Writing in the Disciplines

Using National Study of Writing Instruction data as a baseline, I examine typical practices of writing in math and posit a theoretical framework, a blueprint for writing in math, that has potential for achieving Applebee’s vision for knowledge-in-action, using writing to transform learning and deepen student understanding of math content as well as fostering engagement with the essential conversations of the math discipline.

This article reports on a case study of a Writing in the Disciplines intervention for doctoral students in science education held at Coventry University in May 2010. Differences between this event and previous ones are described, including the use of an online writing peer review system. Issues that emerged during discussions on the day and the performance of the online writing review system are presented. An evaluation of the event is described. A discussion is provided on the importance of developing social communities in writing, the effectiveness of supporting them with an online writing peer review system and the tensions created by the provision of subject specialist feedback alongside generic writing specialist feedback. Conclusions are drawn for the design of future writing training events.

This poem was written for a collection of expressions for and memories of Art Young, put together by the staff of the Pearce Center for Professional Communication for Art Young, Campbell Chair of Technical Communication and Professor of English at Clemson University. Art retired emeritus at the end of 2008, but has recently come back to share his wisdom in a few projects, including my new Writing in the Disciplines (WID) Initiative at Clemson University. I reproduce this poem here to honor him and his career of teaching students (and faculty) to think and write critically and creatively--"across and (using poetry) against the curriculum." Art, this one is for you.

"This study gathers and interprets the earliest extant references to architects in ancient Greek philosophy, as found in select works of Plato and Aristotle.  Throughout this review, Plato and Aristotle [are] shown to consistently present architectonic agents as exemplary civic and intellectual leaders, acting in awareness of their own (and others’) limits, with knowledge of the most appropriate archē, and with a view to the most comprehensive aims—the common good. This discloses an alternative and more accurate etymology of architects: not as master-builders but as leaders and makers of beginnings (archai). The aim of this essay has been not only to rediscover the discursive beginnings for a renewed philosophy of architecture, but to suggest how these philosophical 'archai' might help present-day architects reimagine the full relevance of their still contested role."

WRDS 350 is an advanced scholarly research and writing course that allows students to build on their existing knowledge of academic research and writing practices by studying specific features of scholarly writing relevant to their own interests and disciplines. As practices of generating knowledge, all scholarly discourse is part of an ongoing exchange of ideas-a communal process of discursive inquiry, more about questions than answers. But different disciplines and fields of inquiry ask different kinds of questions in different ways for different reasons and with different objectives. They also formulate their questions, responses, and arguments differently (though sometimes in superficially similar forms/genres): different fields of inquiry have different assumptions and expectations about what constitutes knowledge, what evidence is relevant and of value, and what sources of evidence and information are credible. Forms of discourse and communication are forms of thinking.

Time is a product of the human mind, and it does not exist in a real sense. Perception of time varies from time to time and from space to space; it has never had a single apprehension. It is the human experience that gives time a sense. At this point, Tilly's definition of time might be useful: Time is an invention, the humanly-negotiated concordance of two or more sequences, sequences whatsoever. No single sequence establishes a time, and no time exists outside of human convention. Despite its appearance of superhuman reality, time reeks of culture; it centers on shared understandings about relationships among sequences. Time, therefore, changes as shared understandings and choices of sequences change. 1

Discourse-based interviews (or DBIs) have long been used in writing research to investigate writers’ tacit genre knowledge, including their rhetorical motivations for sentence-level wordings. Meanwhile, researchers in English for Academic and Specific Purposes (EAP/ESP) have used corpus techniques to uncover patterns of such wordings, ones that index community-valued ways of knowing and meaning. This article brings together these two methods in a novel way. By offering a case study of Richard, an advanced undergraduate writer majoring in philosophy at a U.S. university, the article demonstrates how systematic analysis of Richard’s writing informed and enriched DBIs with him and his professor, Maria. Specifically, corpus-based text analysis revealed that Richard regularly expressed an epistemic stance in his course essays in ways that are conventional and valued in philosophical argumentation, while the DBIs revealed that neither Richard nor Maria were consciously aware of these stance patterns, despite regular appearance in both their writing. Taken together, these findings point to the value of using corpus techniques prior to the DBI to identify meaningful choices in language that likely otherwise would be missed. The findings also raise important questions about the acquisition of disciplinary discourses and the sources of knowledge that foster that acquisition.

Developed from presentations at the 2018 International Writing Across the Curriculum conference, this collection documents a key moment in the history of WAC, foregrounding connection and diversity as keys to the sustainability of the WAC movement in the face of new and long-standing challenges. Contributors reflect on the history and ongoing evolution of WAC, honoring grassroots efforts while establishing a more unified structure of collaborative leadership and mentorship. The chapters in this collection offer a rich variety of practices, pedagogies, mindsets, and methodologies for readers who are invested in using writing in a wide range of institutional and disciplinary contexts. Boldly engaging such pressing topics as translingualism, anti-racism, emotional labor, and learning analytics, the 18 chapters collected here testify to WAC's durability, persistence, and resilience in an ever-changing educational landscape.

The current study drew on evolving theories of transfer, with a
particular interest in studying writing-related transfer. Major
theories of transfer come from several perspectives: behaviorist,
cognitive, dispositional, curricular, and sociocultural. Each of
these perspectives has made a contribution to the concept of
transfer and the terminology used to describe it in the teaching of
writing. The terminology is important to consider because when
learning composition skills, students also have to learn to translate
the academic jargon embedded in the description of the task in
order to determine how to approach it (Nelms and Dively 215).
The terms are clues to the worldview of the scholars involved in
constructing a given conception of writing.

Conference: Fourth Biennial Conference on Threshold Concepts: From personal practice to communities of practice, At Trinity College, Dublin, 2012

The workshop will first report and comment on the outcomes of preliminary explorations into the application of threshold concepts theory undertaken in collaboration with learners and subject lecturers at a large central London university. In particular, the outcomes of one pilot case study will be used to illustrate how these collaborations might inform approaches to developing student writing, as well as engaging learners with threshold concepts in potentially generative ways.

Participants in the workshop will then be encouraged to undertake a number of activities that mirror these explorations. At various points in the workshop, I will describe approaches that seek to encourage learners and subject lecturers to use text analysis to investigate not only the language features of threshold concepts and ways of thinking in their disciplines, but also the associated transformations in discourse that arise from threshold concept understanding (Land and Meyer, 2003; 2005). The purpose of this approach is threefold: to facilitate conceptual, paradigmatic change in learners; to develop their ability to engage with, and participate in, disciplinary discourses; and to inform Threshold Concept research and practice.

The language features of discourse shifts associated with threshold concepts acquisition appear under-researched outside of the discourse analysis proposed in Land and Meyer’s 2003 paper (p.4). Similarly, the undertaking of literacy development practices through the lens of threshold concepts is under-reported. Threshold Concepts as a field of enquiry and practice might therefore be successfully informed by text and discourse analysis methods developed in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Academic Literacies and Academic Writing. Importantly, the possibility that learners might acquire threshold concept understanding through certain methods of discourse or text analysis (as vehicles for learning) remains under-researched. The implications for pedagogic practice and perspectives on developing student writing will be concurrent themes of the workshop.

'Threshold concept literacy’: helping learners develop writing skills and acquire threshold concept understanding through examining associated transformations in discourse. - ResearchGate. Available from: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/259991626_'Threshold_concept_literacy_helping_learners_develop_writing_skills_and_acquire_threshold_concept_understanding_through_examining_associated_transformations_in_discourse [accessed Oct 3, 2015].

Im Kapitel Wissenschaft und Studium erlernen Sie Handwerkstechniken der Wissensaneignung. Sie werden befähigt, Lernprozesse und die damit in Verbindung stehenden Anforderungen einzuschätzen und eine effektive Studien-und Arbeitsmethodik zu entwickeln. Dadurch werden Sie in die Lage versetzt, die aus dem Studium erwachsenden Anforderungen durch Anwendung verschiedener Lernarten und das Lernmanagement besser zu bestehen. Nach Abschluss des Moduls kennen Sie die Grundlagen des Bologna-Systems sowie die Bedeutung und Anwendung der Studienordnung. In diesem Kapitel setzen Sie sich mit dem Lernprozess auseinander. Ihnen werden die Aufgaben eines Studierenden genauso verdeutlicht wie Lernarten und Tipps für ein erfolgreiches Studium. Vertiefend lernen Sie Arbeitsmethoden kennen und beschäftigen sich mit der Technik des Lernmanagements als gewinnbringendes Element für Ihren Studienalltag. Ergänzend zur Studien-und Lernmethodik setzt das Modul auf die Vermittlung von strukturellen Kenntnissen des Bologna-Systems, der Studienorganisation und Studienordnung. Die folgenden Punkte stellen die Essenz des Kapitels dar. Diese Aspekte sollten Sie verinnerlichen und anwenden können. Effektives Lernen und Studieren Selbst-und Zeitmanagement Arbeitsmethoden und -techniken Studienordnung richtig lesen und verstehen Bologna Merkmale und Bologna verstehen Lernziele Lehrinhalte Wissenswegweiser Wissenschaft und Studium 2 Mehr Informationen zum Bologna-System folgen am Ende.

The expression of stance--defined broadly as expression of attitudes, epistemic judgments, and interactional involvement--is increasingly recognized as an important, though hidden, feature of both expert and student academic writing, one with potentially “much impact on the success of writing” (Wingate, 2012, p. 147). The study this article reports is motivated by the question of whether there are stance-taking qualities in undergraduate students' coursework writing that, in addition to being valued within specific course contexts, are valued across contexts. Specifically, it presents results from a corpus-based comparative analysis of stance in high- and low-graded papers written in two distinct undergraduate courses at a university in the United States. The investigation reveals both contextual specificity and overlap across the HG papers. It shows that the HG papers in both courses expressed stance with significantly greater frequency than the corresponding LG papers and in ways that project greater contrastiveness, critical distance, and positive alignment with disciplinary concepts. These three stance qualities, I suggest, are a part of a general novice academic stance that may be implicitly expected in students' coursework writing across a range of contexts, especially formal assignments calling for “critical analysis” and evidence-based argumentation.

This dissertation project examines patterns of stance in essays written by high- and low-performing students in two upper-level undergraduate courses, one in political theory and the other in economics. It employs methods of linguistic discourse analysis, drawing largely on Appraisal Theory (a subset of Systemic Functional Linguistics), in combination with methods from corpus linguistics and theoretical insights from rhetorical genre studies. It examines how recurring patterns of stance in students' essays correspond to the goals and assessment criteria for writing in the courses, as revealed through interviews with the instructors and analysis of selected course material. Through this robust set of analytic approaches, the study aims to make explicit patterns of stance in student writing that correlate with high- and low-graded essays and with the disciplinary contexts. The broader aim is to render explicit patterns of interpersonal meanings constructed in students' texts that construe such abstract qualities as critical reasoning, complexity and nuance in argumentation, and control of the discourse—features identified by the instructors as valued in student writing. The study contributes to the field of composition and rhetoric by pinpointing discursive resources that enable some student writers to construct more discipline-congruent styles of argumentation than others. Specific findings show that, while the two essay assignments require different ways of using language to construct valued stances, the high-performing writers in both contexts more consistently construct a "novice academic" stance while the low-performing writers more consistently construct a "student" stance. The former is marked by the rhetorical qualities of contrastiveness, dialogic control, critical distance, and discoursal alignment, or assimilation of the disciplinary discourse. In contrast, the “student” stance is marked by frequent personalizing moves, repeated references to the classroom discourse, and comparatively infrequent use of discursive resources that construe the rhetorical qualities listed above. These findings have implications for instruction in writing in the disciplines (WID) contexts, specifically in terms of how instructors can refine their metalanguage about writing for discussing stance with students explicitly and in detail.

Expressing an authorial stance in contextually valued ways may be
especially challenging for English as a Second Language (L2) writers (in addition, certainly, to many L1 writers), as the subtle ways that writers in the disciplines go about evaluating evidence and positioning the reader toward their views are largely tacit and therefore not often made explicit to students. In response to this problem, this chapter discusses ways that writing specialists can assist faculty in the disciplines to become explicitly aware of stance expressions in their students’ writing. Drawing on analysis of student writing in two disciplinary contexts (political theory and economics) as well as interviews with the course instructors, I offer examples of stance features that appear to be valued in these two contexts even though they run below the instructors’ fully conscious awareness. I then discuss ways that disciplinary faculty can be assisted to identify these features explicitly. The larger goal of this chapter is to argue for a way of reading students’ disciplinary writing that is sensitive to the details of stance-taking and to the language related problems that many students experience when writing in the disciplines.

Simandan D (2005) "New Ways in Geography" Timisoara, Editura Universitatii de Vest/ West University Press, 230 pp.

The first part of the volume - "Old Ways" - addresses the question whether geography as we know it is worth keeping. The first chapter argues that traditional scientific disciplines are not as bad as we sometimes like to think they are. This argument is then deployed in the second chapter to investigate whether geography specifically is worth keeping. The chapter concludes that even if we admit a Cinderella status for geography among the disciplines, this aspect brings some secondary benefits out of which a rejuvenated geography can emerge. The second part of the book – "New Ways" – discusses some lines of flight towards this rejuvenated geography. Given the editorial constraints, I selected three possible new ways on which I have started to work lately. Thus, chapter three explores the stakes of an engagement between geography and metaphysics in the analytic tradition, chapter four makes some suggestions about how to understand the relativity of norms in geographical practice, and chapter five brings together two case studies that help explain why we need to pay sustained attention to the vicious logic of epistemic neglect.

The main concern of this research was assisting postgraduate students when they write in the disciplines. Therefore, the efficacy of some ideas for supervising novice writers in Geotechnical Engineering were qualitatively investigated. To meet the research objective, a series of supervisory sessions that were done in Google Docs were observed and the interactions between the supervisor and the supervisee were thoroughly analyzed. This study showed that online tools such as Google Docs could facilitate learning to write in Geotechnical Engineering through comparing good writing samples and supervisor-student discussion. These activities led to discovering genre features and developing better understanding of the revising stage. This study suggests that using Google Docs to facilitate the interactions between supervisors and supervisees could improve the fluency and the content of writing in the disciplines. Such breakthroughs introduced a new dimension in supervising student writers.

En este capítulo nos proponemos definir los retos actuales del estudio de la alfabetización académica analizan- do su carácter situado, social e interdisciplinar y su impacto en las situaciones educativas que se promueven en la universidad. Esta caracterización no ha empezado a ser ampliamente aceptada por la comunidad científica hasta los últimos veinte años y es, por tanto, heredera de tradiciones teóricas y epistemológicas anteriores. En primer lugar haremos un repaso al estado actual de la investigación en escritura académica situando geográfi- ca, conceptual y epistemológicamente los enfoques predominantes. En un segundo momento analizaremos las implicaciones educativas de estos enfoques haciendo especial énfasis en el rol de los centros de escritura como agentes dinamizadores de la renovación en las prácticas de escritura y de alfabetización académica en contextos anglosajones. Finalmente, analizaremos el estado de la cuestión en el contexto español y daremos cuenta de al- gunas iniciativas de investigación recientes que tienen por objetivo avanzar en nuestro conocimiento acerca de las prácticas de alfabetización académica en nuestro contexto y sensibilizar a la comunidad universitaria de los retos a los que se enfrentan profesores y estudiantes.
Para citar este artículo: Castelló, M. (2014). Los retos actuales de la alfabetización académica: estado de la cuestión y últimas investigaciones. Enunciación, 19(2), 346-365.

Geography means earth writing, and so it is perhaps fitting that writing itself has become a primary intellectual battleground in contemporary geographical thought. This paper advocates for metaphorical earth writing, arguing that it unchains our geographical imaginations from the shackles of our disciplinary past by boldly embracing geopoetics. I hope to spark debate by promoting the un-disciplining of geography as a means to open up a theoretical space for voice, where a material space of emancipation might follow. The notion that our epistemological, ontological, and methodological choices are not apolitical decisions without consequence guides my inquiry. Accordingly I critique the accusation of esotericism as a narrative that reifies the false dichotomy between academia and society. Aversion to metaphor fails to recognize the epistemological challenge it raises and underestimates how jargon combats commonsense notions that reinforce hierarchical power relations. How we write the earth constitutes a political choice, where disciplining others into a singular way of knowing, being, and doing geography is an affront to the possibilities of space. When we make space for earth writing as a beautiful flourishing of geopoetics, we place the earth at the center of experience, releasing the light and energy of a more powerful geography.

As academic disciplines have advanced the integration of disciplines interdisciplinary collaborative structures have become increasingly important and desired. In particular, wholly interdisciplinary disciplines such as environmental science have developed representing a growing class of emergent sciences. Yet interdisciplinary work presents some very real challenges to cherished academic traditions, including the way writing and communication in and across the disciplines are taught. A primary challenge is that interdisciplinary work is entangled in social, political, and public concerns, and greatly distanced from the ideals of an imagined fundamental and apolitical science. This dissertation presents research on some of the common communicative barriers that emerge when professionals from divergent disciplines collaborate to address applied public concerns, such as sustainability. Some of the primary barriers that emerge in interdisciplinary work include discrepancies rooted in divergent disciplinary frameworks, divergent methodological frameworks, divergent beliefs about the social context of research, disagreements regarding disciplinary terminology, and inequities rooted in the design and management of collaborations. A central cause of these communicative barriers that emerge in interdisciplinary work is the absence of a rhetorical dialogue. Without a rhetorical dialogue, this dissertation shows, collaborators act more or less  within their own disciplinary framework, which impedes the ability to collaborate effectively. This dissertation contributes to ongoing work in disciplinary writing research by revealing how cherished practices in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) may serve to reinforce disciplinary assumptions that impede interdisciplinary work. This dissertation concludes with suggestions for utilizing existing rhetorical theories such as activity systems theory, conceptual metaphor theory, genre awareness pedagogy, and the analysis of hybrid forums to provide an improved rhetoric curriculum for professionals that will participate in interdisciplinary work. The dissertation also suggests ways that WPAs can use interest in innovation, leadership, and critical thinking to promote this type of rhetoric curriculum.

Resumen En este texto introductorio del monográfico se definen algunos de los conceptos fundamentales que se relacionan con el constructo de escritura académica. En primer lugar, el concepto de género y su relación con el de sistema de actividad, lo que permite abordar desde un punto de vista dinámico el discurso en los entornos universitarios. A continuación, se discuten las diferentes aportaciones que se han ocupado de la clasificación de los géneros en el ámbito académico universitario lo que permite esbozar una propuesta que sirva de marco integrador para organizar la actividad de escribir y los géneros que se producen en la universidad en esferas discursivas que otorguen sentido y significado a las prácticas de escritura de los estudiantes. En tercer lugar, se ofrecen algunas reflexiones sobre el uso y la enseñanza de los géneros en la docencia universitaria desde la perspectiva apuntada en los apartados anteriores. En la segunda parte del texto se presentan los artículos que forman este monográfico y que ofrecen una panorámica variada y complementaria de las aportaciones actuales en el ámbito de la escritura académica tanto en contextos españoles y latinoamericanos como europeos. A estas aportaciones hay que sumarle la revisión y síntesis de las aproximaciones teóricas, los métodos y los resultados de los movimientos Writing Across Curriculum y Writing In the Disciplines en los EEUU.
Para citar este artículo:
Camps, A. (2013). La escritura académica en la universidad. REDU: Revista de Docencia Universitaria, 11(1), 17.

Abstract In this introduction of the Special Issue, some key concepts related to the notion of academic writing are discussed. Firstly, the concept of genre is revised and its relationships with the more broad notion of activity system, which allows for a dynamic approach of discourse and its study in university contexts. Secondly, genre classification proposals in higher education are reviewed and discussed focusing on their contributions and limitations. Based on this review, a new proposal for genre organization is presented, which could act as an integrative framework to organize writing activity and genres in discursive spheres making meaning of the students' writing practices. Thirdly, some recommendations are provided regarding the teaching and learning of writing at university, based on the theoretical perspective developed in previous sections. In the second part of the article, the contributions of the Special Issue are presented. These contributions offer a varied and complementary picture of current

In an increasingly interconnected world, learning how to think anthropologically-learning how to think with difference-should be an essential part of the process of higher education. Yet many students may never take a single anthropology course during their undergraduate career. In such a milieu, it is important for anthropologists to both teach and actively participate in the curriculum design of the first-year writing seminars that are part of the core curriculum of many universities and colleges globally. While first-year writing programs predominate in the United States and the United Kingdom, they are growing internationally as well, particularly in liberal arts institutions. In this article, I argue that anthropologists should teach first-year writing seminars at their educational institutions for three reasons: first, anthropology as a discipline is ecumenical about evidence; thus, it introduces students to a wide range of evidentiary practices early on. This broad-based understanding of evidence facilitates transfer across disciplines. Second, encountering anthropology in a writing seminar attracts students towards pursuing majors, minors and elective classes in the discipline. Finally, through the discipline's core methodology of participant observation, lived experience, rather than a synthesis of pre-existing texts, is the core source from which arguments and conclusions about the social world are derived. In an increasingly unequal world where representation in, and access to, written text is concomitantly unequal, it is important that students are introduced to multiple ways to understand and think about human experience. The methodology of participant observation destabilises slightly for undergraduate students the authority of written text as the main, and, often singular, source of knowledge.

La escritura es la base para la construcción y difusión del conocimiento en la Educación Superior, aunque todas las disciplinas tengan formas particulares de hacerlo. Este artículo de reflexión contextualiza un movimiento pedagógico poco estudiado en Colombia,muestra su evolución histórica, las bases conceptuales que lo sustentan (enfoque cognitivo y retórico) y la relación con la situación de Colombia a partir de los resultados de la investigación ¿Para qué se lee y se escribeen las universidades de Colombia? Un aporte a la consolidación de la cultura académica, en la que participaron 17 universidades. Analiza parte de los resultados y concluye con unos importantes desafíos para ser considerados por las diferentes instancias que conformanla Educación Superior.

Understanding the linguistic and rhetorical patterns of an academic discipline strengthens students' abilities to write in professional settings. Data-driven learning and corpus-linguistic methods can increase this understanding and should be considered valuable contributors to any writing curriculum. In this paper, I present a case history on integrating corpora in a graduate-level technical editing course to teach students about writing variation. Students applied this knowledge to edit research-based texts for non-native English speakers within the STEM disciplines. Though this case history focuses on corpora in a technical editing course, the approaches I describe transfer to any course with a writing component as well as across grade levels and student proficiencies. I conclude by addressing the barriers associated with integrating corpus-based learning into the classroom.

Abstract: In this article, I discuss dynamics between the profession, the discipline, and the performance of technical communication. I use a historical perspective to describe the development of the oacademic discipline, and both to the explosion of non-institutional technical communication – the growing body of tactical technical communication that happens outside of organizations and institutions, which leads me to describe our current stage as the Golden Age of technical communication. I conclude that in response we should broaden the scope of technical communication and spread technical communication as a set of skills valuable for everyone to learn.

Pour consulter l'argumentaire et la présentation du programme du séminaire en 2020-2021, voir https://calenda.org/804792?utm_source=lettre
Pour l'ensemble du programme 2021-2022, voir https://crises.www.univ-montp3.fr/fr/d%C3%A9masculiniser-les-sciences-humaines-et-sociales
Pour l'atelier du printemps 2020, voir http://ccu.univ-montp3.fr/evenement/2019-2020/demasculiniser-les-sciences-humaines-et-sociales-1

Understanding the linguistic and rhetorical patterns of an academic discipline strengthens students' abilities to write in professional settings. Data-driven learning and corpus-linguistic methods can increase this understanding and should be considered valuable contributors to any writing curriculum. In this paper, I present a case history on integrating corpora in a graduate-level technical editing course to teach students about writing variation. Students applied this knowledge to edit research-based texts for nonnative English speakers within the STEM disciplines. Though this case history focuses on corpora in a technical editing course, the approaches I describe transfer to any course with a writing component as well as across grade levels and student proficiencies. I conclude by addressing the barriers associated with integrating corpus-based learning into the classroom. Linguistic and rhetorical patterns reflect an academic discipline's subject area and its methods fo...

La trayectoria de Bourdieu dentro del campo científico parecería mostrar un tránsito desde su formación inicial en filosofía, pasando por la antropología, hasta arribar finalmente a la sociología. Empero, un escrutinio más atento de su práctica científica muestra que Bourdieu jamás renunció a la antropología. Ya en sus escritos argelinos se advierten los inicios del proyecto de una única ciencia social que desarrollará a la vez desde la sociología y la antropología. Ello lleva a considerar la concepción de Bourdieu acerca de las disciplinas, y el poder de éstas en tanto formas de organización social de las prácticas científicas. Lo que permite explicar sorprendentes episodios de adscripción disciplinaria variable en algunos de sus escritos, los cuáles sólo pueden interpretarse estratégicamente, como tomas de posición pragmáticas en el campo.
Finalmente, se concluye acerca del "politeísmo metodológico" que proponía Bourdieu para superar la falsa antinomia entre lo cuantitativo y lo cualitativo.

WRDS 350 is an advanced scholarly research and writing course that allows students to build on their existing knowledge of academic research and writing practices by studying specific features of scholarly writing relevant to their own interests and disciplines. As practices of generating knowledge, all scholarly discourse is part of an ongoing exchange of ideas-a communal process of discursive inquiry, more about questions than answers. Different disciplines and fields of inquiry ask different kinds of questions in different ways for different reasons and with different objectives. They also formulate their questions, responses, and arguments differently (though sometimes in superficially similar forms/genres): different fields of inquiry have different assumptions and expectations about what constitutes knowledge, what evidence is relevant and of value, and what sources of evidence and information are credible. Forms of discourse and communication are forms of thinking. The aim of this course is introduce you to disciplinary discourses-including, importantly, those of your own chosen field or major-as communicative practices, and therefor as differential knowledge making practices: ways of thinking. You are not a newcomer to scholarly practice, but how familiar are you, really, with your discipline's discursive practices? What does it mean to write or speak (or think) like a 'sociologist'? An 'economist'? A 'psychologist'? A 'computer scientist'? A 'literary scholar'? The aim of the course is to introduce you to the analytic frameworks used by researchers interested in the examination of disciplinary discourses, in order to become a more effective communicator in your own field, and to get a clearer idea of how that relates to rest of scholarly knowledge making practices.

This volume focuses on new trends in different theoretical perspectives (social, cultural, and cognitive) and derived practices, as relevant to the situated nature of the activity of writing in higher education. These perspectives are analyzed here on the basis of their conceptualization of the object, which is scholarly writing; of the writers, particularly their identities, attitudes, and perspectives, be it students, teachers, or researchers; and of the instructional practices, especially the ways in which the teaching–learning situations may be organized taking the former into account.
In order to draw on some of the best available research in these three domains, the contributions analyze writing using research approaches from various traditions and perspectives, both in Europe and in North, Central, and South America, working on their situated nature and avoiding easy or superficial comparisons in order to broaden our understanding of common problems and of emergent possibilities or affordances that might address them. Each contribution builds from well-established previous work in the domain of teaching and learning academic or scientific writing as situated and discipline-dependent, to move our collective conversation forward in terms of new trends. The final aim is to promote a dialogue among these perspectives and traditions and, by addressing the identified needs and unsolved questions, to bridge gaps and move forward in our knowledge regarding academic writing activities in various higher education settings.

To cite this book:
Castelló, M., & Donahue, C. (Eds.). (2012). University writing: Selves and texts in academic societies. BRILL.

For nearly fifty years, Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) has been growing and evolving, from disparate composition-related activities run by individual instructors to coordinated efforts across institutions that involve both writing as a process of learning and discipline-specific rhetorical practices. In this time, WAC has developed a series of principles and practices that best exemplify what the successful incorporation of writing into coursework looks like, as well as who should be responsible for this writing instruction. In the "Statement of WAC Principles and Practices" (2014), endorsed by both the International Network of WAC Programs and the CCCC Executive Committee, the onus of disciplinary-specific writing instruction is placed on disciplinary instructors, noting that "writing in the disciplines (WID) is most effectively guided by those with experience in that discipline" (p. 1). Such a statement makes sense superficially, but begs the question: What does that experience and expertise look like in practice?

Drawing on the appraisal framework from systemic functional linguistics (SFL), this article examines patterns of stance in a corpus of 92 high- and low-graded argumentative papers written in the context of an upper-level course in economics. It interprets differential patterns of stance in students’ texts in light of interview commentaries from the instructors, exploring how their judgments of students’ levels of “critical reasoning” and “analytic rigor,” among other qualities, may be influenced by recurring configurations of stance. As a methodological contribution, the article demonstrates how appraisal analysis of student writing, when used alongside instructor interviews, can reveal types of stances that are tacitly valued in the specific context. Results suggest the need for greater awareness among faculty in the disciplines of what is “going on” when they are reading student work and how they can make their expectations and judgments more explicit to students when assigning and evaluating writing.

This study reports about a yearlong study of the initiation of novice grant writers to the activity system of National Institutes of Health grant applications. It investigates the use of cognitive apprenticeship within writing classrooms and that of social apprenticeship in laboratories,programs,departments,and universities,which introduced students to the genre system of National Institutes of Health grant proposals and helped them in moving from peripheral participation to more central participation. While cognitive apprenticeship employs devices such as modeling,scaffolding,coaching,and collaboration to enhance learning in formal settings,social apprenticeship requires socialization,interaction,and collaboration with experts,colleagues,and peers in informal settings to acquire disciplinary knowledge and experiences. The study suggests that writing instructors should acknowledge and incorporate resources in other activity systems in which students participate,i.e.,their laboratories and home departments,and teach genre systems rather than specific genres to better facilitate students’ enculturation to activity systems of disciplinary discourse communities.

The idea of competition is so fundamental that we often take it for granted as a natural good. Nearly every aspect of our lives involves competition: we compete in school, we compete for jobs, we compete at work, we compete socially, we compete in games and sports for fun, and when we are not competing ourselves we spend much of our time enjoying watching others compete. But our obsession with competition has several potential complications. A world divided into winners and losers, for example, is an inherently inequitable world – and there will always be far more “losers” than “winners”. Competition also has a variety of interesting relationships with our inescapable need for cooperation and social cohesion. Attempting to disentangle cooperation from competition, in fact, can undermine both sides of this pair: a lack of either can lead to unproductive stasis, and worse. But a complete integration of cooperation and competition can lead to “us versus them” thinking and even war, which US rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke called “the ultimate disease of cooperation.” To better understand the idea of competition, we will examine the ways that it has been investigated and conceptualized in different academic disciplines. For example, competition is fundamental to Business, Economics, and Political Science. But, because of its inescapable role in human society, competition is also an important topic in Psychology, in Anthropology, in Sociology, and even in the study and practice of Education. In this class, we will explore the ways that competition has been investigated in some of this recent research and scholarship, and students will complete research projects of their own contributing to that scholarly conversation.

Situated in the literature on threshold concepts and transfer of prior knowledge in WAC/WID and composition studies, with particular emphasis on the scholarship of writing across difference, our article explores the possibility of re-envisioning the role of the composition classroom within the broader literacy ecology of colleges and universities largely comprised of students from socioeconomically and ethnolinguistically underrepresented communities. We recount the pilot of a composition course prompting students to examine their own prior and other literacy values and practices, then transfer that growing meta-awareness to the critical acquisition of academic discourse. Our analysis of students’ self-assessment memos reveals that students apply certain threshold concepts to acquire critical agency as academic writers, and in a manner consistent with Guerra’s concept of transcultural repositioning. We further consider the role collective rubric development plays as a critical incident facilitating transcultural repositioning

This dissertation explores the reciprocal nature of teaching and learning in a disciplinary writing course on a university campus. The study draws on qualitative, ethnographic case study methodology to examine how an instructor and teaching assistants in a junior-level geography course taught the discipline’s writing practices, genres, and epistemologies, and how students in the course took up that disciplinary writing knowledge. Using Rhetorical Genre Studies, Wenger’s (1998) theory of brokering, and Gee’s (2011) concept of Discourses, I demonstrate how the instructor positioned the course content, learning goals, and discipline in order to give students access to the knowledge production practices of geography. First, I found that the primary genre of the course—the literature review—functioned to mediate this course objective of critical consciousness rather than mediating students’ entry into the discipline of geography. Second, I found that the genre in this classroom came into being in four distinct ways through the brokering practices of the instructor and teaching assistants. Third, through an examination of representations of the genre in instructors’ and students’ talk, I found that while students were frequently conversant in the genre’s characteristics, they at times struggled to enact the particular rhetorical moves that signaled to their instructors that they had taken up the genre successfully. Overall, this dissertation provides a theoretically grounded framework for understanding how meaning is co-constructed in the entering spaces of a disciplinary writing classroom. By examining a class that was positioned by the instructor as an opportunity to understand knowledge production in the academy, this study extends conversations about critically conscious genre pedagogy to pose new possibilities for how disciplinary writing and research courses might be designed as opportunities for raising students’ critical consciousness.

In this dissertation, I use qualitative research methods to study relationships between compositionists and faculty in other disciplines in the context of cross-curricular literacy (CCL) work.  Drawing on a two-year CCL project in the biology department, for which I was a participant observer, I argue that compositionists need to attend more carefully to issues that influence day-to-day interactions with disciplinary faculty in order to develop more meaningful CCL relationships. Toward that end, I offer a revisionary approach to cross-curricular literacy work that cultivates complex relationships by delaying consensus and embracing disconnection and disorientation.  More specifically, I employ revisionary stance as a discursive strategy to complicate three key concepts in CCL literature and scholarship—expertise, change, and outcomes.  I re-vision three texts produced during my time in the biology department in order to illuminate the complexities of negotiating expertise, recognizing change, and pursuing outcomes in CCL contexts.  Given the reciprocal relationship between discursive and material change (Lee), I maintain that revision of CCL discourse can inspire revision on a pedagogical level, shaping how compositionists and disciplinary faculty participate in CCL interactions.  Thus, a revisionary approach leads me to conceptualize revisionary pedagogy for cross-curricular literacy work.

I theorize revisionary pedagogy as a means of fostering pedagogical relationships in CCL contexts, complicating how relationships are framed in traditional Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines scholarship.  The literature advances three main conceptual models of CCL, each of which embraces expertise, change, and outcomes in ways that sponsor potentially problematic relationships between compositionists and disciplinary faculty.  I draw on Composition scholars’ rich conceptualization of revision (Jung; Lee; Welch) and pedagogy (Kameen; Qualley; Stenberg) to challenge the litany of next-best models and imagine alternative possibilities for relationships in CCL contexts. Revisionary pedagogy is a means of approaching material circumstances that reconstitutes how compositionists and disciplinary faculty conceive of and participate in CCL relationships.

This article examines the function of expertise in relationships between WPAs and colleagues in other disciplines who co-develop disciplinary writing curriculum and/or writing pedagogy. I argue that scholarship on interdisciplinary expertise has unexplored implications for the work of writing specialists and disciplinary content experts collaborating across disciplinary lines. Tapping into that research, I retheorize cross-curricular literacy (CCL) efforts as a pedagogical activity in order to sponsor the integration of literate and disciplinary knowledge among faculty experts. Unlike current calls to negotiate expertise in WAC contexts, a pedagogical framework emphasizes the interpersonal dimension of day-to-day interactions and generates relationship-building strategies in response to forces that enable and constrain successful negotiation.  By treating expertise as a vehicle for reflexive inquiry, itself open to reconstruction and transformation, such a framework suggests alternative ways to research and engage in CCL relationships.

Reforming and modernizing higher education has recently become an
important goal in the national vision of several Middle Eastern countries.
To move toward this goal, a common strategy has been the emulation
of models from abroad—mostly Western models—by establishing
international branch campuses (IBCs) on their soil. Of the 240 IBCs
established worldwide, approximately one-third of these are located in
the MENA region (C-BERT 2017; Miller-Idriss and Hanauer 2011,
182). Most of these adopt English as the language of instruction.
With this expansion of IBCs in non-English-speaking contexts comes
the significant challenge of adapting to the institutional structures, expectations,
and needs of the host country (Wilkins and Huisman 2012,
5) while maintaining the institution’s education quality (Miller and Pessoa
2017, 188). The difficulty of maintaining the standards of the home
institution becomes salient when it comes to academic writing in English,
particularly in academic writing in the disciplines. Research in this
area shows that students may find themselves struggling to complete
their studies in a second language (Coleman 2006, 7; Hughes 2008,
118), and technical and academic writing can be especially challenging
for students at IBCs (Evans and Morrison 2011, 203). In our context,
we found that many students enter the university less prepared and
with less knowledge of academic genres than students at the main campus
(Miller and Pessoa 2017, 182). The challenge is exacerbated because
professors coming from the main campus of these universities
may not have extensive experience teaching linguistically and culturally
diverse students and may, therefore, not be prepared to help their
students with their writing needs.
Our previous research shows that faculty adopt different strategies
when faced with this challenge when adjusting to IBCs (Miller and
Pessoa 2017, 186). Concerned about maintaining the main campus
standard by covering all the material and not watering down the curriculum,
some professors do not adjust their practices or course expectations
at all. Others lessen the intensity of writing and reading requirements
for their courses. Still others invest significant effort in helping
students develop their writing skills either by developing strategies to
scaffold student writing through past experience or by seeking opportunities
to collaborate with writing faculty to more effectively scaffold
their students’ writing.
In this chapter, we1 focus on our interdisciplinary collaborations
with faculty in history, design, and information systems at a branch
campus of an American university in the Middle East. We describe the
underlying process of collaboration that guided our work and the implementation
of writing workshops. We then provide a summary of the
collaboration in each discipline and present some evidence of the outcomes.
The central purpose of this chapter is to show how these interdisciplinary
collaborations serve as a model to scaffold student writing
development in higher education, particularly in IBCs.