Negotiating Expertise in Disciplinary �Contact Zones�

Abstract

This essay argues that the challenges we face in promoting WAC or WID initiatives in engineering stem in large measure from conceptions of expertise that divorce mastery of domain content from rhetorical process. It considers what we might gain by foregrounding the rhetorical or negotiated dimensions of expertise, especially as that negotiation becomes apparent in disciplinary “contact zones.” Various curricular avenues for highlighting this interest are examined, and its complementary role to existing courses is stressed. Although expertise has its own complex political and economic dimensions, ABET’s new accreditation criteria offer added impetus to use the negotiation of expertise to curricular advantage. In a culture both obsessed with and skeptical toward experts, we seem to agree on this much: the “real” experts are scientists, doctors, and engineers. While scientists and doctors hone their expertise through years of postgraduate work until they are formally licensed by their elders, engineers are virtually alone in having their expertise certified professionally at the undergraduate level. This focus on professionally certifiable engineering expertise, in the context of an undergraduate education, may help us understand why the engineering curriculum is often perceived as the most challenging arena for projects encouraging writing across the curriculum (WAC) or, for that matter, writing in the disciplines (WID). This essay argues that the challenges we face in promoting WAC or WID initiatives in an engineering context stem in large measure from competing conceptions of expertise. As we seek to help students communicate across and beyond the engineering disciplines, our efforts (under whatever curricular model) are shaped by at least two cultures: a distinctive culture of disciplinary expertise within the engineering professions