The most influential development in composition theory and practice in this century took place in the late sixties and early seventies with the emergence of process pedagogy. Up until the late sixties, composition classes, influenced by the principles of New Criticism, were largely text-based: students read texts, and they produced them.

This New Critical emphasis on text veiled the idea of authorship and its attendant processes. Accordingly, in these writing classrooms, teachers rarely discussed the process of composing. Rather, they emphasized text: its clarity, authority, and correctness.

Process pedagogy aims to shift attention away from the text and towards the processes that created it -- processes that should be understood as fluid, complex, and, above all, highly individual. Process pedagogy offers professors a new way of thinking about the teaching of writing:

1. Process pedagogy encourages students to understand writing as a process that is comprised of a series of interrelated activities and strategies. These include invention (brainstorming, freewriting, etc.), organization (nutshelling, outlining, etc.), drafting, and revision.
2. Process pedagogy employs teaching methods that discourage appropriation of the students' authority, seeking instead to help students to become confident contributors to the academic community. To achieve this end, process pedagogy promotes several methodologies, among them frequent student-teacher conferences, the use of peer group exercises and peer tutors in all phases of the writing process, and the use of the facilitative response to student writing.
3. By limiting the use of texts in class and asking students to write from and about their own experiences, process pedagogy acknowledges the importance of students' personal experiences and voices, and seeks to find appropriate ways for the personal to inform academic writing.

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It's important to note that many writing classrooms incorporate some process methods without devoting themselves fully to process pedagogy. In fact, process pedagogy is compatible with other pedagogies and can be successfully combined with modes of discourse assignments, critical thinking exercises, instruction in logic and argument, and teaching writing through reading.

How do you use process pedagogy in your writing instruction?