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.
Communication Across the curriculum programs provide instructional support for teaching oral practices in noncommunication classrooms. These programs frequently design instruction to help students develop oral proficiencies while pursuing their major. There is a tendency in these programs, though, to be rather elitist in communication instruction. The pattern has often been to “export” communication principles with little if any substantive exploration as to the potential relevance of those principles within the target discipline. In short, there is little exploration as to the rhetorical and social functions of orality in other disciplines. This study examines one such discipline, mechanical engineering, and the oral practices in their classroom contexts. Through a qualitative, ethnographic framework, I explore meanings assigned to communication and one oral genre, the design review presentation. I use standard content and discourse analytic tools to describe how this discipline assigns meaning to, teaches, and performs this oral genre. I conclude that this oral genre was a site that highlighted critical disciplinary tensions. Through an examination of the oral practices in these classrooms (including interdisciplinary complexities between me and the mechanical engineering disciplinary members), I explore “context” in a multidimensional way. I ultimately argue for a disciplinary communication pedagogy that teaches communication with a sensitivity to the critical oral contexts of the target discipline.
Assessment of writing for technical purposes is oriented in the main toward standards developed in accordance with general literacy goals and composing practices developed in English Language Studies for Writing-Across the Curriculum programs. Increasingly, interpretation of technical writing practices cast it as being defined by direct participation in the work of disciplinary communities. This dissertation shows, first, how criteria for assessing technical writing changes dramatically when developed from this “situated” perspective. Second, it suggests that such development provides improved support for overall technical writing pedagogy—practically, by articulating the goals and expectations of the competent members who form the disciplinary community teaching any novice; and ethically, by providing ways to insure the presence of resources for thinking critically about the work and developing in it toward informed interaction with a wider community, in or out of the discipline.
Data on situated technical writing practices and their assessment by competent members of a technical and scientific community were gathered during a participant-observer year in the School of Engineering at the University of Guelph. The character and operation of the work of engineering are highlighted by comparing them to the specifications for writing outlined in technical writing textbooks currently in use. As the inquiry proceeds, it focuses on three key issues: (1) how members of a discipline orient to work through writing; (2) what resources of document, text, and language are used for writing situated in the engineering disciplines; and (3) why engineering writing pointedly includes graphical as well as lexical ways of articulating substantive material. These topics effectively form questions that arise and are answered in the course of making the comparisons that form the focal points of the central chapters.
As its outcome, this study produces a local and particular inspection of what a group of expert engineers takes to be techniques adequate to writing for technical purposes. Featuring three separate considerations of physical documents and their design, the creation and uses of text formats, and the specialized deployment of graphical and lexical language resources, the central chapters detail how expectations for writing practices are seen from the point of view of the actors who are the expert members of the disciplinary community. By establishing this situated vantage point, the study seeks to initiate inquiry into the relationship between the assumptions made in competent members writing assessment practices and those invoked by the practices in writing pedagogy as it is viewed from the situation of the humanities-trained instructor. The claim made here is that writing approached from the actor's point-of-view has a significantly increased chance of being accepted as rational action, or practices meeting the expectations placed on it by a disciplinary community. This study suggests, finally, that we can draw on the coincidence of what is achieved with what is expected to develop criteria for response and evaluation that will reinforce both our practical and ethical reasons for teaching technical writing.
This case study explores the role of language, particularly texts, in the engineering design process. The results support a new “mediated” model of engineering design as an inventional activity in which designers use talk, written language and other symbolic representations as tools to mediate design work: to think about and think through their design process. Although graphic representations have long been recognized as important tools for design thinking, written language has not been considered central to design. Instead, traditional models of design include written texts as merely means for communicating technical content. This study, however, describes how both oral and written language served crucial functions in facilitating design invention in the design activity of a four-student team, in an innovative mechanical engineering design course at a U.S. technological university. To trace the function of symbolic representations (written, oral, and visual) in design activity, design ideas were coded for both the stage of design process addressed and type of representation used to mediate design talk (Text-mediated, Sketch-mediated, Both-mediated, Unmediated). Analysis focused on contrasts between talk about the most- and least-successful features of the team's design. {Paragraph Break} Results suggest that: (1) texts are embedded in design activity; (2) although extended talk did coincide with more frequent invention, inventing more proposals did not guarantee design success; (3) successful design was associated with using written and graphic representations together, and less successful design with using either text or sketch separately; and (4) different types of mediation were used at different times and at different stages of the design process. Qualitative analysis confirms six mediating functions previously recognized for written and graphic representations in design (Conveying ideas, Recording proposals, Pacing activity, Affording invention, Contextualizing design, Sharing visions) and identifies two new functions (Arguing for proposals and Structuring invention). {Paragraph Break} These results suggest that engineering design educators and researchers should recognize mediation as a potential marker of design success. In addition, educators in both writing and engineering need to consider that combining talk, texts, and graphic representations may help designers produce effective texts and artifacts.
The current study examined women engineering co-op students learning about engineering discourse practices in the workplace. The study included a survey of recent engineering graduates (92 men, 84 women) of Midtown University (a pseudonym), and case studies of five women Midtown engineering students enrolled in co-op during spring and summer 1997. Survey results aided in designing the case studies, which examined more closely the experiences of women co-op students in a variety of workplace environments, and who were majoring in engineering fields that have been identified as particularly attractive to women: civil, chemical, and industrial engineering. The case studies relied heavily on interviews, site visits, and writing samples. Although the survey provided useful information about the amount of time respondents believed they spent writing during co-op, the kinds of documents they wrote, and aids for learning to write, the case studies revealed the complexity of the learning process, involving the quality of the mentoring relationship between and student, the availability of sample documents to model, the presence of supportive co-workers, students' prior writing experience and disciplinary knowledge gained in school, the kinds of tasks students' are assigned during co-op, and students' engineering specialty and gender. Perhaps the most important finding was that the women studied here all believed that engineers use writing to persuade, which seems to contradict previous research suggesting that engineers do not view their writing as persuasive, but as simply presenting facts that speak for themselves. It is unclear whether or to what extent gender may have influenced the women's perceptions about engineers' use of persuasion; it is perhaps more likely that they were attracted to engineering fields and co-oped in workplaces in which persuasion was integral to the work of engineers. Future research needs to compare the perceptions of men and women engineers Across engineering specialties and workplace contexts. The study findings have implications for researchers and teachers of business and technical communication, writing in non-academic settings, experiential learning, gender studies, writing Across the curriculum, and writing in the disciplines.
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