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Imagining a contact zone for writing process pedagogy and cultural studies
Abstract
This teacher-researcher study responds to the debate between advocates of process pedagogy and those who favor a cultural studies approach to first-year writing. Process advocates like Peter Elbow create a student-centered, interactive classroom that employs personal writing and peer response to encourage individual agency. Advocates of cultural studies like James Berlin take an overtly political, teacher-centered approach that engages students in structural analyses of cultural texts to uncover how they function to position audiences in ideology and to constrain individual agency. I argue that if a way can be found to resolve differences and overcome student resistance to cultural studies, these approaches could work better together than either does alone. They share goals, and the strengths of one could compensate for the weaknesses of the other. One means of merger is Mikhail Bakhtin's novelistic theory of the self. In my course, it inspired writing assignments that enabled self-composing by promoting agency within situations important to students, including their vocational journey. When process pedagogy was modified to help students situate agency, personal writing, process writing, and peer and instructor response showed surprising power. They enabled what Bakhtin calls "outsideness," which stimulated a "third" or composing self to imagine the hero the self might become. Such a tripartite self has a loophole out of present "fixedness." Bakhtin's image of the contact zone also helps account for the power of a pedagogy that engages students with others' internally persuasive and authoritative discourse and that encourages their active response. Modified to situate agency, this pedagogy welcomes cultural studies as a means for students to discover how their agency has all along been constrained by their culture. Such a cultural studies approach to writing should evoke little resistance because instead of learning that they are not free to act, students would use awareness of constraints to act more knowingly and deliberately.
Subject Area
Language|Language arts
Recommended Citation
Vandermeulen, Carl A, "Imagining a contact zone for writing process pedagogy and cultural studies" (1995). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9611071.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9611071