This course provides an overview of the key theories and methods that have informed writing instruction, assessment, and curricular design since the emergence of the “process movement” in the late-1960s. Prior to the 1960s, writing instruction consisted mainly of teaching and evaluating product-oriented skills such as organization, paragraphing, sentence construction, grammar, spelling, and so forth. These “technical” skills were meant to help students prepare and present their written products to teachers who then corrected them (often with the infamous red pens). By the 1960s, a few teachers began to turn their attention to the processes of text production, hence a shift in focus from a product- to a process-driven writing instruction that we now call the process movement. While today the product approach is far from extinct, the process movement has nonetheless played a large role in making the field of composition studies possible by giving writing teachers and scholars something to study in addition to something to teach, namely the conditions, socio-political and cognitive, that shape writers’ composing processes.

This course will introduce you to and help you work with some of these approaches that guide the study and teaching of writing. We will explore and challenge the different theories and methods of teaching writing that have emerged in the last forty or so years, ranging from methods for teaching students how to produce texts to methods for assessing these texts. Most of all, though, this course provides an opportunity to think about what it means to teach writing, to develop our own goals for teaching writing, and to generate and articulate practices that will help us achieve these goals in the contexts of the schools, communities, and state-mandated requirements we teach within.