I don't want to kill my parents

Freud says something like that - that if you want to become a self-actualized adult, you have to psychologically kill your parents, cut off ties with them, do what you want, forge your own way.

Scholarship does the same thing, though I wonder how effective it is. The process movement comes along and changes the game, kills the current-traditional rhetoricists. Then the socio-epistemic movement kills the cognitivists. Now we have context-ecology-social-genre theorists killing everyone. It's unnecessary.

Genre theory and the need for social contextualization in student writing is an adequate idea on its own merit. Raising awareness of the world external to the student may create rhetorically sophisticated writing, may make the student more conscious of their language use, may increase cultural knowledge, may foster a sense of community. These are important goals. I don't see why writers feel the need to dismantle previous theory to make room for the new. There's plenty of room for everyone.

The criticisms against process are based on what Maxine Hairston calls a "facile, non-logical leap," (Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing 25). How does asking students to write about themselves recreate dominant power structures, particularly when that writing isn't graded? When you write about yourself, your culture, how does that disadvantage you from the dominant culture? Hyland says the process model is "based on individual motivation, personal freedom, self-expression and learner responsibility, all of which might be stifled by too much teacher intervention" (19). So we get rid of it? Ignore it? Replace it? Nonsense.

I see no conflict between process models and genre-social-context-ecology models. Both systems do what we want for students, they are not mutually exclusive, and indeed, they work better in conjunction with each other.