Riffing on Summerfield's Fear

Summerfield expresses fear that "process" has become static because it has been institutionalized. She worries that "workshops" will follow a similar fate. A quick survey of composition texts seems to bear out her fears.

Frank Smith, noted literacy researcher and scholar, in Joining the Literacy Club (1988), cautions that "the most misleading metaphors are those that we do not think are metaphors at all" (p. 94).

He identifies five such metaphors, all of which bear some relation to process approaches and pedagogies. The first, "information," is frequently invoked as the primary purpose for writing and learning. The information metaphor transforms all of our activities into what Rosenblatt would call "efferent" activities. Smith suggests that a better alternative would be a metaphor that "speaks to the creation and sharing of experience--the generation of possibilities of knowing and feeling" (p. 97) Next, he points to the metaphor of "process" itself as one that has over-saturated education. Seeing various activities of the brain as processes gives the impression of order and confidence in our abilities, as educators and researchers, to understand finally what is complex and largely hidden. Teaching process, coincidentally, lends itself to the production-line model for schooling, parceling out the constituent pieces of the whole, learning these individual pieces, or in the case of writing, stages, and reassembling the pieces into a cohesive whole, finished product. The danger of this static metaphor, according to Smith, is that it takes "a global enterprise, like writing...stretches it out, breaks it up into parts, and makes it particularly susceptible to programmatic instruction, removing all the sense from what is to be learned and making learning difficult if not impossible" (p. 101). Third, the "skills" metaphor is so often uncritically used. To hear educators speak of improving their students' reading or writing skills conjures up images of athletes practicing for the big game, with coaches looming over, drilling them on ball-handling or free throw shooting. Harste, Woodward, and Burke (1984), in Language Stories and Literacy Lessons, point to the most disturbing implication of such an image: it posits "a behavioral model of language learning by suggesting that a particular environment--a subskills approach--is unquestionably the base from which one begins to study "higher" forms of reading [and writing]" (p. 54). The brain, unlike muscles in arms and legs, does not improve through this kind of repetitive practice, and neither does literacy. Minds grow and literacy expands as a result of meaningful contexts, interactions and opportunities.

The last two metaphors Smith calls out can be lumped together: "levels" and "stages." Each denotes the relative position of a student's ability, or if I may mix misleading metaphors, "skill" in relation to some fixed standard of performance. These terms, like the others, connote deficit. The goal of most writing and language classes is to move the learner from level to level, stage to stage, toward greater proficiency and fluency. The danger, of course, is that this kind of talk might encourage more of us to teach to levels and stages rather than teaching to make learning meaningful to individuals.