise has been continuously contested by conservative and liberal edu-cational theorists alike. During Weaver’s era, the resistance to giving students procedural knowledge was politically motivated, part of a greater attack on all forms of progressive politics and education in the United States. Pedagogically speaking, this resistance is no different today, even though a part of it comes under the guise of post-process pedagogy. Although the political stance of many post-process theorists is diametrically opposed to Weaver’s, the ideological and methodological aims of post-process theory could distort the progressive agenda that has been historically connected to the composition movement since the early twentieth century.

We can begin to see this possibility, first, by imagining how Weaver would have to adjust his critique to the theoretical climate of our times. Contemporary arguments for “speaking correctly” are most often contextualized by having students think about grammar rhetorically or by introducing them to the central tenets of English for Specific Purposes. Likewise, scholars who wish to argue that first-year writing should be “useful” must first address the prevalent body of research that critiques the socioeconomic and sociocultural aspects of utility. Today, the ideas of “correctness” and “usefulness” have taken on a complexity that makes Weaver’s complaints seem unsophisticated. There are few, if any, scholars today who would neatly fit into Weaver’s facile classification system. Furthermore, it seems hardly necessary to point out that many scholars in our field have taken on the label “sophist” as a badge of honor, as a way of push-ing back against the hegemonic tendency of truth claims. This insistence on contextualization makes any idea of “speaking the truth” and giving students “the right names of things” seem naive.

But Weaver was not naive. He stubbornly chose, instead, to live in a world of traditional ideals. Politically, Weaver was influenced by his Southern Agrar-

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ian mentors, who believed that the South’s feudal structure was a preferable form of government, despite the “historical accident” of slavery (Bailey 33–36). Although many recent critics have taken Weaver to task for his racism and sexism,1 most have acknowledged his contributions to rhetorical theory.2 As Walter Beale has commented, it was Weaver’s idealism that made him believe without qualification that “rhetorical education is an attempt to shape a certain kind of character capable of using language effectively to carry on the practical and moral business of a polity” (Beale 626). The rhetorician’s role, as Weaver saw it, was to engage in cultural criticism, and Weaver envisioned a rhetoric that would work in tandem with an internalized dialectic to restore modern culture to its more conservative roots, a culture based on religion, hierarchy, and first principles (Beale 626–34). Weaver, therefore, resembled progressive educators in that he believed education played a vital cultural role, but as a conservative he objected both to the political agenda of progressive educators and to their pedagogical methods.3

This hostility suggests that a focus on rhetoric alone does not guarantee that one will be sympathetic with progressive goals. Although he had once been a member of the socialist party, Weaver had rejected the socialist dream of greater equality for all. “To Write the Truth” applied this philosophical re-jection of equality to the classroom. Explicitly attacking three of the primary tenets of progressive education—namely that educators should (1) concern themselves with the immediate needs and values of their students; (2) engage their students in social interactions to help build a better, healthier democracy; and (3) ground their observations about teaching empirically—Weaver used a primarily Platonic theory of rhetoric to help maintain the more traditional role of teacher authority in the classroom. “Student-centered education” had gained some influence in writing classrooms, and by the mid-twentieth century the communications movement was more explicitly a part of first-year writing curricula.4 Arnold Needham, one of Weaver’s contemporaries, had argued for “permissive education” in first-year classes. Under Needham’s plan, courses would contain “student-selected, student-planned, individually planned, activi-ties in communications, as distinct from committee-planned and committee-imposed assignments” (Needham 13). He further stated that

the permissive also denotes . . . an “atmosphere” or classroom setting in which the instructor and the members of the class accept, and do not reject, each other at their current levels of achievement in the language arts. A two-way, or interper-sonal, relationship prevails; all those concerned are taken where they are and as they are. All truly student-centered work in communications would have to begin

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at this point and work outward, as if along the radius of a series of concentric circles. (Needham 13)

Needham, a proto-critical pedagogue, saw enormous educational potential in the permissive atmosphere. Weaver, on the other hand, believed it would lead to educational impotence. “There are two postulates basic to our profes-sion,” he argued. “The first is that one man can know more than another, and the second is that such knowledge can be imparted. Whoever cannot accept both should retire from the profession and renounce the intention of teaching anyone anything” (“To Write” 28). As is often the case in his polemical tracts, Weaver allowed for no middle ground: professors were either “definers” for their students, imparting wisdom that descends from an ideal world, or they were completely powerless to teach.

While the progressive movement claimed that effective instruction began with the experiences and interests of the students in the classroom, it also claimed that instruction needed to help students interact with the broader social realm. Jane Addams, for example, once noticed that a group of urban schoolchildren, who had been bored by a lecture on flowers, sprang to life when they saw a passing ambulance. By starting with experience, she believed that she could lead students toward a deeper understanding of the culture in which they lived (27). Weaver, however, was explicitly hostile to bringing students to this type of cultural understanding, so he used the fact that progressives focused on experience to attack their larger social agenda and also to mask his own, which was to restore an older social order. “The dialectician works through logic,” he quipped,

which is itself an assurance that the world has order. True enough, there will not be much student-centered education here, and knowledge will take on an authority which some mistake for arrogance. The student will learn, however, that the world is not wholly contingent, but partly predictable and that, if he will use his mind rightly, it will not lie to him about the world. (“To Write” 30)

This predictability arose from tradition and from authority, and Weaver used his belief in tradition to narrow the definition of how authority works.

By doing so, he willfully misread the progressive agenda. In Experience and Education, John Dewey had already acknowledged the limits of a solely student-centered teaching philosophy. “The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience,” he argued,

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does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. Experience and education cannot be directly equated to each other. For some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience. (13)

Weaver believed that dialectic (as defined by the teacher) introduced students to the truth about the world. He also believed, as he makes clear in “Rhetoric and Dialectic in Dayton, TN,” that the teacher could and should use rhetoric to impart the truth that has been discovered through the dialectical process. Under the progressive system, however, the teacher was not a definer for his or her students but was instead a mediator between the student’s experience and the broader social experiences to which she or he hoped to bring students. Despite Weaver’s contentions to the contrary, progressive educators were con-cerned with exposing their students to the truth about the nature of the world, but they wanted to do so by looking more thoroughly at the ways that authority arose from the interaction between teachers, students, text, and language. In addition, progressive education was “an extension of political progressivism, the optimistic faith in the possibility that all institutions could be reshaped to better serve society, making it healthier, more prosperous, and happier” (Berlin 58). By focusing on “the immediate needs and the characteristics of the student” (Applebee 191), progressive educators could then move their students toward the goal of bettering culture and society.

For Weaver, truth was discovered through dialectic and imparted through rhetoric to students. For progressives, experience and education were mediated through empiricism, which was the final tenet that Weaver found abhorrent in progressive educational philosophy. Progressives believed that the empirical method was effective, both as a method of inquiry and as a method of ground-ing one’s assertions. In Experience and Education, Dewey emphasized “the organic connection between education and personal experience” (12) as well as a commitment “to some kind of empirical and experimental philosophy” (13). Empiricism, i.e., “the attempt to describe human behavior (or other phe-nomena) according to a definable, limited system” (Wallace 103), proved to be important to composition studies because, although it is a limited system, it rendered phenomena measurable.

As a thinker who believed that truth could only be discerned through dialectic, Weaver saw no value in the empirical method.5 In fact, he believed that empiricism was connected to the decline of Western civilization. In Ideas Have Consequences, Weaver traced the history of the liberal tradition back

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to the nominalists of the fourteenth century and presented “a long series of abdications” (3) to the empirical method, which he connected to the inability of liberalism to offer cogent plans of action for the betterment of society. “It is very hard after a century of liberalism, with its necessity of avoiding commit-ment, to get people to admit the possibility of objective truth, but here again we are face to face with our dilemma: if it does not exist, there is nothing to teach; if it does exist, how can we conceive of allowing anyone to teach anything else?” (“To Write” 24). Weaver’s either/or position precludes at least two other possibilities. If objective reality does not exist, the progressive educator would argue, there is still plenty to teach. In that case, the teacher should help the student engage the subjective reality that is offered by a particular discourse community. If objective reality does exist, the progressive educator would ar-gue, the teacher should lead the student to a fuller understanding of objective reality from his or her particular subject position.

Turning directly to Weaver’s focus on definitions, a student-centered edu-cator would have chosen to work with the subjective experience of students and their understanding of definitions in order to move that subjective experience into conversation with different authorities. Weaver, however, anticipated this pedagogical technique when he wrote:

Those who argue that teachers should confine themselves to presenting all sides of every question—in our instance, to giving all the names previously and currently applied to a thing—are tacitly assuming that there are sources closer to the truth than are the schools and that the schools merely act as their agents. It would be interesting to hear what these sources are. (“To Write” 29)

In the progressive cosmology, truth was in the interaction between “subject, object, audience, and language” (Berlin 15). In Weaver’s cosmology, the schools were the seat of an authority which contained ideal truth.

At the level of theory, post-process scholarship has more in common with the progressive tradition than the Weaverian one. Thomas Kent asserts that while individual post-process theories are widely divergent, they do share three assumptions, namely that writing is “public, interpretive, and situated” (1). Having these assumptions at its core, post-process theory should not have any relationship to Weaver’s cosmology, which insists on an idealized formulation of knowledge. At the level of practice, however, post-process critiques of the process movement run parallel to Weaver’s critiques of the progressive move-ment. Generally speaking, post-process theorists critique the process movement on two grounds: first, the process movement attempts to make generalizations

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about the writing process, which is far too complex a phenomenon to measure empirically; and second, the method of teaching that has emerged from the process movement too often ignores social and cultural factors of writing. Al-though his political and epistemological stances were different, Weaver would have agreed with both of these critiques of the process movement because he was hostile to empiricism and also believed that writing instruction should play a broader cultural role than the utilitarian role of improving the quality of student writing.

Were Weaver writing today, he might, like David Russell, lampoon the way that “process theory” has been applied in primary and secondary institu-tions. It would be anathema to Weaver, as it would be to any responsible writ-ing teacher, that education about writing be reduced to the memorization of stages in the writing process. Like any reasonable writing teacher, he would object to simply giving students quizzes over the stages of the writing process, as if that activity could in any way produce good writing or good thinking. The second concern of post-process theory would have been even more significant to Weaver, however, because like post-process theorists Weaver wanted writ-ing instruction to address broader rhetorical, social, and cultural concerns. As Sidney I. Dobrin explains, post-process pedagogy asks us to shift our “scholarly attention from the process by which the individual writer produces text to the larger forces that affect that writer and of which that writer is a part” (132). In other words, Weaver, like post-process theorists, would not have been satisfied with helping students master the writing process without first interrogating the students’ beliefs.

If the cultural concern lies at the heart of post-process theory, then the term “post-process” is a misnomer because it obscures the social and historical forces that have shaped writing instruction for more than a century. Because many practitioners of composition have fought to enact the tenets of progres-sive education for well over one hundred years,6 and because post-process theory is not “always already” progressive, the linear historical explanation that the term post-process theory implies is far too simple. We must, therefore, examine the ways that contemporary practices relate to the production of pro-cedural knowledge. To do so, I would like to investigate more thoroughly the post-process belief that all writing should be public, interpretive, and situated. Even though the definitions of these terms vary wildly within different writing epistemologies, these three terms continue to be an ideal lens for considerations of whether or not a writing theory will help to improve a student’s writing in meaningful and productive ways.

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Post-process theory argues that writing instruction should be public because the reception of writing is judged through its interactions with au-dience; interpretive because the production of text relies on the judgments of the writer(s); and situated because both writer-related judgments and reader-related judgments rely on sociohistorical contexts, the writers’ and the audiences’ places in history (Kent 1–5). Progressive educators also believed that writing should be public, interpretive, and situated: public because they attempted to engage their students in social interactions to help build a better, healthier democracy; interpretive because they argued that writing instruction had to begin with the experiences of their students; and situated because they believed in the transactional interaction between subject, object, audience, and language. Progressives and post-process theorists, therefore, share the same general epistemological beliefs, but the progressive belief in a public, interpretive, and situated philosophy differs from post-process theory in two significant ways. First, progressives respond to the fact that writing is inter-pretive by insisting that instruction should be student-centered. Second, they respond to the situated nature of writing by insisting that truth-claims about writing should be grounded empirically.

The student-centered and empirical nature of the progressive project, to which the process movement was an heir, may have reached its peak in the mid-1980s when George Hillocks, in his well-known meta-analysis, provided empirical proof that the environmental mode was the most effective form of teaching. At the height of the process era, few people would have been surprised that the presentational mode, “where the instructor dominates all activity, with students acting as the passive recipients of rules, advice, and examples of good writing” (247), was found to be the least effective. What was evocative about Hillocks’s study was his discovery that the environmental mode of instruction was also more effective than the natural process mode, “where the instructor encourages students to write for other students, to receive comments from them, and to revise their drafts in light of comments from both students and the instructor” (247). By isolating one of the process movement’s premises—i.e., the importance of requiring multiple drafts with feedback—and measuring it separately, Hillocks was able to show that, while helpful, this requirement was not enough. Hillocks’s study asked teachers to engage students not only in procedures that lead to better writing but also procedures that center around inquiry for both students and teachers. To effectively give students the best procedural knowledge about writing, the teacher had to “plan and use activi-ties which result in high levels of student interaction concerning particular

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problems parallel to those they encounter in certain kinds of writing” (247). Like progressives, Hillocks believed this “certain kind of writing” was argu-mentative—the kind that allowed students to form “arguable assertions from appropriate data” and to predict and counter oppositional claims (247).

When we consider this turn in the empirical data, it may seem ironic that it would be the argumentative turn in writing instruction that would become objectionable to many empirically-minded process theorists. Those who are familiar with controversies about making first-year composition an overtly po-litical course will remember that in the early 1990s Maxine Hairston responded to what she believed were the excesses of such moves by attempting to resituate composition studies more squarely with its process-based, student-centered tradition. Although she did not use the term post-process pedagogy, she had noticed a new direction for first-year composition. “It’s a model,” she wrote, “that puts dogma before diversity, politics before craft, ideology before criti-cal thinking, and the social goals of the teacher before the educational needs of the student” (180). Scholars who were proposing the new type of writing courses, Hairston pointed out, were arguing that teachers needed to move beyond methodology (i.e., become post-process), that rhetoric was inherently connected to social change, and that teachers should use their rhetorical force to help bring about more social change in the classroom (180–83). At the heart of these new courses was the assumption that the political issues at stake warranted a more directive approach on the part of the teacher. “The teacher can best facilitate the production of knowledge by adapting a confrontational stance toward the student” (qtd. in Hairston 181), one scholar had argued, and another argued that “political commitment . . . is a legitimate classroom strategy and rhetorical imperative” (qtd. in Hairston 182). Weaver would have agreed. If Weaver had not been writing fifty years prior, Hairston could have included quotations from his work to clarify that when one connects political commitments to rhetorical imperatives in the classroom, the door opens to an entire spectrum of political stances on the part of teachers.

More important to Hairston, however, was the impression that “those who advocate such courses show open contempt for their students’ values, preferences, or interests” (181). As a corrective, Hairston argued that “students’ own writing must be the center of the course” (186) and that we must remain in our area of expertise, “helping students to learn to write in order to learn, to explore, to communicate, to gain control over their lives” (186). Hairston attempted to bring the political goals of progressive pedagogy back in line with the pedagogical means of progressive educators. Although many people

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perceived Hairston’s argument as reactionary at the time, it was clearly a principled reaction. Hairston maintained that although post-process political goals were progressive, their means of achieving these goals were pedagogically regressive. Leaving behind Hillocks’s description of the environmental mode, which requires the teacher to provide students with argumentative data that are diverse enough to address both a position and many viable counter-positions, some post-process teachers were becoming definers for their students, and like Weaver they were not beyond using their rhetorical power to do so.

Although the goal of post-process theory was to free writing scholars from having to focus solely on the now commonplace knowledge that “writing is a process,” the effect, as Lad Tobin discovered when he was attending a workshop on post-process pedagogy, was actually the supplanting of student-centered, process-based courses with teacher-centered, content-based ones. While at the conference, Tobin had wanted to say that

organizing a course around a huge collection of readings that are chosen and controlled by the teacher and that reflect the teacher’s interests and agendas sets back composition pedagogy thirty years—no matter how hip or leftist or progres-sive the readings are meant to be. (14)

It would have been more precise to argue that the type of course planning that Tobin saw at that conference was entirely at odds with the progressive agenda because the student-centered focus in progressive pedagogy was what had made the movement radical, ethical, and effective. If we accept Hillocks’s data, though, we could argue that in a writing course a teacher could choose, even control, a collection of readings in the course, as long as that collection is deliberately structured in such a way that students will be able to find their own concerns and values addressed within it. Nevertheless, the heart of Tobin’s critique is sound. “If we learned anything from Murray, Emig, and Elbow, we know that you don’t teach students to write,” he remarks, “by telling them that their views on issues that concern them . . . don’t count as content or count only as naive opinions to be corrected during the course” (14). To reject what we learned from process scholars about the importance of student-centered pedagogy, in other words, is to be at odds with the procedural, inquiry-driven methods that have always been at the heart of the progressive movement.

These methods, I contend, should remain at the center of the field of com-position because they are what will give students the greatest access to mastery over the writing process. In a post-process age, however, we must define the

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concept of mastery as precisely as possible. In his argument for post-process pedagogy, Gary Olson argues that “typical discourse, especially academic discourse, entails what Lacan called ‘the discourse of the master’” (8). In his argument, Olson asserts that post-process pedagogy allows us to look more thoroughly at the ways that academic discourse can serve the interests of those in power. This critique has been productive for scholars in our field throughout the 1990s and well into this decade, but in Lacan’s cosmology critiques of aca-demic discourse are only a part of the equation. Academic discourse does not entail the “discourse of the master” but falls instead under its own category. Pointing out Olson’s lack of clarification between the “discourse of the master” and the “discourse of the academy” would be merely pedantic if it were not for the fact that the confusion closes off possibilities for writing teachers. When we confuse academic discourse with the master’s discourse, we are left with a forced choice: either we put our efforts into teaching students to write like masters or we put our efforts into teaching our students how to critique the master’s discourse. In either case, we become servants, explicitly in the case of helping our students write like masters or implicitly in the case of allowing the master’s discourse to shape our own teaching.

Although many welcome the ways that post-process theory has allowed us to use the academy to critique the master’s discourse, we must consider what it means to focus on this possibility at the exclusion of all others. At worst, the master’s discourse needs academic discourse because those in power utilize the knowledge that the academy produces for their own authoritarian ends. In these cases, we should resist the ideas of “mastery,” “clarity,” and “ef-fectiveness” in order to interrogate the social forces that define those terms. We have reached a point now, however, where we need to ask ourselves what this resistance achieves for our students—marginal or otherwise. By rejecting mastery, can teachers enact enough social change to warrant a loss of focus on the procedures that lead to better student writing? No academic, as Rich-ard E. Miller argues, likes to become the means to a corrupted power’s end. In a public, situated, and interpretive world, however, there are places where academic discourse brings about significant improvements in our culture and, more importantly, in our students. There are, as David Metzger implies in “Teaching as a Test of Knowledge,” many styles of discourse in the academy. As academics, we should foster the styles of university discourse that are most ethical and avoid the forced choices that lead us to narrow our visions of what our teaching can accomplish.

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Although student-centered teaching remains at the heart of this affirma-tive project, it may also be true that post-process theory has emerged as a result of many teachers’ dissatisfaction with the progressive assumptions that are inherent in the process and environmental modes of teaching. In my experience as a writing program administrator, I have learned that these matters are in no way settled in the hearts and minds of composition teachers. There is still a great deal of resistance to the progressive idea that our instruction should be student-centered and that we as writing teachers have a responsibility to help students gain procedural knowledge. Some graduate students, many of whom I only teach for one semester before they move on to study in the fields of literature, screen studies, and/or creative writing, wholeheartedly respect Weaver’s argument that the teacher should be an absolute authority in the classroom. “Let there be no mistake,” Weaver writes,

this is an invitation to lead the dangerous life. Whoso comes to define comes bearing the sword of division. The teacher will find himself not excluded from the world but related to it in ways that may become trying. But he will regain something that has been lost in the long dilution of education, the standing of one with a mission. He will be able, as he has not been for a long while, to take his pay with honor. (“To Write” 30)

In my interactions with new and experienced teachers, I have discovered that the seductiveness of Weaver’s argument about teaching and “the dangerous life” cannot be ignored. “How many of us,” a student of mine once argued (even asking for a show of hands), “gravitated toward teaching because we wanted to ‘build networks which would provoke better inquiry,’ and ‘provide scaffolding which would help students make the right decisions to improve their writing?’”

These particular moments of resistance are never easy to encounter. Punctuated by air quotes and so effectively parroted back to the class, my words seemed hollow in comparison to Weaver’s. Nevertheless, as a teacher commit-ted to progressive philosophy, I had created an environment that allowed for this type of questioning, and encouraging and addressing arguments from our students, even if they strike at beliefs we hold dear, still remains at the heart of what the progressive movement teaches us to do. In that particular moment, with no one in the class raising a hand and everyone falling silent and turning toward me to see how I would respond, I realized that I too did not become a teacher in order to step out of the way of my students’ learning processes. The student-centered focus only came to me as a result of seeing empirical proof about the effectiveness of environmental modes of teaching and as a

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result of first hand experience, i.e., discovering the effectiveness of progressive practices in my pedagogical life. But at this moment in our history, if we who believe in the effectiveness of progressive pedagogy are going to survive the critiques of procedural knowledge that are being mounted on all sides of us, we must remain aware of the premise that is at the heart of Weaver’s critique of progressive pedagogy, namely that by failing to focus on truth we fail ourselves and our students.

Barbara Couture’s Toward a Phenomenological Rhetoric: Writing, Profes-sion, and Altruism attempts to realign writing instruction with the pursuit of truth. Hers is not a Platonic Truth, as it was in Weaver’s conception, but like Weaver she does reject relativism. Relativists, she claims, “deny that the classical quest to seek truth is a viable goal for rhetoric and dismiss the idea that truth is attainable,” but she further contends that the “the relativist interpretations of truth and writing that these theorists propose reflect a rather narrow belief that truth is an immutable interpretation that corresponds to a static real-ity” (183). From this assertion, she argues that “a more positive relationship between truth and writing can be construed if we conceive of them both as processes rather than static declarations, processes in constant motion, growth, and development” (183). More than many post-process theorists, Couture is explicit about the importance of keeping process at the center of post-process thinking. Truth must be “located in subjective experience, that is, within one’s own consciousness,” (184) but it must also be “an outcome of intersubjective understanding, that is, of the interplay of one’s conscious reckonings against another’s” (184). Finally, this intersubjective understanding must progress “toward truth through expression, that is, speaking or writing” (184). These criteria for truth-seeking do a great deal to help restore a particular purpose that many new and experienced teachers seem to want, a purpose that may, as Weaver put it, help teachers take their pay with honor, or at the least something approaching that ideal.

If we are going to realign post-process theory more squarely within its progressive tradition, however, there is one final step that we need to address. While it is important that we consider what college English should be, it is equally important to consider how college English should be taught. Like the progressives who came before us, we must consider the way that we ground our theoretical assertions about teaching. If the current trend in our field continues, it may well be that the next generation of composition and rhetoric scholars will look at the body of empirical evidence that proved the effectiveness of procedural teaching as a curious relic from our past, if this body of research

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is studied at all. From a progressive standpoint, we must recommit ourselves to grounding our theoretical assertions in actual practice if we really want to claim to be engaged in public, interpretive, and situated pedagogy. As we ask what types of content we should bring into and outside of the classroom, we must continue to reflect on the ways that these decisions relate to the modes of instruction we use. To do so, we must find ways to measure what effects these decisions have on our students and on the public.7 The primary danger still lingering in post-process pedagogy is its desire to resist what Lee-Ann M. Kastman Breuch calls “the pedagogical imperative”: the insistence that a theory have practical applications in the classroom. If we believe that writ-ing and writing instruction are public, interpretative, and situated, then like the progressives who came before us we must be willing to have our theories grounded in the realm of observation and practice. If post-process theory is given the luxury to resist pedagogical application, then it will itself remain an idealized hierarchical principle, one that contradicts the central premises that it claims to be purporting.

Notes

1. See Crowley.

2. See Foss, Foss, and Trap for a thorough description of Weaver’s contributions.

3. For a thorough discussion of Weaver’s relation to rhetoric and politics, see Giles.

4. See the special issue of CCC titled A Usable Past, particularly George and Trimbur, and also Heyda.

5. See Connors for a thorough discussion of Weaver’s position on the relationship between science and composition.

6. There are many excellent histories that tell the stories of these progressive educa-tors. Among these are Adams, Brereton, and Kates.

7. For pragmatic reasons, English studies should consider a more empirical tra-dition because many who care little about effective writing instruction are now using the authority of empiricism to impose objectivist state-mandated writing assessments on teachers. While both the progressive and the process movements used empiricism to help find what teaching methods lead to better writing from students, it is now, unfortunately, the opponents of any form of progressive educa-tion (process, post-process, or otherwise) who claim the authority of empirical study. This co-opting has had an effect on the students who enter our classrooms. Those who oppose the tenets of progressive education may target higher education next. If they succeed, not only will our students be stifled by four more years of overly

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formal instruction and state-mandated writing assessments, but our teaching will be circumscribed as well.

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Ronald Clark BrooksRonald Clark Brooks is an assistant professor and associate director of first-year composition at Oklahoma State University.

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historicizing critiques of procedural knowledge: richard weaver

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