Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Post-process pedagogy

Post-process pedagoy is a reaction to process pedagogy that was founded to get away from product pedagogy, but ultimately ended up focusing on the end-product as well. Post-process pedagogy offers a variety of assignments to cater to students' different learning styles. It is hard to put into a pedagogy because it wants to get away from structured styles, with its emphasis that writing "cannot be taught."

An example of post-process pedagogy is Dr. Rickly and Dr. Rice's assignment which allowed students to write a term paper or create a media project. The goals of the assignment are the same in the end, in terms of what they're looking for, but the methods or the means are optioned for the students. Another example is Dr. Whitlark's mid-terms assignment. He left the project open ended in terms of content requirements, as long as the students adequately proved to him what they had learned this semester. Finally, at Angelo State, I took a class that allowed students to take different forms of a test, either short answer to several objective questions, or one long essay to one all-encompassing question, or multiple choice and true/false questions. All of these assignments allow for variety in the classroom.

In my classroom, I'd like to try to create a variety of assignments, so that students aren't just reading texts and taking tests. I want to mix up the assignments with projects, presentations, papers, etc. Also, in terms of the composing process, I want to be able to offer them variety. For example, if I have my students brainstorm for an assignment, I won't make them "brainstorm" in a specific way. They can free write, draw clusters, draw outlines, write a draft of a paragraph or two, or they can think. The assessment for the assignment will be their ability to prove to me (verbally or written) that they have thought about the assignment and begun planning how to write their drafts.

1 comment:

Nancy said...

Laura, You have a great way of explaining things--makes everything easy to understand. I have mixed feelings about post-process pedagogy. Do you mean to provide these options you mentioned in your blog for 1301 students? Do you think that, perhaps, freshmen would appreciate more direction than post-process pedagogy dictates? Just wondering.