A View from the World of Writing.
Charles Bazerman, University of California Santa Barbara
The movement in CXC from instruction in general principles of communication to instruction in particular communicative practices of disciplines, focusing on the "coherent repertoires of symbolic practices that constitute the disciplines" which the author advocates mirrors a similar movement that occurred in the history of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) as it incorporated a Writing in the Disciplines (WID) approach. The following observations about what has been learned over the history of WAC draw heavily on a forthcoming reference volume on WAC (Bazerman et al, forthcoming). This volume provides resources to go more deeply into the literatures and issues that I briefly touch on here.
This gradual movement toward WID came from research into disciplinary writing and disciplinary classrooms, attempts to articulate what students needed to know, and by the kinds of discussions that occurred in interdisciplinary WAC seminars. These discussions, programmatic experiments and research inquiries led to a recognition that faculty in different disciplines not only had different goals for the writing assignments, but they held students accountable for producing different kinds of texts in different styles, making different kinds of arguments on different evidence. Further students' socialization into disciplinary communicative practices were fraught with difficulties and multiple perspectives. Ultimately it has lead to a view that disciplines are not stable, fixed entities with specific practices for all time (Prior 1998), although some attempt to regulate behavior and standards more than others (see Bazerman 1987; McCarthy 1991; McCarthy & Gerring 1994)
While the general principles of writing to learn, encouraging student expression of response and attitude toward course readings and other materials in informal genres such as personal journals found advocates (see Fulwiler & Young 1982), faculty in other departments often saw this informal writing as outside the scope of their courses. They did not feel course time and student effort should be expended in this way at the expense of their more disciplinary goals. Rather they felt that students should be encouraged to develop the kinds of statements which count as thinking, argument, analysis, and evidence within their disciplines. (McLeod 1989).
This view expressed in faculty seminars and other discussions went hand in hand with research findings about student experiences, teaching practices in assigning and commenting on writing in disciplinary courses, and the communicative practices of mature researchers. Lucille McCarthy's 1987 study of a student in his first two years of college attempting to me the writing demands of different courses and teachers revealed that the writing experience in each course was distinctive, requiring different kinds of writing in different learning contexts. The student summed up his experience of writing in cynical terms: "First you have to figure out what your teachers want. And then you have to give to them if you're gonna' get the grade...And that's not always easy." (McCarthy 1987, p. 362). This finding has been substantiated in a number of studies, excellently reviewed by Russell in 1997 and 2001.
It has also been found that the most general hopes of writing to learn (as expressed by Britton 1970; Emig 1971, 1977; and Applebee 1984) have been tempered by results suggesting that the writing task needs to be well matched to the learning objectives of the courses (Langer and Applebee 1987; MacDonald and Cooper 1992). Specialized forms of writing to learn are now being developed within different disciplines.
Although it is now much clearer that writing instruction needs to align with the goals of disciplinary thought and practice, goals of teachers of writing do not necessarily align with the learning goals of disciplinary instructors. Faigley and Hansen (1985) found that while English teachers responded to the form, disciplinary instructors in two social science classes were more concerned with familiarity with disciplinary knowledge and modes of reasoning, and thus looked to the conceptual depth and evidence of the argument, as viewed through disciplinary lenses. Schwegler and Shamoon (1991) looked further into the criteria eight sociologists used in grading student papers and found the professors had a highly developed model of what kind of work counted as good sociology.
To complicate the picture further two instructors in the same discipline do not necessarily share goals, assignments, purposes for assigning writing, roles for student to adopt in their writing, and criteria for evaluating work (Herrington 1985). Secondly, Herrington found that students' perceptions of what was required differed from the instructors'. As a result there were distinctive differences in the papers of the two courses, and uneven student success. Sometimes these differences reflected patterned differences of interests between disciplinary specialists concerned with solving disciplinary problems and students trying to apply disciplinary findings to practical problems of life (Geisler 1994). However, repeated findings indicate student alienation from course material, resulting in decreased engagement in disciplinary writing (for examples Greene 1993 and Chiseri Straiter 1991).
These studies of the varying practices and challenges of writing in courses across the discipline have been matched by studies of the writing practices of professionals participating in their disciplinary work. Much of this work has examined scientific and technical writing (for example Bazerman 1988 & 1999; Myers 1991; Prelli 1989; Van Nostrand 1997; and Sauer 2003). Studies of the socialization of graduate students in writing practices of their fields (Blakeslee 1997; Prior 1999; have also given insight into disciplinary practices. At the same time practitioners of primarily the social sciences have been examining the rhetorical activities of their own field with an eye towards addressing what they see as fundamental problems in the way their fields formulate knowledge. In anthropology the central document is Clifford and Marcus's edited volume Writing Culture in 1986, In economics it is McCloskey's Rhetoric of Economics . In sociology Gusfield's 1976 article on the rhetoric of drunk driving research is viewed as the foundational work. The history and sociology of sciences have also contributed to our understanding of disciplinary writing practices, with perhaps the most well-known book being Latour's 1991 Science in Action .
Communication based rhetoricians have also been part of the investigation into disciplinary argument, though they have tended to take an approach that applies general principles of rhetoric to scientific writing rather than seeking out forms of disciplinary differentiation (see for example Gross 1990). Further they have generally not been interest in practical applications of their findings to skills instruction, for which they have been criticized within communication by Gaonkar in 1997. Nonetheless they should provide some disciplinary expertise in advancing the CID approach.
The turn of WAC toward a disciplinary focus has indeed evoked the criticisms mentioned by the authors of the foregoing article: that it fragments the humanistic tradition, that it leads students away from personal concerns and personal voice to empty structures and alienated forms of knowledge/power; and that it rides roughshod over class, ethnic, and personal identities. From my perspective the social powers contained in these discourses are the very reason that they should be studied and the reason students should be given access to them. As far as personal identity, commitments, and interests, students are to be encouraged to find their own meanings and purposes in these disciplinary forms, so that they may inhabit and use them to overcome barriers and to bring diverse perspectives and interests into the disciplines. Identities can grow, gain strength, and provide greater opportunities for social engagement as they assimilate the powers of the professions. Further, only by learning disciplinary practices can students remake those disciplines in more equitable and less narrow ways, and only by learning disciplinary practices can students incorporate (Bazerman 1992, 2002).
I am particularly pleased that the authors here identify their entryway into disciplinary difference through the concept of style, even though I have found the concepts of genre and activity system to be ultimately more powerful tools to understand those differences. The pleasure comes from my deep respect for Ludwik Fleck's profound work from the early 1930's on the role of language in the formation of knowledge, translated into English in 1979 as Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact . This work introduces the concepts of thought collective and thought style. But Fleck's thought collective is, when you look at his analysis, the group of people among whom communications circulate. Similarly Fleck's thought style is not an evanescent thing in the heads of people but the style of representation the researchers use in expressing their knowledge--so could be as easily called expression style. An inquiry that takes Fleck as its starting point is off to a most excellent start.
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