Teaching Writing in the Disciplines: Student Perspectives on Learning Genre

Mary Goldschmidt

doi:10.20343/teachlearninqu.2.2.25

Abstract

Writing in the Disciplines curricula can both challenge and reinforce assumptions that writing is a general skill that students will already have learned prior to doing the specialized writing in their chosen field of study. Rhetorical genre studies, however, tends to emphasize the situated nature of writing expertise, and thus supports the exploration of more sustained and varied forms of writing instruction in higher education. This article reports on a qualitative study that gave priority to a rich source of pedagogical insight: student writers themselves. In-depth interviews and surveys were used to examine the pedagogical practices and curricular experiences identified by students as being most helpful in developing undergraduate expertise in their discipline’s research genre. These student-centered descriptions of successful genre learning point the way toward curricular and instructional models that emphasize the intellectual, affective, and relational nature of writing.

Highlights

It is a commonplace in writing research that written communication is a social competency as much as it is a cognitive skill, many faculty members continue to ask why their students haven’t “learned to write” prior to entering their classes
I purposely chose to work with seniors who had, arrived at stage three, and I intentionally selected departments whose faculty members view their courses as places of “learning to write.”3 I wanted to expand the portion of Thaiss and Zawacki’s study that looked at what students “say about how they learn to write in their disciplines” (p. 96)
Their specific focus was on the difficulties created when students are “welcomed into the academy by the rhetoric of widening participation, but at the same time denied an adequate participation by taken- for-granted assumptions about academic conventions” (p. 66)

Summary

A B S T RAC T

Writing in the Disciplines curricula can both challenge and reinforce assumptions that writing is a general skill that students will already have learned prior to doing the specialized writing in their chosen field of study. In-depth interviews and surveys were used to examine the pedagogical practices and curricular experiences identified by students as being most helpful in developing undergraduate expertise in their discipline’s research genre. These student-centered descriptions of successful genre learning point the way toward curricular and instructional models that emphasize the intellectual, affective, and relational nature of writing. K EY WORDS genre, writing in the disciplines, academic literacy, psychology, computer science

INTRODUCTION

Design and Statistical Analysis

Findings

CONCLUSION