When criteria are explicit, stable, and omnipresent, they no longer need to be enforced. Students learn to apply them to themselves.
This post traces how genre-based pedagogy produces self-surveillance — not as an unintended side effect, but as the logical outcome of a system in which authority, assessment, and agency have already been reconfigured.
1. From external judgement to internal monitoring
Early in genre-based pedagogy, evaluation appears external: teachers apply rubrics, identify missing stages, and provide corrective feedback.
Over time, this work migrates inward.
Students begin to anticipate judgement by running the checklist themselves:
Have I done the stages?
Is this section functioning correctly?
Have I met the criteria?
Judgement is no longer something that happens to the text. It becomes a background operation of the writer.
2. The checklist as cognitive template
Rubrics do more than guide assessment. They shape attention.
When criteria are repeatedly invoked, they become:
the default lens for planning,
the framework for drafting,
and the basis for revision.
Students do not ask what meanings are possible. They ask what is required.
3. Writing as pre-emptive compliance
Once criteria are internalised, writing becomes anticipatory.
Texts are constructed to avoid penalty rather than to explore meaning. Choices are filtered through questions of risk:
Will this be marked down?
Does this fit the genre?
Is this allowed here?
Innovation is suppressed not by prohibition, but by calculation.
4. The disappearance of the reader
As self-surveillance intensifies, the imagined reader fades.
Students no longer orient to:
persuading someone,
informing someone,
or engaging someone.
They orient to an abstract evaluative system. Writing becomes an interaction with criteria rather than with people.
5. Anxiety as structural outcome
Self-surveillance is often experienced affectively as anxiety.
But this anxiety is not a personal failing. It is a structural consequence of:
continuous self-monitoring,
high stakes attached to compliance,
and limited tolerance for deviation.
The system requires vigilance, and vigilance produces unease.
6. The illusion of independence
Self-monitoring is frequently celebrated as learner autonomy.
Students appear:
self-directed,
reflective,
and responsible.
But what they are directing and reflecting upon is not meaning-making. It is alignment. Independence here means independent enforcement of external norms.
7. The narrowing of possibility
As criteria are internalised, the space of conceivable texts contracts.
Students learn not only what to do, but what not to imagine. Possible meanings that do not map cleanly onto stages simply never arise.
The system has succeeded when alternatives become unthinkable.
8. Looking ahead
When self-surveillance is normalised, resistance can no longer be theorised.
The next post shows how refusal, confusion, or divergence are recoded as psychological problems — issues of motivation, confidence, or mindset — rather than as signals of theoretical or pedagogical limits.
That is where we turn next.
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