supporting scholarly exchange about communication across the curriculum
Content Area:
Communication Across the Curriculum
Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum
Writing to Learn vs. Writing in the Disciplines
Discipline:
Welcome to the WAC Clearinghouse Theses and Dissertations Page. The theses are displayed below. If you'd like us to add a new thesis or dissertation to our list, please contact Kevin Eric De Pew.
This study describes a cross-disciplinary study in Writing Across the Disciplines (WAC) at the University of South Carolina Aiken (USCA). As a composition specialist within the larger academic community, I reflect on assumptions made about writing both within and beyond the composition sequence by exploring practices, processes, and personalities within USCA's academic disciplines and schools. After reviewing WAC scholarship, I use surveys, assignment reviews, and interviews to analyze disciplinary assumptions about "writing-to- learn." I explore disciplinary categories and characteristics that have been previously established by WAC scholars. With participants, I examine explicit and implicit purposes and processes that are unique to disciplines. I also explore commonalties we share as teachers or past students of writing, as well as contradictions with our actual practices. I also explore the relationships between writing backgrounds of my participants. Definite patterns--purposes and uses of language to describe writing--can be associated with the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, particularly evident with upper-level classes. Creativity and discovery of new knowledge are most valued when students are being acculturated to a discipline. Our disciplinary expectations are more variable for freshmen. Generally, instructors' frustrations with freshmen's lack of critical abilities lead instructors to rely on structural approaches while presenting foundational knowledge which instructors perceive as fixed and transmittable. Pedagogical patterns are also less predictable even within disciplines. My study suggests that teaching patterns are more associated with personal backgrounds than disciplinary purposes and concludes that exploring personal backgrounds may be just as significant as determining disciplinary practices and processes. Exploring instructors' expectations for students, and their willingness or resistance to changing instructional methods, also leads me to question whether WAC is better represented as a tool for faculty development or as a reformatory initiative for student learning. As tool or initiative, WAC's impact remains questionable until fully assessed through future research studies. Assessment must be confronted as a major issue for WAC.
This investigation analyzes qualitatively what happened as several teachers constructed a process for implementing portfolio use and assessment in their respective disciplines. This study relies on the use of discourse analysis and other qualitative methods, as it probes the nature and process of meaning-making. The analysis focuses on conversations with teachers both on one-on-one interviews and in full group discussions. An analysis of these discussions provides a means to a deeper understanding of the process used by the teachers to discern for themselves the meaning of portfolios, especially with respect to the participants' own social, cultural and educational context. This study investigates how selected teachers from two private high schools in six different subject matter disciplines used portfolios and initiated portfolio assessment in what each considered to be a writing Across the curriculum Approach in their classes. The study also deals with the quality of 'writing to learn' and 'learning to write' that the writing Across the curriculum movement advocates. The meaning-making process of the teachers and the concerns each had about portfolio use and assessment in combination with workshop procedures, particularly small group work, are the focal points of the research. Although the author was tempted to make sweeping conclusions about how teachers use portfolios in various disciplines, it simply could not be done. Therein lies a weakness of qualitative research, and therein lies an inherent strength. Portfolio use and assessment serve rather as a means to an end. The study provides one more facet of the ongoing conversation and debate concerning teachers and their meaning-making processes in a social, cultural, and educational context.
As compositionists have recently acknowledged, two strands have developed in writing Across the curriculum research and practice, the write-to-learn strand, dominated by a pedagogy that advocates writing as a mode of learning and the learn-to-write strand, dominated by research in learning to write in the disciplines. Using an ethnographic study of a dance class, this dissertation argues that, perhaps, the two strands are not completely adequate for a viable Theory of writing Across the curriculum. As a result, the dissertation challenges scholars to reconsider writing Across the curriculum practice and research in light of broader conceptions of learning and literacy. Findings from a study of a dance class (including perspectives from the instructor, students, and the texts in the course) present perplexing questions for writing Across the curriculum practitioners. While writing Across the curriculum practitioners assume that every discipline is or can be logocentric, the epistemology of the discipline of dance is not always logocentric. In fact, the discipline of dance forwards alternative literacies--imagistic and kinesthetic ones--and language remains a contested site of knowledge, a point of dance or a metaphor of dance rather than the central vehicle for the production of knowledge. Dancers mean with their bodies, not always with words. This discipline's complex relationships with language confound common writing Across the curriculum pedagogies and call for reexamination of issues such as academic acculturation, alternative literacies, and conceptions of texts that impinge on or challenge writing Across the curriculum practice in many disciplines.
Writing-Across-the-curriculum programs, which have focused chiefly on the differences that characterize writing in the various university disciplines, have encouraged faculty members and students to believe that while academicians function together within an academy and share some common ground, each discipline and its discourse is quite different from the other. This study argues that defining academic discourse communities principally by their disciplinary differences may obscure commonalities Across disciplines that also may be important. It re-examines the primary WAC framework of discipline and proposes a second framework of pedagogy, asserting that the intersections of discipline and pedagogy are more useful than is either alone in explaining the discourse communities in which faculty members ask their students to write. As it reports an ethnographic study of two academic disciplines, accounting/finance and anthropology, the study probes two questions: (1) How do faculty members map and sustain the discourse communities in which their students must write, and (2) how may WAC projects help faculty members and students understand and describe what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how they might do it more successfully? It describes data gathered through interviews with faculty members, observations of classes, and reviews of course syllabi and of student writing. The interpretation of these data, which reveals similarities and differences that both observe and cross disciplinary lines, supports the addition of the framework of pedagogy to WAC considerations. It demonstrates that the inquiry into pedagogy can explain how faculty members Theorize their roles, the roles of their students, and the nature of the curriculum. The study concludes by generalizing its work with WAC boundaries to a larger conversation about creating and using categories. It proposes that engaging the dualisms and contradictions found in the margins leads to a more fluid vision of discourse and other communities while it models productive boundary blurring for faculty members and students.
Scholars in rhetoric and composition have heralded a new way of thinking about writing, referring to the change as a paradigm shift (Hairston, Young) or naming the new direction a 'social turn' in rhetoric and composition (Bizzell, Bruffee). Within the writing classroom, this emphasis on the social has encouraged pervasive use of three practices: use of personal experience in writing; contextualization of student writing; and collaborative learning. Although all three practices fall under the larger 'social' rubric, practitioners draw warrants from numerous Theoretical constructs which often represent very different or even opposing philosophies. This study attempts to gain greater understanding of the social movement in rhetoric and composition by examining the most influential groups within the movement--those who draw warrants from feminism, Marxism, and social constructionism. The study points to inconsistencies and overlap among Theoretical groups and highlights the intricate nature of practices that are often referred to and used in manners that belie their complexity. In using the term 'personal experience writing,' scholars have conflated the autobiographical and intimate with personal experience that represents a broader, more general daily experience, creating unexpected problems in the composition classroom. Teaching writing in context is defined differently by different Theoretical groups; at the same time, early expectations for such 'teaching in context' movements as writing Across the curriculum are largely ignored today. And claims for collaborative learning often do not play out as expected, partly because efforts to relinquish authority to students and to 'force' students to cooperate create other problems. There are consistencies Across Theoretical groups, but different ideas about how best to serve students places a very different emphasis on most social practices. This examination points to the complicated relationship between Theory and practice and to the need for classroom teachers to understand the Theoretical underpinnings of their methodology.
This dissertation argues that major approaches to writing Across the curriculum (WAC) are framed by the general/special binary--that is, that language use is general or transferable Across disciplines versus entirely situated in separate disciplinary-specific discourse communities. Proponents of the discipline-specific Approach to WAC have dismissed the possibility of a general or cross-disciplinary Approach because they say it requires a universal, cognitive, or totalizing generic discourse practice to account for transferability Across disciplines, which is untenable in a postmodern world and university of linguistic and social heterogeneity. This dissertation critically re-sees and refigures the general/special binary in WAC by investigating its cultural politics, including representations of social; constitutions of the subject(s) of advanced literacy; perspectives on democracy; and meanings of the cross-disciplinary. WAC's unique position in the curriculum is represented as a cross-disciplinary forum and strategy for advancing a critical-transformative literacy.
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