Wardle and Kain

...the functions of genres in situated activity, the purposes of generic conventions, and the reasons genres change over time are often transparent to participants in communities and difficult for outsiders—including writing instructors and students—to identify and understand (123)

Brent (2012)

...will help students develop rhetorical knowledge that they can transform when thrown in the deep end of new rhetorical environments. In addition, if we can help them become more conscious about what to observe and what questions to ask in new rhetorical environments, we will have gone a long way toward helping them transform, if not simply transfer, this knowledge. (590)

In two recent articles, Brent tackles this question of how to teach for learning transfer in PW courses. Drawing on studies he conducted with university students participating in internships, poised at the transitional moment between school and work, Brent attempts to mine his students’ experiences to understand the kinds of rhetorical knowledge they draw on as they confront new writing situations at their internship sites.

articulating the similar but different challenges faced by those seeking to teach PW courses in post-secondary contexts. We review various teaching strategies that have been devised to meet these challenges and then articulate a rationale for and description of WAW-PW, sharing elements of our classroom practices as well as the voices of students who have experienced our WAW-PW curriculum. In all of this, we revisit a question of ongoing significance, posed by Elizabeth Tabeaux in CCC in her 1985 article “Redesigning Professional Writing Courses to Meet the Communication Needs of Writers in Business and Industry”: “How can we make our writing courses more relevant in preparing students for the work place?” (427)

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What does this tell us about what we should do as teachers of writing? It does not give us a detailed prescription for reforming the curriculum of professional writing courses. (589)

Rather, it suggests that if explicit teaching of rhetorical principles does anything for students, it does so because it works in concert with a complex rhetorical environment in which they must rapidly adapt to competing rhetorical exigencies. The academic experience as a whole enculturates students, in Tishman, Jay, and Perkins’ terms, into rhetorical thinking at the same time as specific rhetorical instruction gives them a more principled and more conscious awareness of the rhetorical moves they make. (590)

...a conscious understanding of general principles is an asset to transfer (or transformation) of learning, as is what Perkins and Salomon call “mindful metacognitive activity”—that is, thinking consciously about certain aspects of one’s own thinking. (590)

...what, if anything, we can legitimately expect a rhetorical education to do for students when they cross the boundary from our classroom into the classrooms of other disciplines or the much larger boundary between school and workplace. While the case studies I have presented don’t settle any details of exactly what a rhetorical education might look like, the study does suggest that...

• an understanding of how to extract genre features from models,
• how to analyze an audience, and
• how to use genre knowledge to interpret information

...will help students develop rhetorical knowledge that they can transform when thrown in the deep end of new rhetorical environments. In addition, if we can help them become more conscious about what to observe and what questions to ask in new rhetorical environments, we will have gone a long way toward helping them transform, if not simply transfer, this knowledge. (590)

Knowledge Society (Notes)

In the last few decades, however, the question about the role of writing in the production of knowledge has gained new salience with the rise of what has commonly been termed the knowledge society, where civic life as well as much economic activity depend on the production and sharing of knowledge. (3)

In short, writing has become an important means of production  and as such forms a vital component of the epistemological infrastructure of knowledge-intensive organizations and societies. (4)

...writing has moved centre state in all sectors of society. (3)

...writing fuels the knowledge economy, with written products becoming "the chief vehicles for economic transactions and the chief ground for making profits or achieving advantage" (4)

In addition, as a growing body of research in writing studies indicates, writing is vital to citizen participation in teh shaping of public knowledge, in policy deliberation, and in public decision-making. 4)

...writing as a knowledge-making practice raises a number of urgent questions:

• What role does writing play in knowledge-intensive societies?
• What specific exigencies arise for writing in knowledge-intensive settings?
• How do institutional and organizational contexts constrain, enable, or otherwise shape writing as a knowledge-making practice? 
• How does writing as a knowledge-making practice shape institutions and organizations? 
• How do people come to participate in collective knowledge-making endeavors?

knowledge-making practices
diverse knowledge-intensive settings

...writing as a knowledge-making practice. (4)

...to examine, illustrate, and articulate the vital roles rhetoric and writing play as knowledge-making practices in diverse knowledge-intensive settings. (4)--purpose of book

...the many ways in which rhetoric and writing operate in knowledge-intensive organizations and societies. (5)

To study the knowledge making processes of writers in knowledge intensive industries. To contribute to the knowledge-making process themselves.

Blakeslee

Technical and professional writing instructors often use two types of assignments to simulate workplace practice and to teach professional genres: case studies or client projects. (169)

...the ways in which we can use such collaborations to teach professional genres. For example, my research suggests that these collaborations may act as useful transitional experiences that bridge classroom and workplace contexts for students and expose them gradually to workplace practices and genres. (170)

Scholarship which examines "how students move from the contexts of schooling to those of the workplace":

• Anson, Chris M., and L. Lee Forsberg. "Moving beyond the Aca demic Community: Transitional Stages in Professional Writing," WC 7 (1990): 200-31.
• Blakeslee, Ann M. "Activity, Context, Interaction, and Authority: Learning to Write Scientific Papets in Situ." JBTC 11 (1997): 125-69.
• Freedman, Aviva, and Christine Adam. "Learning to Write Professionally: 'Situated Learning' and the Transition from University to Professional Discourse." JBTC 10 (1996): 395-427.
• Winsor, Dorothy A. Writing Like an Engineer: A Rhetorical Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996.
• Winsor, Dorothy A. "Writing Well as a Form of Social Knowledge." Nonacademic Writing: Social Theory and Technology. Ed. Ann H. Duin and Craig J. Hansen. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996. 157-72.

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Service Learning/Client Projects

Her Main concern: finding strategies for teaching professional genres.
Value Of Approach

My examination of classroom-workplace collaborations suggests that, despite their practical limitations, these activities still may have a number of benefits. (189)

1. transitional experiences
2. potential for exposing students to workplace cultures and activities
3. gradually introducing them to the genres that both arise from and support those cultures and activities.

Benefits

• …although not totally immersed in workplace cultures in such activities, [students] gain exposure through these projects to workplace writing and general work place practices. (175-76)
• …through this exposure students begin to develop the history of interactions with the activity system that Russell says they need
• the context of school in these projects may support students' encounters with the new activity systems. (176)
• The students in my studies also tended to value the classroom-work place collaborations more highly than traditional assignments. (178)
• In the classroom-workplace collaborations I studied, students also seemed to exhibit a heightened sensitivity to audience. (181)
• My research suggested that classroom-workplace projects may act as a bridge between school and work; classroom and workplace activity systems may overlap with the projects since students get a taste of workplace practices while still experiencing the structure, support, and familiarity of the academic learning environment (182)
• In other words, the projects allow students to carry out tasks they will be asked to carry out in the workplace, but they also provide a supportive environment. They allow students to experience workplace practices without the usual accountability of the workplace. (183)

Limitations

• …despite the fact that the projects were from the workplace and not case studies, the students, and even the clients, still considered them as more like school projects. (179)
• This lack of accountability may have a downside, however. Students conceivably make compromises in their work because they ultimately do not feel responsible. (183)
• My findings suggested that feedback and response often are problem areas in these types of projects…the clients may not respond at all or may respond in an extreme manner—being overly critical or overly complimentary.The students in my studies generally were dissatisfied with the feedback they received from the clients… In all of these cases, the students I studied were dissatisfied, and sometimes even angry, with the responses from the clients. (186)

Downs & Wardle, 2007 (Notes)

Downs/Wardle (2007):

Organization:

• Introduction
• Myths and Misconceptions about FYC
• Rationale and Description of WAW
• Case Studies (2)
• Challenges and Critiques

Core Beliefs

The first of our shared beliefs corresponds with James Reither’s assertion that writing cannot be taught independent of content. (559)

Second, the course is forthcoming about what writing instruction can and cannot accomplish; it does not purport to “teach students to write” in general nor does it purport to do all that is necessary to prepare students to write in college. (559)

Third, the course respects students by refusing to create double stan- dards or different rules for student writers than for expert writers. (560)

In sum, then, the course does not teach from principles that contravene writing studies research. Instead, it draws on research from the field and prin- ciples and ethics that shape the field to help students understand the nature of writing and to explore their own writing practices. (560)

Features of WAW

1. Readings

In the writing studies course, we use readings that report research about writ- ing and theorize ways of thinking about writing to raise important questions and to provide examples of various textual moves related to scholarly writing based on primary research (560)

2. Reflection

"Class time spent on readings focuses more on students’ reactions to them than on the readings themselves..." (561)

3. Research

The most noteworthy feature of the course is that students conduct primary research, however limited, on issues of interest to both themselves and the field of writing studies. (562)

Other

Conducting primary research helps students shift their orientation to research from one of compiling facts to one of generating knowledge (562)

...the course about writing be- comes a writing course in which students study writing to learn more about it and potentially improve their own. (562)

One conception of writing we strive to help students shift is imagining “writ- ing” essentially as merely drafting a paper. The course design helps us show students that most scholarly researched writing in fact begins with becoming curious and establishing a question and moves through research. What stu- dents traditionally imagine as writing is actually only the final move in a much larger series of events. However, in our courses, students do arrive at this final move, presenting their research in both a significant written report and an oral presentation. (563)

...the writing studies pedagogy answers Reither’s and Kleine’s calls for communities of inquiry. (564)

our goal remains to help students learn more about writing and become more successful writers in the university. (574)

Proven means of facilitating transfer include self-reflection, explicit abstraction of principles, and alertness to one’s context (576)

While faculty in other disciplines are expected to teach the content and methods of their fields even in the most introductory courses, many (if not most) FYC classes throughout the country allow students to write on any range of topics, topics which often fall outside the writing teachers’ specialization. Writing teachers and students alike are better served by focusing specifically on topics teachers know. (577)

(similar problems with procomm classes 1) in the same way that students are going off to major in numerous disciplines, students in procomm classes are going off to pursue numerous fields of practice--the majority of which we know and can know nothing about. 2) The generalist approach, focused on generic genres of prof writing, flies in the face of everything we know about teaching writing and the significance of context.)

To argue otherwise accepts and perpetuates the myth that content is separable from writing—that an FYC instructor need not be expert in the subject matter of a paper in order to evaluate the quality of writing in that paper, or need not be a subject expert on writing in order to teach writing. (577)

Methods

• discourse analysis of small corpuses
• interviews and surveys of manageable numbers of subjects
• small-scale ethnographies and case studies

Outcomes

(evidence: student's end-of-semester reflections)

• increased self-awareness about writing,
• improved reading skills,
• a new understanding of research writing as conversation.

Challenges and Critiques

Challenges:

• The course is demanding and different. (574)
• Few appropriate resources exist for first-year students. (574)
• Students will produce imperfect work. (575)
• Instructors must be knowledgeable about writing studies. (575)

Critiques:

• Teaching about writing may not improve student writing. (576)
• The course simply represents the instructor’s desire to teach about things she knows and enjoys. (577)

Benefits of WAW Pedagogy

• this pedagogy overcomes the problem of contradictory research and practice: rather than purporting to teach students “academic writing” and claiming to prepare them for writing in their disciplines, the course teaches students what we as a field have learned about writing as an object of study. (578)
• the pedagogy teaches potentially transferable conceptions of the activity of writing rather than “basic” writing skills that are in fact highly spe- cialized and contextualized. (578)
• the course has the added benefit of educating first-year students, adjuncts, and graduate students about the existence and content of the writ- ing studies field. (578)

Bibliography (histories)

Teaching "About"

Kain, Donna & Elizabeth Wardle. "Building Context: Using Activity Theory to Teach About Genre in Multi-Major Professional Communication Courses." Technical Communication Quarterly, 14.2, (2005): 113–139.

Service Learning/Client Projects

Blakeslee, A. "Bridging the Workplace and the Academy: Teaching Professional Genres Through Classroom-Workplace Collaborations." Technical Communication Quarterly 10.2 (Spring 2001): 169-192.

Cox, Michelle, Christina Ortmeier-Hooper, & Katherine E. Tirabassi. "Teaching Writing for the 'Real World': Community and Workplace Writing." English Journal 98.5 (2009): 72-80.

In CCC

Pennell, Michael. 2007. 'If knowledge is power, you're about to become very powerful': Literacy and labor market intermediaries in postindustrial America. College Composition and Communication 58.3. 345-384.

Simmons, W. Michele; Jeffery T. Grabill. 2007. Toward a civic rhetoric for technologically and scientifically complex places: Invention, performance and participation. College Composition and Communication 58.3. 419-448.

Beason, Larry. 2001. Ethos and error: How business people react to errors. College Composition and Communication 53.1. 33-64.

Porter, James E.; Patricia Sullivan; Stuart Blythe; Jeffrey T. Grabill; Libby Miles. 2000. Institutional critique: A rhetorical methodology for change. College Composition and Communication 51.4. 610-642.

Tebeaux, Elizabeth. 1985. Redesigning professional writing courses to meet the communication needs of writers in business and industry. College Composition and Communication 36.4. 419-428.

Selzer, Jack. 1983. The composing processes of an engineer. College Composition and Communication 34.2. 178-187.

Bataille, Robert R.. 1982. Writing in the world of work: What our graduates report. College Composition and Communication 33.3. 276-280.

Harwood, John T.. 1982. Freshman English ten years after: Writing in the world. College Composition and Communication 33.3. 281-283.