I wish I had read this article years ago to combat a faculty member’s assertions that as English writing instructors we are not qualified or capable of teaching writing outside our discipline. The faculty insisted that we should only teach within our disciplines. However, my position, and the department’s and university’s positions, relies on English faculty’s ability to apply discipline-specific rhetoric and genres to general, multidiscipline writing courses.
Michael Carter maintains that faculty outside a discipline can teach writing within a discipline. Writing within a discipline is the writing specific to particular discipline, “a process of slow acculturation through various apprenticeship discourses” (385). Individuals within the discipline learn through carefully guided instruction and practice the methods necessary for communicating in acceptable and predictable methods governed by that discipline.
Carter explains historically how writing within the discipline began to give way to writing outside the disciplines when university focus began to turn to teaching freshman composition as specific treatments for poor writing skills of entering students—the responsibility for writing, left the disciplines and found place in English departments outside the other disciplines.
Carter explains that the distinction he draws “between writing outside and writing inside the disciplines is the difference between knowledge and knowing, that is disciplines are repositories and delivery systems for relatively static content knowledge versus disciplines as active ways of knowing. Some psychologists describe this distinction as declarative or conceptual knowledge on the one hand and procedural or process knowledge on the other, the difference between knowing that and knowing how” (387). Therefore declarative/conceptual knowledge is knowing that, and procedural/process knowledge is knowing how.
Carter then applies knowing to doing—how particular disciplines “do” their writing as a manifestation of how they demonstrate knowledge. “Because doing plays a central role in this conception of writing in the disciplines, it may be helpful to understand disciplinary ways of doing and the connection between knowing and writing” (386).
“It is this relationship among knowing, doing, and writing that is concealed by the disciplinary focus on conceptual knowledge. Doing is the middle term that links writing and knowing in the disciplines. Thus, the challenge in reframing the disciplines as ways of knowing, doing, and writing is to find a means of describing in convincing terms the ways of doing that characterize the disciplines, convincing, that is, to faculty and students in the disciplines” (386).
Carter explains through his university’s program outcomes necessary for ongoing accreditation and assessment, departments and faculty establish outcomes or what students must “do” demonstrate competence within the discipline. “Doing enacts the knowing through students’ writing, and the writing gives shape to the ways of knowing and doing in a discipline. So instead of focusing only on the conceptual knowledge that has traditionally defined the disciplines, faculty are encouraged to focus also on what their students should be able to do, representing largely in their writing. Having faculty identify disciplinary ways of doing and then assess them through students’ writing is a step toward situating writing in, not outside, the disciplines” (391).
Carter explores approaches to express how disciplines know, do, and write. The three chief approaches include individual disciplines, metagenre, and metadiscipline. Individual disciplines establish program outcomes of what students should do. Metagenre “implies categories of knowing, doing, and writing that cut across disciplines but may be inflected differently in different disciplines and in different contexts” (394). And metadiscipline suggests “that disciplines themselves may be grouped according to common ways of knowing, doing, and writing” (394).
Carter establishes four metagenres in academic writing:
•problem solving
•empirical inquiry
•research from sources
•performance
Problem solving asks students to “identify, define, and analyze a problem. . . ; determine what information is appropriate to solving the problem and then find it. . . ; offer a range of potential solutions according to the establish criteria, choose the most viable solution, and make a convincing case for that solution” (395).
Metagenres and acts of doing for problem solving include, business plans, feasibility reports, management plans, marketing plans, reports to management, project reports, project proposals, technical memoranda, and technical reports (396).
Multidisciplines for problem solving include: accounting, agricultural and resource economics, animal science, business management, engineering, food science, forestry management, mathematics, and psychology.
Empirical inquiry “consists of answering questions by drawing conclusions from systematic investigation based on empirical data” (396). To accomplish empirical inquiry students are to “ask pertinent questions about [a subject]. . .; apply deliberate and thorough observational skills to conduct experiments and collect data; organize and summarize data and present them in a way that is accurate and comprehensible in both verbal and graphical forms; and interpret data and draw conclusions that allow the students to support or refute hypotheses and make a case for alternative hypotheses” (397).
Metagenres and actions of doing for empirical inquiry include laboratory report, poster, poster presentation, research proposal, research report, scientific article, and scientific presentation (398).
Multidisciplines for empirical inquiry “reside in the sciences, both natural and social, such as anthropology, biology, chemistry, geology, microbiology, political science, and sociology” (405)
Research from sources has two primary distinguishing characteristics: “(1) the kind of research that is done, that is not, not based on data gathered from independent observations but largely on sources that have their origins elsewhere; and (2) the goal of the research, which typically does not have extrinsic value, such as solving practical problems or investigating hypotheses, but value that is intrinsic to the discipline” (398). Generally research from sources “pose an interesting research question about [a subject]; locate relevant primary and secondary sources for investigating a research question; critically evaluate primary and secondary sources in terms of credibility, authenticity, interpretative stance, audience, potential biases, and value for answering the research question; and marshall the evidence from the research to support an. . . . argument for an answer to a research question” (398)
Metagenres and actions of doing for research form sources principally are research papers. However, Carter maintains that different disciplines have different purposes behind their research papers. For instance in literature research the goal is “to enable students to read and understand literature from historical, cultural, and theoretical perspectives” (400).
Metadisciplines for research from sources include history, literature, multidisciplinary studies, philosophy, religious studies, gender studies, and humanities.
Performance denotes both the “act and the resulting object of a performance, but particularly the primacy of the object as evidence of success in learning to perform the act, doing the performance” (400).
Metagenres and actions doing for research from sources does include fine arts performances; additionally, but it also applies to rhetoric and writing: “In rhetoric, writing, and language, the focus is mainly on written performance including such genres. . . as documentation, editorials, feature articles, news stories, proposals, and technical reports, but also certain media such as PowerPoint presentations and websites” (402). Metagenre for performance also includes assessment documents such as “the artifact, a portfolio of artifacts, and the critique” (406).
Metadisciplines for performance include architecture, art and design, graphic design, industrial design , landscape architecture, and language, writing, and rhetoric.
Carter concludes: “By questioning the strict boundaries that mark off the disciplines one from another, postdisciplinarity also implicitly questions the assumed disjunction between the specialized knowledge of a discipline and the generalized knowledge of writing: the former is not so special; the latter is not so general. It may be, then, that writing is located neither fully in nor fully outside the disciplines because disciplinary boundaries themselves are porous and in flux; the disciplines are not fixed containers at all. Projecting the disciplines as ways of knowing, doing, and writing tends to emphasize not disjunction but junction, the intersections of disciplines, the connection between research and teaching, and the ties between writing and knowing. From this perspective, it is not so much writing in our outside but writing of the disciplines” (410).
Carter, Michael. "Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines." College Composition and Communication 58.1 (2007): 385-418.
No comments:
Post a Comment