Dan Butcher writes:

For me, practice always comes before pedagogy, for several reasons. An important part of this is my lack of formal training in composition pedagogy (actually, any pedagogy). I had one education class in college, and it was a methods course, so I got little of the theory behind the method. Equally important, however, is that I best understand theory by seeing it applied, so what theory I've learned has come from seeing colleagues in action, not from reading articles and books. Most importantly, though, my experience has been that theories of composition and pedagogy haven't really been relevant in my classroom.

Over the years, colleagues with more formal training would tell me, "the latest literature on composition says," and I would try to implement what the literature said I should do. It rarely worked. For example, I was told (and I read) that national education standards suggested successful composition teaching shunned highly structured assignments in favor of empowering students to make their own choices about their writing. The rationale was that in the world of work, people rarely had structure imposed on their written communication; rather, they were free to create and explore. I tried this approach with researched essays, and the writing was passable, but I saw that while students enjoyed the freedom to choose their own topics, they learned little about how to shape their writing for a particular reader (they lacked the experience to visualize for themselves a reader beyond the teacher). As I reflected on the results, I also considered my own work experiences prior to teaching, and I realized that my workplace writing was in fact structured (my boss specified topic, format, purpose, and audience). It seemed that only in the arena of freelance journalism was a writer free to choose these things for himself. So I tried a new approach: I created assignments that approximated real-world situations by giving students an audience, purpose, format, and topic. The writing (and the learning) improved.

From this experience, I concluded that it doesn't really matter what the experts and the literature say if it doesn't work within the constraints I face (an open admissions public university with students of widely varying degrees of preparation and skill, and a department that has very specific goals and end products).

This is not to say I am not interested in theory; quite the contrary, especially as I move into an online environment. I'm eager to learn what experts and theorists have to say about successful online education. But I weigh it all against what I know to be true with my students and my institution; if the theory comes up short when put to the test, I feel no need to hold on to it, regardless of the source. I'm fortunate to have the latitude to experiment; though my department has specific goals for composition, I'm free to get my students to those goals as I see fit.

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