Composition, it seems, i always defining itself.But the field of composi tion studies, perhaps more than other disciplines, tends to resist all-encompassing definitions.In our lead article for this issue, "Present-Process: The Composition of Change," Jessica Yood call into question the idea that the "writing pro e " can truly be called a paradigm.Yood examines the roots of the notion of "pro cess" as paradigm, which she traces to Maxine Hairston's influential 1982 article "The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing."Hairston asserted that the process movement, which views the writ ing process as messy, recursive, and holistic, repre ented a paradigm shift in the way knowledge is created in composition, which was comparable to the para digm shifts described by Kuhn in the "hard cience ."early twenty year after Hairston's article appeared, the notion of process as paradigm was problematized in another influential publication, Thomas Kent's 1999 collection Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm.Yood describes her initial attraction to the idea that composition studie was "post" process.In fact, she argues that viewing process as paradigm-a fixed way of solving problems and generating new knowledge-is particularly unsuited to a field that is constantly changing in response to societal forces, perceived student needs, and institutional priorities.However, in this article she works to rehabilitate process a a useful perspective, if not a definitive paradigm, arguing that "the vocabulary of process is exactly what i useful to u right now, not as a 'Big Theory' of how individuals compose, but as a way to talk about the power of change con tructed within literacy programs in our local communities."If the need for a way of talking about change is important for composition in general, it is especially so for ba ic writing, which was created in respon e to changing societal forces, specifically the influx of large numbers of poorly prepared students during the open-admissions era of the l 970s.The other four articles in this issue amply illustrate the types of changes that are currently buf feting basic writing programs and pedagogies.In so doing, they demonstrate the need for Yood's "present-process" concept of composition.In "It's ot Remedial: Re-envisioning Pre-First Year College Writing," Heidi Hu e, Jenna Wright, Anna Clark, and Tim Hacker describe how the writing program at the University of Tennessee at Martin has responded in positive ways to a situation that has recently occurred in many parts of the United States-a mandate by the state legislature that "remedial" programs cannot be offered at four-year colleges and universities.The authors explain the process through which they used this "crisis" to develop a pedagogically sound-and credit-bearing-basic
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 42 citations exist upstream.