Product Pedagogy

Rescue Plan for College Composition and High School English

Michael Prince, Chronicle July 2009

against process pedagogy (and the teaching of rhetorical strategies), in favor of product–in that, sounds much like Birkerts. One problem: he also emphasizes imitation pedagogy, showing students the craft that academics use–but how does that product get to students without process? Interesting that no reference is made to Graff.

Isn’t the problem with the SAT more that it is a product-oriented, not process-oriented approach to learning. Would a question that asked students to analyze Lady Macbeth’s ambition avoid the problem he addresses–writing that is staged, not crafted?

birkerts on the kindle

Birkerts, a recent post on the Atlantic. Re-covering old ground: the page to screen transfer. But even more clearly, re-hearsing the blatant problem of his Gutenberg Argument. Here, he makes a case for the ‘page’ as context, and the ’screen’ as the flattening of context. And yet, in his own print book, in the pages of Gutenberg (as even my students in English 101 wonder) there is very little Gutenberg, very little context for understanding the history of print, or even of texts. Birkerts venerates the aura of the book—the aura that is removed from its context. This may be a reverse of Benjamin; read more closely, it seems to me, it is the real insight: reproduction brings us not just access, but greater access to the creative process (now more intertwined with reproduction, but process nonetheless): the reader is ready to turn into a writer.

Whitman wants context through access—and understands that context comes at a price for the page: specimen daze; the page of convulsiveness.

Birkerts wants the book ripped from its context, presumed pristine; the book, as it puts it, beyond revision. Birkerts wants the page as metaphor (window); what he doesn’t like is the screen as metonymy (contiguous with the process of its production).