Berlin's Thoughts on Pedagogical Theories

                I appreciate Berlin’s efforts in providing me a much needed review of the classical rhetorical ideals, but try as I may, I still don’t understand how these ideals relate to the “new” writing pedagogies, the post WW2 process approach to writing, or whether this is even an important distinction for me to make.

                I get it. Yes, it seems that composition writing can be viewed as a reductive form of the dialectic. Yes, I agree that the Truth is subjective and the writer is stating her/his version of it and hopefully along the way, the reader can glean, in a heteroglossic sense, whatever might be personally needed at the time to either support or undermine that particular reader’s Truth at any given time. In a similar way, process writing would seem to be another form of a dialectic, helping to hone the Truth that the writer will eventually commit to print.

                But Berlin loses me when he makes these mysterious comments about the universality (or lack thereof) of the teaching of the writing process.  Of course there are many ways of approaching the writing process; we have learned about quite a few before writing our literacy autobiographies.  In turn, I was really let down when he closes with admonishing the writing teacher to teach the version of this process that “recognize[s] and justif[ies] the version of the process being taught, complete with all of its significance for the student” (777).  Of course!