Outlining Implications

1. Some adult students arrive in the classroom with real rhetorical or literacy problems in hand and in mind. Rhetorical situations, often stemming from the workplace, may follow such students to school. These serve as potential resources to be tapped. 
   
2. Many adult students are immersed in a complex discursive web in their jobs, where they use writing to get work done in a variety of ways and writing is always connected to "getting things done."
   
3. Conventions of authorship in the workplace are quite different from the classroom and students may transport these conventions to the classroom. 
   
4. Adult students will have varied relationships to academic literacy instruction and various literacy histories--while some of them will bring stories of negative experiences with literacy, some will not. Some, in fact, will have very positive associations with literacy and literacy instruction. In any event, these histories will invariably shape the literacy work one asks such students to do.
   
5. In their capacity as workers, many adult students are not just writers, but serve as teachers of writing and/or local writing consultants. 
   
6. Adult students will likely have considerable experience producing specific genres of professional writing--antecedent genres. Because of the frequency with which they produce them, such genres come to have considerable hold over adult students composing imaginations. Adult students may sometimes mistakenly (and unknowingly) draw on their knowledge of these alpha or dominant genres in their academic writing. These genres may or may not serve as useful antecedents for the academic genres writing teachers invite students to produce in composition classrooms. 
   
7. Some adult students, when they arrive in the classroom, may already been engaged in any number of self-sponsored literate endeavors--these could serve as potential resources for the teaching of writin (John's blog). 
8. School implications: the path is not linear or neat.

BIG ONES:

Writing teachers who work with with adult or mixed (traditional and non-traditional) student populations need to know something about professional writing in order to meet such students where they are and to understand the rhetorical universe in which they swim when they are not in class.

A discussion of the needs and experiences of adult and non-traditional students should be a part of any conversation addressing issues of diversity in the writing classroom (i.e., TA training or graduate education). 

Research with adult student populations has shown that adult students need their coursework to be relevant to their lives. While assignments which ask such students to draw on their own personal experiences may work well with such students, they may also seem like an imposition, especially if the instructor is younger than her charges. Like their instructors (and like most Americans), most adult students are committed workers, who spend most of their waking hours at their jobs and whose lives have come to revolve around their work. Writing teachers who work with adult or mixed (traditional and non-traditional) student populations should try to view their students' workplace literacy practices and knowledge as resources to be tapped, not obstacles to overcome, in the writing classroom. 

There was an article about workplace ethnography...this was the only essay I saw which attempted to engage adult students in a way which I think could really succeed, by tapping into their professional knowledge and experience.