Relations, Locations, Positions: Composition Theory for Writing Teachers

This collection of previously published essays and newly written commentary essays focuses on the postprocess movement in comp studies, a movement that takes into account the sociomaterial nature of writing.

This anthology for beginning teachers and graduate students in composition studies and other related fields begins with the premise that writing is always social, a dialogue between self and other. This “social turn” not only underscores the value of the writing process by encouraging students to prewrite, draft, and revise together, but, more important, it also focuses on postprocess by foregrounding approaches to teaching writing that highlight the importance of context. Thus, this anthology seeks to move “beyond process” by building on the valuable lessons from process pedagogy and by promoting the idea that writing stands for a radically complex network of phenomena. Editors Vandenberg, Hum, and Clary-Lemon have organized the essays collected here in three overlapping sections: Relations, which assumes that writing occurs through conversations and negotiations with others, highlights the concepts of literacy, discourse, discourse community, and genre; Locations, which explores how writing is shaped by material places and intellectual spaces, emphasizes the importance of contact zones, ecocomposition, materiality, and place; and Positions, which identifies how writing reflects the contingency of our beliefs and values, considers markers of identity such as sex, gender, race, class, ableness, and sexual orientation. To show how some of these ideas are demonstrated or experienced in actual classrooms, each section ends with brief “pedagogical insights” written expressly for this collection.