Production vs. Connection

As a composition teacher, I often wonder if my style of teaching is the best style for my students. In my department, we are encouraged to stress to our students that writing is not about the product, but about the process. While having a great initial product is fantastic, it is not realistic for every student to produce a wonderful and original piece of work. So, by pushing them to think in this way, students should be able to see their writing styles change a little bit through the semester. But, is that actually a good thing?

            According to Stuart Selber, my way of thinking would be associated with the “paradigm of production”. According to him, this paradigm “ teachers embrace process models and even the social turn that the discipline has taken, yet they ultimately expect students to produce a thoroughly original text, one in which their own…ideas and words become the discernable anchor of the discourse” (Selber 135). In other words, teachers expect originality while also at the same time urging them to interact with the real world. As a result, these students could be thinking that originality has no place in the world of academic writing.

            As an alternative, Selber discusses the “connection paradigm”. This particular paradigm allows people to “focus on reorganizing and rerepresenting existing (and equally intertextualized) texts—their own included—in ways that are meaningful to specific audiences” (Selber 135). A potential assignment for Selber would be writing a “hypertext that interprets and arranges relevant discussions of copyright for teachers of writing and communication” (135-6). So, with this line of thinking, teachers are allowing students to use original thought to figure out certain packets of information could be connected with each other.

            So, why aren’t more teachers using assignments that fall within the “connection paradigm”? I think it is because other disciplines are not encouraging them to think in that way. English/Composition is responsible for teaching the college writing, so the university believes that we have to teach it a certain way that can translate to multiple majors and schools of thought. Even though teaching writing with computers would be extremely beneficial to multiple students, that is not what we are there for. We are there to teach them how to do research and write academic papers and that’s it. That is why the process method still lingers in the composition world—because we are being hemmed in by the other disciplines. Until they see the purpose of doing a more interactive idea of writing, we will be teaching the basics.

Work Cited

Selber, Stuart A. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004. Print.