College Writing and Beyond

A New Framework for University Writing Instruction

Anne Beaufort

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780874216592
• eBook ISBN: 9780874216639
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Composition research consistently demonstrates that the social context of writing determines the majority of conventions any writer must observe. Still, most universities organize the required first-year composition course as if there were an intuitive set of general writing "skills" usable across academic and work-world settings.

In College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction, Anne Beaufort reports on a longitudinal study comparing one student's experience in FYC, in history, in engineering, and in his post-college writing. Her data illuminate the struggle of college students to transfer what they learn about "general writing" from one context to another. Her findings suggest ultimately not that we must abolish FYC, but that we must go beyond even genre theory in reconceiving it.

Accordingly, Beaufort would argue that the FYC course should abandon its hope to teach a sort of general academic discourse, and instead should systematically teach strategies of responding to contextual elements that impinge on the writing situation. Her data urge attention to issues of learning transfer, and to developmentally sound linkages in writing instruction within and across disciplines. Beaufort advocates special attention to discourse community theory, for its power to help students perceive and understand the context of writing.

1

THE QUESTION OF UNIVERSITY WRITING INSTRUCTION

Anne: What’s your sense of yourself as a writer now, compared to four years ago?

Tim: Uh, well, shoot. Four years ago I would have said, you know, I’ve got … I don’t know … Four years ago, before taking classes here, I would have said, well that’s not really writing … realizing that … it’s not like a particular genre that qualifies as writing. Okay, now you can use style or you pay attention to this, but it’s like, you know, whenever you scribble something down, I mean anytime you sit down at the keyboard then that’s writing. Even if it’s one, two, three, four …

—Tim, senior year of college

Anne: Do think you grew as a writer?

Tim: In college? Oh yeah, yeah.

Anne: How?

Tim: Well, I grew to enjoy it and I think I enjoyed it because I was set free, and in being set free I think I found that I had some skill at it … I had occasions that were handed to me (laughs). Write! Well, might as well make this fun.

—Tim, two years after college

This book has two stories to tell: the story of Tim’s somewhat limited growth as a writer (from this researcher’s perspective) between the time he started a freshman writing class at a major US university until two years after he had graduated from school; and second, more argument than story, a case for a re-conceptualization of writing instruction at the post-secondary level. In an earlier ethnography, I examined the struggles of four writers to acclimatize themselves to the demands of writing in college and then in the workplace. Out of that work came a beginning articulation of the nature of writing expertises and a demonstration of why transfer of writing skills from one social context to another is a major issue as yet given too little attention in conceptions of writing curricula. In this work—a blended genre of both ethnography and argument—I draw on the data of a longitudinal case study of one writer bridging from high school writing instruction to freshman writing and then to writing in his two majors, history and engineering, to answer the fundamental question college administrators, college professors in disciplines other than composition studies, and business leaders ask: why graduates of freshman writing cannot produce acceptable written documents in other contexts? At the same time, for those readers who are well acquainted with the scholarship that answers that question, I provide additional empirical work and pragmatic suggestions (in the final chapter and appendices) that may aid the effort to build more coherent writing instruction at the post-secondary level. And for theorists and critics who have not focused on these issues, I hope to provide food for thought on the nature of writing expertise. I see the issues I raise here as relevant to all venues for college-level writing instruction: freshman writing programs, writing-in-the-disciplines programs, programs to train teaching assistants and tutors in teaching of writing, and writing center pedagogies.

We know that writing is a complex cognitive and social activity and that the mental processes involved as well as the contextual knowledge bases that must be tapped are enormous. Writing skill is honed over a lifetime. A ten or a fourteen-week college course in expository or argumentative writing is only a small step on the journey. But given that that step is costing universities in the US (and ultimately, taxpayers) billions of dollars in their collective budgets every year and that there are major industries (publishing, testing) associated with these programs, the question, more finely tuned is, “Could these expenditures of dollars and human capital be made more wisely?” What has recent research in literacy studies or composition studies told us about why Dick and Jane cannot write documents of use to employers or colleagues at the end of college? And how could this research be applied to re-conceptualizing writing curricula and teacher training and tutor training?

The biggest, most costly aspect of writing instruction at the post-secondary level is the compulsory writing course offered in the freshman year to most college students. Some in the field of writing instruction (Petraglia 1995) have already suggested that freshman writing as an enterprise in US institutions of higher education should just close shop: the “products” (i.e. graduates of freshman writing) are unfinished, the gains are too minute to show up in most assessment processes, and the cost–benefit ratios are too small. I have a different view based on my research, my understanding of colleagues’ research, and my reading in fields that speak to the transfer of learning problem. Freshman writing, if taught with an eye toward transfer of learning and with an explicit acknowledgement of the context of freshman writing itself as a social practice, can set students on a course of life-long learning so that they know how to learn to become better and better writers in a variety of social contexts.

You may ask what qualifies me to set such a bold agenda for a single book, based on a single case study. I make my argument humbly, with great respect for those many teachers (including those who taught Tim) who work arduously, with great dedication to their students’ growth as writers, whose insights may render my views flawed and limited. But I base my views on my own teaching of college writers, my experience mentoring teachers of writing and directing two writing programs at two universities in the US with very different student populations, my work on state-mandated assessment of writers, and my research. In the spirit of numbering my days, I am willing to take the risk to write this now. I hope that teachers, researchers, administrators, and publishers will be willing to listen and continue working with me on the agenda I set forth in this book.

Here is a road map to what follows. In the rest of this chapter I will further explain the problems with teaching writing as it is typically constructed in institutions of higher education in the US, drawing on the work of others who also name the problem in theoretical ways. I will point out the theoretical and practical implications of these problems as they extend to writing-in-the-disciplines and writing center work. In addition, I will lay out a conceptual framework for my argument and the case study analysis.

Chapter 2 describes the institutional setting for Tim’s freshman writing experience and looks at Tim’s writing, his professor’s comments on his writing and her comments on her teaching, and some of Tim’s views of his freshman writing experience. In this chapter, I demonstrate what appeared to be the real discourse community of Tim’s freshman writing class and what possibly caused some missed opportunities for furthering Tim’s writing development. In Chapter 3, I do a comparative analysis of Tim’s writing experiences in one hundred-level history courses he was taking at the same time he was enrolled in freshman writing courses. The comparison makes evident that the writing challenges in his history courses were greater than in freshman writing, as were the challenges of reading-to-write and critical thinking tasks. From the data presented in these first two chapters, the reader can begin to see why the enterprise of freshman writing, as traditionally constructed and commonly practiced, needs to be questioned further.

Chapter 4 moves further into Tim’s writing experiences in his sophomore and junior years, as he completed his coursework for the history major. This case study within a case study highlights instances of negative transfer (i.e. applying principles of writing learned in one context inappropriately in another context) and Tim’s very limited progress in learning to write in history due to a lack of any developmental path in his writing assignments from course to course. Chapter 5 offers an in-depth look at Tim’s experiences with writing for engineering his junior and senior years of college and two years later, when he had had that much experience in a small manufacturing company with writing on the job. This transition from history to engineering discourse community norms was not smooth. It required not only learning new genres and new subject matter, but also encountering a host of new rhetorical situations, new ways of thinking, and new roles as a writer. The problems Tim encountered set the transfer of learning issue in bold relief.

In Chapter 6, I return to the problem of freshman writing and its main corollary enterprises—teacher training, campus writing centers, and writing-across-the-curriculum programs—and offer a proposal for revamping the roles of these writing initiatives in higher education institutions so that the “product” is students who are expert at learning writing skills in multiple social contexts, rather than expert writers in a single context. In the Epilogue, we hear from Tim’s freshman writing teacher—her perspective on the data and what it means for her teaching now. In Appendix A, I offer some principles and curricula for teaching for transfer, i.e. helping writers to become life-long students of the craft and practice of writing. The activities and frameworks presented in this appendix, while chiefly geared to writing courses, could be readily adapted to writing-intensive courses and writing tutorial settings. Appendix B gives Samples of Tim’s writing. Appendix C gives more detail about the research methodology. But first, I return to the problem with conceptions of writing instruction at the post-secondary level.

PROBLEMS IN UNIVERSITY-LEVEL WRITING INSTRUCTION

In France and England, when I say I teach writing at the university level I am met with puzzled looks. A common response is: “Writing? Don’t university students in the US know how to write already?” Formal writing instruction in most European countries ends in high school. In the US, if I say I teach writing, the next question is, “You teach creative writing?”

And yet, I am part of an American tradition of teaching expository and argumentative writing at the university level that was started in US higher education in the late 1800s at Harvard. This enterprise now employs thousands of teachers (many part time), supports over 60 Ph.D. programs in which historical, theoretical, and classroom-based research on the teaching of writing is carried out, and represents a healthy percentage of the college textbook industry’s revenues.¹ Academic writing is one of two courses generally required of all college students (the other, a math course). Many campuses also have an upper-division writing program or writing-in-the-disciplines program as well, and a campus writing center where students can seek individualized help on writing projects.

Periodically, journalists, or politicians, or scholars critique this compulsory college level writing course. I concern myself here with the critiques of other scholars, which have generally come from two perspectives.² The first critique they make is based on social constructionism and activity theory and the related perspectives of literacy studies, genre theory, and critical theory. From these theoretical vantage points, all acts of writing—and writing instruction—are viewed as socially situated human activities. Writing literacy is a form of political and social capital. Genres perform social functions. Writers assume subject positions and political positions through the genres they employ.

This leads to a critique of freshman writing that goes something like this: because it is a compulsory course, taught in isolation from other disciplinary studies at the university as a basic skills course, this social context leads freshman writing to become a course in “writing to produce writing” (Dias 2000), or to “do school” (Russell 1995). For the majority of students, freshman writing is not a precursor to a writing major. It is an isolated course, an end in itself, a general education requirement to be gotten out of the way. If taught within an English department, or by teachers who are primarily trained in English or comparative literature, students may perceive it as an English course, and yet the course is often a poor step-child to literature courses in English or comparative literature departments and usually suffers the same isolationist lack of intellectual and social moorings.

But why does this lack of institutional grounding for freshman writing matter? Because usually there is no overt linking of the course to any intellectual discipline (even the disciplines of Rhetoric or Composition Studies are usually not invoked in freshman writing), the over-riding social context for students becomes the institutional requirement of the course itself. So writing papers is perceived by students as an activity to earn a grade rather than to communicate to an audience of readers in a given discourse community and papers are commodified into grades, grades into grade reports, grade reports into transcripts, etc. This condition is a serious detriment to motivating writers and to teaching writers to be sensitive to authentic social contexts for writing. This condition also misleads students into thinking writing is a generic skill that, once learned, becomes a “one size fits all” intellectual garb. This in turn leads to misappropriation of principles taught in the course in other contexts where some of those principles are not helpful, or, as cognitive psychologists would say, negative transfer of learning occurs.

On the other hand, no course, no writing situation is without a social context.³ Given the backgrounds of those who typically teach writing courses and their interests in literature, creative writing, or cultural studies, students in writing courses are most often schooled in the discourse community norms and genres associated with literary studies or cultural studies or journalism (especially the sub-set of creative non-fiction). If students begin to learn some of the literacy practices of these discourse communities, there is some benefit. But what leaves students short-changed as they move into other course work and fields is that the particular discourse community (or communities) in which the teacher is situating himself or herself is not made explicit. And this leads to the second issue with a generic skills course in writing: the transfer of learning issue.

Most teachers of writing think of themselves as generalists. The particular institutional context of their classes and the future endeavors of their students are of less concern than the challenges of equipping students with basic skills. But research in composition studies and linguistic anthropology and literacy studies in the last 30 years has shown there is really no viable commodity called “general writing skills” once one gets beyond the level of vocabulary, spelling, grammar and sentence syntax (and some would argue that even at the sentence level, writing is specific to particular discourse communities’ needs).⁴ McCarthy’s landmark study documented how little a student may gain from a generic writing skills course. Others have repeatedly documented over and over the context-specific expectations about what counts as “good writing” (Bazerman 1982, Berkenkotter et al.1988, Brandt 1990, Canagarajah 1997, Fahnestock and Secor 1991, Faigley and Hansen 1985, Heath 1983) Writing standards are largely cultural and socially specific. And yet, novice writers usually get little instruction in how to study and acquire the writing practices of different discourse communities.

Russell (1995) explains the problem with the assumption that there exists a set of “general writing skills” by drawing a sports analogy: it is as if there were a course in general ball handling that were intended to teach skills applicable to playing jacks, tennis, baseball, and soccer. Given the way freshman writing is typically taught, graduates of these courses could easily think the standards for writing they have been given in freshman writing are universal. They are ill-prepared to examine, question, or understand the literacy standards of discourse communities they are encountering in other disciplines, in the work world, or in other social spheres they participate in. This can result in negative transfer of learning: what worked for a freshman writing essay is inappropriately applied to writing in history, or social sciences, or the sciences or in business. The student must learn, through failed attempts at such transfer of supposed “general” writing skills, how to adapt to the standards and purposes for writing in new discourse communities. And there is significant documentation of students’ inabilities, unassisted, to grasp these discourse community differences that affect writers’ roles and the texts produced.⁵

In addition to these overriding problems—the inexplicit, or isolated social context of most generic writing courses that teach one way of writing (useful in freshman writing, and somewhat in literature, journalism, or comparative literature courses), rather than teaching a set of tools for analyzing and learning writing standards and practices in multiple contexts, i.e. to facilitate transfer of learning—there are other concrete problems with the typical curriculum in freshman writing. As part of the lack of clarity about what discourse community or communities freshman writing is within or attempting to approximate, there is the problem of a subject matter to write about within the context of a particular discourse community’s values and standards. Even textual or rhetorical or literary analyses of texts—common assignments in freshman writing—are often conducted without students having solid grounding in the subject matter of the texts being analyzed and the discourse communities these texts come from. So again, the writing is being analyzed without examining how subject matter, rhetorical occasion, and discourse community context interact. It is a commonly held belief that the only subject of generic writing courses is “writing,” and yet students read and write on a variety of subjects without attention to the effect of a given subject matter on written expression.

Kaufer and Young (1993) point out, writing with “no content in particular” wrongly assumes “pretty much the same skills of writing will develop no matter what content is chosen” (p. 78). In contrast to this position, Kaufer and Young highlight what the relationship of subject matter to development of writing skills is: (a) a language act is a composite of form and meaning; (b) subject matter constrains writing, that is, it is not simply a passive environment; and (c) subject matter makes a significant difference in the particular writing skills that get learned (p. 83).

Some teachers of freshman writing offer a smorgasbord of readings on a variety of topics from week to week, which keeps the level of engagement with ideas and information more superficial (Dias 2002). Others let students choose their own subjects to research and write about across a semester. At best, if the curriculum is laid out in either of these ways, the teacher can only sit on the intellectual sidelines of the subject matter the student is exploring, asking questions a generalist would ask.⁶ And if a writing course is theme-based, with readings focused on a single intellectual topic, as is the case in the data I will present here, it is n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Tables and Figures
• Chapter 1 - The Question of University Writing Instruction
• Chapter 2 - The Dilemmas of Freshman Writing
• Chapter 3 - Freshman Writing and First Year History Courses
• Chapter 4 - Learning To Write History
• Chapter 5 - Switching Gears: From History Writing to Engineering
• Chapter 6 - New Directions for University Writing Instruction
• Epilogue: Ten Years Later
• Appendix A: From Research to Practice: Some Ideas for Writing Instruction
• Appendix B: Samples of Tim’s Essays
• Appendix C: The Research Methodology
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About The Author