Cross-Curricular Underlife: A Collaborative Report on Ways with Academic Words

Abstract

We five students and one teacher began this project in an independent study group in the quarter after our writing course for well-prepared freshmen. As we observed how students and teachers used language and valued specific language interactions in courses across the curriculum, it became clear to all of us that the relation between any language process and learning at the freshman level differs, in important ways, from the single image of that contained our course in college writing. As observers and collaborators, we encountered many classroom cultures that defined both learning and academic literacy very differently than our writing course had. The discourse community defined in composition was rarely reproduced later because students and teachers in other introductorylevel courses operated in two very separate and often conflicting rhetorical worlds. These worlds diverged in their views of appropriate uses of language-including talk and listening as well as reading and writing-because students and teachers often imagined their roles, and each other, from opposing views of what counted as teaching or learning. Students taught themselves how to fit their expectations to the values they encountered, while teachers remained distant from student learning processes. We found that language-as-learning varies according to the size, level, content, and evaluation systems in different courses. To demonstrate this, our project describes student motives for taking a wide range of courses, formal course requirements, student decisions about what these requirements meant,