On Education and Writing: Toward an Integrated Pedagogy - By Ryan Wasser

There is a troubling trend in contemporary writing pedagogy to construe classical approaches to writing instruction "as fixed, static entities . . . produced by asymmetrical power relations that . . . reinforce oppressive or stereotypical attitudes and ideologies" (Mutnick and Lamos 25). In place of the classical tradition, progressive educators, following the lead of Paulo Freire, have championed student-centered approaches to education, in effect developing students in the service of themselves as opposed to in the service of knowledge as is characteristic of classical approaches. In this article I argue against the pedagogical monism that characterizes contemporary educational models by positing an integrated model of writing instruction that builds contemporary, theory-driven frameworks on top of historically valid and progressively developed principles, using the languages of modernistic and classical architecture as a mnemonic. Using the "Palladian Arch" as a guiding image, I then close my article by describing how vertically-aligned, foundational approaches such as process pedagogy and genre and rhetorical studies relate to the horizontally-aligned, theoretical approaches that ultimately lead to the apotheosis of each student's intellectual persona.