Theoretical Backdrop

As teachers of first-semester college writing at Bryan College, Columbia State Community College, and Middle Tennessee State University, we value writing as a means of discovery and of moving an audience, and we believe that students learn to be effective writers by becoming conscious of the composing process and by writing and rewriting under the guidance and support of critical readers, a writing community composed of classmates and the instructor.  The courses we teach are what Erika Lindemann calls “How-centered courses.”  These are writing courses that “avoid overemphasizing any one element of the communication triangle, but instead focus on the process whereby writers balance all three: the writer’s persona, the subject, and the reader” (257).  Our subject matter is the writing process, and our students constantly engage in the practice or prewriting, writing, and rewriting.  In that we ask our students to take responsibility for their learning in a cooperative, collaborative setting of their peers, our instruction is student-centered. 

            By these comments, the reader will recognize that we align ourselves with New Rhetoric, which “inherently values writing, not only as part of formal education but also as a means of discovery and self-definition” (Williams 38), and process pedagogy, an approach to the teaching of writing which in the late 1960s began to supplant current-traditional rhetoric and its emphasis on correctness that had so long dominated writing instruction.^[i]  In more recent times and primarily as a result of postmodernist thought and multicultural studies, process pedagogy has come under scrutiny by composition theorists, including Thomas Kent, Sharon Crowley, Richard Bullock, John Trimbur, Lester Faigley, James Berlin, Joe Marshall Hardin, and Susan Miller.^[ii]  In fact, as we move into the new century, the discipline of composition studies is turning toward what has been termed the “post process age” and focusing more and more on how social factors of race, class, ethnicity, and gender affect writing development (Allison 9).^[iii] “Poststructuralist theory,” writes Judith Harris, “has modified and refined our ideas about the relationship between writing and subjectivity.  The unrestrained and autonomous subject so admired by liberal humanist theory has been subtly replaced by a conception of the subject as socially circumscribed by the language and the clutter it represents” (179).  With this turn of ideology comes the politicizing of composition studies.  For example, in the recently published Opening Spaces: Critical Pedagogy and Resistance Theory in Composition (2001), Joe Marshall Hardin draws on postcolonial theory, cultural studies, and postmodern social theory to argue for a critical pedagogy that teaches students “to question or to resist the values promoted and inscribed in various discourse” (3).

            Is the writing teacher’s responsibility “to teach students to write and read for and within curricula made by academics for academics” or “to assist students in resisting these restraints?” ask Mark Hulbert and Michael Blitz in Composition and Resistance (42).  From our perspective as process-oriented teachers who are sympathetic to multicultural concerns regarding race, class and gender and who are conscious of how these factors inform our teaching and our students’ learning, this either/or proposition oversimplifies the challenges of writing instruction.^[iv] Now more than ever with more and more students clamoring for college degrees, we see ourselves helping students develop the understandings and skills that will lead to their academic success while at the same time will give them the critical tools to question practices of their institutions, workplaces, and nation--in other words, to develop their own voices of social consciousness.  Recognizing the centrality of student voice in the writing process approach to teaching writing, John Kordalewski notes,

Students’ cultural identities are also crucial dimensions of student voice.  For students who belong to subordinated groups, honoring their voice within the classroom assumes special significance. [. . .]  Ultimately, the question for teachers is not simply how to incorporate student voices into classroom activities, but how to assist in the growth of those voices.  This can entail using specific teaching methods as well as creating situations in which students express their voices beyond the classroom.^[v] 

In a limited way through cross-institutional collaboration, we have encouraged our students to express their voices beyond their particular classrooms, and even though multicultural concerns were not the focus of our work, we are able to report a number of relevant findings in the conclusion to this study. 

            The assumptions that drive the project which brought together our freshmen as peer readers inform writing process theory as it intersects with a rhetorical theory that emphasizes audience and with a pedagogical practice that values collaboration and computer-assisted instruction as means of student-centered learning. 

Writing Process Pedagogy and Audience

            Ask entering college students who they write for and why, and most will say “To the teacher for a grade.”  Writing instruction that privileges form and correctness of the writing product reinforces the notion that writing is just a classroom exercise that has no relevance outside academia.  However, the ability to write well is essential to students becoming productive workers and citizens (as well as students), and an acknowledgment of the centrality of audience to writing well is crucial to their success.  Fortunately, the 20th-century paradigm shift in writing pedagogy from writing-as-product to writing-as-process (an acknowledgment of how writers produce writing through the recursive processes of invention, writing, and rewriting) has the potential to promote audience-centered writing.

             Audience awareness and audience adaptation, cornerstones of rhetorical theory as old as Aristotle, are among the most difficult aims of successful writing to achieve.  To what extent should writing instructors stress audience to first-year college writers?  In “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy,” Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford acknowledge two positions in regard to audience instruction in the writing classroom: the “audience addressed” perspective assumes that the writer’s knowledge of an audience’s “attitudes, beliefs, and expectations is not only possible (via observation and analysis) but essential” (156) and the “audience invoked” perspective acknowledges that “the audience of a written discourse is a construction of the writer [. . .] but [. . .] that writers simply cannot know this reality in the way that speakers can” (160). Although we recognize this distinction between speaking to audiences and writing to audiences, we believe that first-semester college students should be taught to consider audience in their writing.  By asking students to target appropriate readers for their topic and purpose, we adopt the “audience addressed” approach to audience instruction and establish an expectation of “real-world” writing for our students.

            First-year college writers can be taught to shape their writing for readers. The multiple drafting aspect of writing-as-process instruction allows student writers opportunities to experiment with content and language adapted to specific audiences.  That their efforts in this respect are further enhanced in collaboration with peer readers is an assumption that is tested in our project that required student writers to communicate with other student writers across institutional boundaries via e-mail correspondence. (See Essay Assignment)

Collaboration and Computer-assisted Instruction

            Kenneth A. Bruffee’s pioneering work in the use of collaboration to teach writing established the potential of student peer groups to facilitate their own learning by reading each other’s writing aloud and offering advice for editing and revision.  Peer response is grounded in social constructionist theory, which contends that the ability to think is developed socially:

[C]ommunication and thought are causally linked, especially in writing.  The processes which we use to communicate are not innate cognitive behaviors, but the result of natural social interaction; therefore, the composition instructor needs not only to provide students access to academic discourse, but also to create a social environment in which academic discourse can be learned.  (O’Brien and Denny 107)

Writing teachers, such as Karen Spear, recognize the communal features of writing and promote peer groups as a means of preparing students for real-life writing where much writing is team processed.  Spear writes, “The context of school writing differs from that of ‘real’ writing and potentially distorts it.  Out of this awareness, many teachers have been turning increasingly toward small group interaction to help students experience the problems of audience and purpose as they affect writings in actual writing situations” (4). 

            Nonetheless, in “Rescuing Community: Sociality and Cohesion in Writing Groups,” David Foster acknowledges that group pedagogy has had its detractors:

In seeking pedagogical community, it is argued, writing teachers too often gloss over or deny the reality of competing voices. [ . . . ]  Critics [. . .] read in communal experience group oppressiveness and the denial of difference.  The critics assert that ‘community,’ as presently conceived and practiced in writing classroom, is inherently inequitable and oppressive.” (2)^[vi]

Is it possible to achieve cohesiveness in writing groups while also maintaining and respecting differences among group members?  In our increasingly pluralistic society, this dilemma may be the challenge of future writing group pedagogy.  Such a pedagogy will need to break down the barriers of communication among diverse populations and extend the group beyond the walls of our individual institutions of learning.

            Peer response groups have been a staple in our own individual writing classes since the early 1990s.  By-and-large the writing communities at our three institutions (large public university, small community college, and small private college) have been self-contained in classrooms of fairly homogeneous students bound by their common purpose and shared situation.  Whereas this like-mindedness has many advantages, namely supportive peer readers, a disadvantage occurs when writers attempt to reach audiences less like themselves.  The next logical step in moving students to a higher sophistication of audience awareness and adaptation is to expand the writing community beyond the classroom walls, a step made possible by computer technology.

            Gail E. Hawisher, one of the leading proponents of using computers to teach writing, points out that the development of two major contributions brought to composition studies by the use of computers, word processing and electronic conferencing, coincides with the rise of the process paradigm and social constructivist views of language respectively (81).  Indeed, the computer is a tool that has the potential to facilitate revision and enable writers to collaborate more efficiently than ever before. According to Michael Spitzer in “Local and Global Networking: Implications for the Future”:

Many teachers who have used computers in a process-based writing classroom have discovered, sometimes serendipitously, that computers promote collaboration [. . .]. In an environment in which students write collaboratively, their writing becomes more meaningful to them and their efforts are more productive [. . .]. Whether the students all work in the same classroom or send messages across the country, the social context of the network provides them with an immediate audience [. . .]  [with] the potential to transform student writing from listless academic drudgery into writing that is purposeful and reader-based. (59)

Furthermore, as Patricia R. Webb argues, we can “teach students to use the technology [. . .] to question their assumptions about writing [. . .] and to expand their concept of audience” (77).  A case in point is the Michigan Technological University’s Computer-Supported Writing Facility, which, according to originator Cynthia Selfe, allows students “to practice writing and to write for a variety of audiences and purposes if they [hope] to become better writers” (27).

An increasing number of voices have called into question the positive effects of computers in composition, in fact, have suggested that computers do not always help this process but hurt it. In an essay included in Reforming College Composition: Writing the Wrongs (2000), Linda Myers-Breslin questions the positive results of student collaboration across distances via computer technology such as the use of email.  “We hope that students read what others have to say and convey their own ideas, forming a community of writers who write carefully and critique thoughtfully.  But is this what is really happening?” she asks. “I think not,” she concludes, claiming that that networked writing does not constitute community or even collaboration.  “The terms community, collaboration, and conversation, when applied to the Internet, need more thorough consideration than most of us have given up to this point” (162).  When we connect students from other schools, even other countries, teachers must be aware of three potential problems: “(1) the teacher’s concept of collaboration might be quite different from the students’ concepts, (2) collaboration is not a natural by-product of conversation, and (3) collaboration requires deliberate and concerted pedagogical efforts” (163).  The latter point is especially important; we agree with Myers-Bresline that pedagogy should drive the technology, not the other way around. 

Our position is that, properly integrated, the use of computer technology is an asset, “a more efficient extension of existing instructional practice,” as Myron C. Tuman argues in Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age. Tuman goes on to add that

for an increasing number of composition specialists computers are machines ideally suited for the job of connecting people directly with each other [. . .] wonderful tool[s] for facilitating expanded and enriched interpersonal communication, a means of communicating that at once seems to displace traditional control [for example, that of the teacher] and to facilitate greater involvement by those on the margins. (83-84)

            In some measure we are guilty of what Tuman and Michael Spitzer concur early users of computers in composition pedagogy are guilty of, relying too readily and solely on word processing and its attendant tools to improve the composition process and the resulting product (Tuman 84, Spitzer 58). However, like them, we have also progressed to realizing the benefits of the networking capabilities afforded by the technology:

The new networking technology is important, not in providing us with greater power in composing individual texts, but in providing us with the opportunity to communicate through reading and writing immediately with other people in situations similar to ours, or in providing students with the opportunity to communicate in real-time with each other, rather than with their teachers. (Tuman 84)

Our project capitalizes on this aspect of computers in composition.

            Computer technology can bring together writers from different backgrounds with positive results.  Carolyn Handa sees collaboration via computers as “a move outward from the writer to others who provide response and input [. . .]. [It] means much more than just organizing students in groups [. . .].  It involves getting students to realize consciously how much others--sometimes even those we haven’t met--help develop our ideas” (162).  A number of cross-institutional writing projects suggest the benefits of connecting students via e-mail.  In 1995 undergraduates at Roane State Community College (Oak Ridge, Tennessee) e-mailed drafts of essays to graduate students at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock who returned the drafts through e-mail with comments; both groups of students said the experience was helpful, and project results “indicated a much greater interest in revision than that which normally occurs in a composition class” (Jordan-Henley and Maid 213).  In 1989 college writers collaborated with sixth graders at Lake Bluff School in Shorewood, Wisconsin, and in 1995 freshmen English students at Milwaukee Trade Technical High School collaborated with college writers at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee; these projects offered students opportunities for editing and revision and provided students with a sense of purpose and direction for their writing (Maris).  In 1998 a high school English teacher and a university instructor of preservice teachers worked together to create cross-age student partnerships, in which the college students responded to the high school students’ writing; they found collaboration benefited both high school students and the college students, as well as the teachers themselves (Dale and Traun).  Also in 1998 instructors at two different colleges in Montana (Dull Knife Memorial College, a tribal college, and Miles Community College, a distant community college) collaboratively taught composition courses by using the same reading and assignments and doing peer revision for each other by exchanging drafts via local mail service; collaborating this way, “students become much more aware that they are writing for a group of knowledgeable peers and therefore make efforts to write within the discourse conventions of that new group” (O’Brien and Denny 113).^[vii] 

            These stories of successful collaboration lend credence to the assumptions about writing instruction that prompt our own practice.  Our students participate in writing communities and work toward “real-life” writing targeted to appropriate audiences.  Using computer technology that connects our students as peer readers across institutional boundaries is one way to achieve this goal. (See Conclusions)