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About the Author
Laurie Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York, is a professor of fine arts and the director of the Comparative Arts and Culture Graduate Program at Hofstra University. Her writing has focused on the place of art and artists in society and the education of young artists, but she has also written essays questioning the viability of beauty in a post-Darwin era, the meaning of abstract painting, and the tyranny of outcomes assessment. She will blog about university life, the arts. and culture.
About Brainstorm
Gina Barreca
Mark Bauerlein
Marc Bousquet
Laurie Fendrich
Dan Greenberg
John L. Jackson Jr.
Stan Katz
Michael Nelson, guest blogger
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Marty Nemko, guest bloggerBob Zemsky
Recent Posts
A High Note for Hofstra | Comment [2]
Religious Interference in the American Election | Comment [86]
The Little Engine That Couldn't | Comment [2]
At Least I Wasn't A Banker | Comment [5]
Great Expectations | Comment [2]
Featured Articles By the Author
Does Learning Benefit From Being a Process?
Language is always in flux, we’re told, but sometimes the changes are deeply pernicious. Take the word “process,” which now sticks like clingwrap to nouns that used to stand proudly alone. For example, instead of a campaign, it’s now the “campaign process”; an election is now the “election process”; admissions has become the “admissions process”; and grading is now the “grading process.” The worst case of all, for those of us in education, is “learning,” which has been utterly destroyed by becoming the “learning process.”
“Process” doesn’t attach itself to any old noun. (We don’t have a “couch process” or a “cake process.”) It wants nouns that already encompass a process, where it is, of course, redundant. This shouldn’t surprise anybody, since it’s in the nature of weak things to want to sidle up to stronger things. “Process” is such a weak word that it wobbles when used alone. Its slyness comes from how miraculously it manages to gain strength merely by standing next to any noun that is forced to support it. The result is that nouns that admittedly might have involved complex ideas become more difficult and abstract than they were previously, and that a new creature emerges — a hybrid word that’s meaningless without the help of experts.
The first order of business for experts is, of course, to come up with some kind of chart (a flow chart is always nice) so that we dummies who aren’t experts can understand how much more complex the thing under consideration is than we’d heretofore known. If you want to see a nice fat flow chart about the learning process, pick one at random from the web. I myself liked this one. The big oval-shaped bubbles connect with one another via swirling arrows, providing a perfect, hermetically sealed system of learning.
It doesn’t take a degree in linguistics to see that the takeover of plain old nouns by the word “process” is a symptom that English is in trouble. It’s under assault by bureaucrats who want to make what they do sound more important than it really is. Forcing perfectly good nouns to capitulate to the word “process” inflates our language and will eventually make it good for nothing other than charts.
I have to conclude my blogging process now. I’ve got to move on to my cooking process so I can indulge in my eating process so I can then get to my sleeping and dreaming process. There, I hope to dream sweet dreams about anything other than the charting process.
Posted at 04:04:58 PM on December 17, 2007 | All postings by Laurie FendrichComments
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The “processifaction” is especially loved by such people as undergraduate associate deans, “learning communities” supervisors, “first year experience” and “exploring college” administrators who are process focused because they have little of substance to teach or say. So they wrap their vacuity in verbosity.
— Joseph F Foster · Dec 18, 07:14 AM · #
If you think “process” is overused, now try the word “solutions.” As in business, networking, and technology. They only cause more problems.
— Carol M. Powell · Dec 18, 09:04 AM · #
It would be interesting to see if the rise of “process” is concomitant with the rise of the consulting industry. They certainly seem tied closely together. I’m not suggesting that one created the other, but like so many moments in the history of ideas, each feeds the growth of the other. I would throw “solutions” as well as “service” into the mix, er, process.
— John Laudun · Dec 18, 11:04 AM · #
I use the word “process.” I like the word and I even use in all of the notorious, above-mentioned ways.
I learned the utility of the word 25 years ago when I took a graduate course in process, group process, to be exact. A group process course is purposefully about nothing —- and this was long before Seinfeld made something out of nothing! With the pretense of a body of knowledge stripped away, real experiential learning begins. The group’s, or shall I dare say, learning community’s, struggles with the task of nothingness inevitably evokes predictable stages of a process, i.e. storming, norming and forming. I don’t know of a more apt or efficient word for the common progression of distinct parts of a greater whole. This is what a process is. Likewise, the learning, writing, and college admissions processes are all phenomena whose complexities, and multiple stages tend to unfold in some semi-predictable, albeit dynamic, sequences. Using the “P” word communicates that we have become more conscious and reflective toward an activity that is no longer apprehended as static nor monolithic; and therefore, the one-word noun is not always “le juste mot.”
— Lisa · Dec 20, 05:15 PM · #