Writing, Reading, and Revising (in) the Disciplines

1. Writing, Reading, and Revising (in) the Disciplines Bruce Horner Endowed Chair in Rhetoric and Composition University of Louisville

2. Teaching Disciplinary Research and Writing Sequence of Assignments • Reading a small (3-4) number of texts • Reading each of these more than once, and in different ways • Substantial revisions of students’ written interpretations of texts read that incorporate changes to those interpretations • (Reading texts = Studying phenomena)

3. Writing Courses • Teach ways of reading as well as writing • Teach re-reading and re-writing • Teach what distinguishes disciplined academic inquiry from other kinds of inquiry and other kinds of reading and writing • Teaches movement beyond “common sense” to uncommon sense • Leads students through experience of the rhythms of disciplinary inquiry

4. Writing Courses • Focus on samples of students’ writing for what writing makes of the course topic • Ask of this student writing not whether it is correct or accurate, but rather • Ask what meanings the students’ ways of reading and writing produce, and how • Ask how to revise these ways of reading and writing to produce more fruitful meanings

5. Problematic Common-Sense Beliefs about Writing and Reading Discrepancy between what expert writers say and believe about reading and writing and what they themselves actually do as readers and writers Students have trouble with reading and writing when attempting to enact the unsubstantiated beliefs about reading and writing they’re taught

6. Common Sense Notions vs. Actual Practices of Writing Process I. common sense notions Read Think Write (Research) (Gather ideas, Outline arguments) (Put it down on paper) II. Actual practice Read Think Write

7. Common Sense Approach to Meaning sign referent Tree Chair

8. Situated Meaning Context Data entry job Sound-image Meaning Associated signs Confinement, tedium, back-neck-wrist pain Chair

9. Common-Sense Beliefs about Writing and Reading Writing and reading are the same across disciplines (“writing is writing; good writing is good writing”) • Shared set of terms for writing and reading (and good writing and reading) across disciplines , BUT • Diverse and fluctuating meanings for these terms: • Across disciplines • Across time and space within disciplines • Across time and space within individuals Lea, Mary R., and Brian V. Street. “Student Writing in Higher Education: An Academic Literacies Approach.” Studies in Higher Education 23 (1998): 157-72. Thaiss, Chris, and Terry Zawacki. Engaged Writers, Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 2006.

10. Writing and Revising the Disciplines Jonathan Monroe, ed. (Director of the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines at Cornell University) scholars’ recursive use of reading-writing-thinking throughout the writing process scholars’ seminal contributions to their fields often stem from their efforts to tinker with dominant ways of thinking and writing, vocabularies, questions, assumptions, and methods in their disciplines

11. Conduct recursive, deliberative reading of all texts: Students’ own and peers’ notes and writing Assigned scholarly texts or phenomena Assignments themselves Assignments to Engage in Recursive, Deliberative Reading of All Texts

12. Assignment to Reread and Reflect on Their Practices Writing about Music To give us a place to start and move from as the course progresses, use this assignment as an opportunity to demonstrate your current understanding and practice of what "writing about songs" means and involves. After listening to the song I play, use the remainder of our class time to write an essay in which, first, you describe your reaction in a few paragraphs in a way that seems appropriate to commit to writing. Then go on in your writing to describe the writing represented in your first few paragraphs. For example, what about the song do you seem to have reacted to? What might account for why you reacted as you have to the song? And what do you seem to have been trying to do in writing about your reaction? What problems, if any, did you encounter in trying to put your reaction into writing? What sorts of things, if any, did you find it difficult to describe? What questions cropped up as you were writing about your reaction? How did you sense you were "finished"? How does this experience of writing about songs compare to your usual encounters with songs? End your essay with a discussion of what writing about songs seems to involve, given your written reaction to a song and your analysis of that writing.

13. Assignment Sequences Use reading as a site for comparing intersections and differences between: -habitual approaches -unfamiliar approaches specific to and established in a discipline

14. Practicing Critical, Deliberative Reading An everyday scenario: I cannot find the milk in the refrigerator (under my very nose).

15. Socially-historically situated practices-expectations-perceptions • Expectations are social as well as personal, learned from repeated social practice: previous interactions with others in particular households, classrooms, workplaces, and so on. • Repeated social practice can make expectation spontaneous, even automatic (e.g., looking for the main point, plot summary, symbolism). • Expectations limit perception. • Differences between meaning-making and finding a milk carton.

16. Common Use of Underlining Recall tool for what we perceive as important (“main ideas”)

17. OTHER USES OF UNDERLINING • Underlining as a reflective tool to identify habits of reading; • Underlining as a learning tool to grasp unfamiliar, specialized approaches endorsed by a discipline; • Underlining as a revision tool for developing one’s thoughts concerning an assigned reading which one has already read and marked. • Underlining as a critical tool for identifying limitations in established approaches

18. Sample Reading Assignment Make a photocopy of Jean Anyon’s essay “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work.” Read the essay while underlining what strikes you as important. When underlining, try to develop a system of marking aimed at help you to recall not only what on the page has caught your attention but also how and why you see that as important. For instance, find a way to identify the specific responses (thoughts, feelings, physical movements or sensations) you have when pausing over the underlined part.

19. Sample Questions for Student Group Discussion for Analyzing Notes on Anyon • What patterns do you notice in the markings of each student writer? • What guiding questions might this student writer be seen as using when making sense of Anyon’s article? • In your experience, what types of courses expect you to use such questions? • What might be the overlaps and gaps between the approaches of each student writer and the approaches you believe this course is advancing?

20. Two Sets of Underlining by Two Students (Italics indicate markings by Jack. Underlining indicates markings by Sarah.) Scholars in political economy and the sociology of knowledge have recently argued that public schools in complex industrial societies like our own make available different types of educational experiences and curriculum knowledge to students in different social classes. Bowles and Gintis (1976), for example, have argued that students from different social class backgrounds are rewarded for classroom behaviors that correspond to personality traits allegedly rewarded in the different occupational strata—the working classes for docility and obedience, the managerial class for initiative and personal assertiveness. Basil Bernstein (1977), Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977), and Michael W. Apple (1979), focusing on school knowledge, have argued that knowledge and skills leading to social power and reward (e.g., medical, legal, managerial) are made available to the advantaged social groups but are withheld from the working classes, to whom a more “practical” curriculum is offered (e.g., manual skills, clerical knowledge). While there has been considerable argumentation of these points regarding education in England, France, and North America, there has been little or no attempt to investigate these ideas empiricallyin elementary or secondary schools and classrooms in this country. This article offers tentative empirical support (and qualification) of the above arguments by providing illustrative examples of differences in student work in classrooms in contrasting social class communities. The examples were gathered as part of an ethnographical study of curricular, pedagogical and pupil evaluation practices in five elementary schools. The article attempts a theoretical contribution as well, and assesses student work in the light ofa theoretical approach to social class analysis. The organization is as follows: the methodology of the ethnographical study is briefly described; a theoretical approach to the definition of social class is offered; income and other characteristics of the parents in each school are provided, and examples from the study that illustrate work tasks and interaction in each school are presented; then the concepts used to define social class are applied to the examples in order to assess the theoretical meaning of classroom events. It will be suggested that there is a “hidden curriculum” in school work that has profound implication for the theory—and consequence—of everyday activity in education.

21. REVERSE UNDERLINING Purposes: • Identify parts of the assigned reading one has glossed over previously. • Produce a more “in depth” interpretation

22. Writing Assignment Thomas Kuhn says at the opening of his essay “The Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery” that while “historians have ordinarily viewed discovery as the sort of event which . . . is itself without internal structure,” “we need a new vocabulary and new concepts for analyzing events like the discovery of oxygen.” After reading and taking notes on Kuhn’s essay, write an essay in which you use details from Kuhn’s essay to explain what you currently understand to be Kuhn’s objections to how historians have ordinarily approached discovery. How, according to Kuhn, should we be analyzing events like the discovery of oxygen?

23. Erin’s Reverse Underlining of Initial Reading of Kuhn General level: • Observation: Erin’s first paper centers on the first paragraph and the last section of Kuhn’s article, thus leaving untouched more than four pages of prose in an essay that is seven and half pages long. • Question: Why does Kuhn need two more examples of discovery (the discoveries of X rays and the planet Uranus) in addition to the example of the discovery of oxygen to make his case? Local level: • Observation 1: While Kuhn spends a full page on the first characteristic of the internal structure of scientific discovery (the role of anomaly), Erin’s paper zeros in on three parts of that discussion: the first sentence, a sentence in the middle, and one sentence toward the end. • Question: Why is it important to Kuhn that we acknowledge the two “requisites for the beginning of an episode of discovery”? • Observation 2: Erin’s opening sentence for the third paragraph provides an inaccurate reference. The actual phrase is “often many members of his group struggle to make the anomaly lawlike,” not “lawful.” • Question: What might Kuhn have in mind by such a word choice?

24. Reverse Underlining a Writing Assignment Writing Assignment Kuhn says at the opening of his essay “The Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery” that while “historians have ordinarily viewed discovery as the sort of event which . . . is itself without internal structure,” “we need a new vocabulary and new concepts for analyzing events like the discovery of oxygen.” Write an essay in which you use details from Kuhn’s essay to explain what you take to be Kuhn’s objections to how historians have ordinarily approached discovery. How, according to Kuhn, should we be analyzing events like the discovery of oxygen? Erin’s Observation The writing prompt glosses over parts of asentence in Kuhn’s essay: “Both scientists and, until quite recently, historians have ordinarily viewed discovery as the sort of event which, though it may have preconditions and surely has consequences, is itself without internal structure.” Erin’s Questions What, according to Kuhn, counts as an “internal structure”? Given Kuhn’s interest in “internal” structures, what “external” structures might Kuhn’s essay be said to have glossed over?

25. Concluding paragraph to Erin’s revision paper In conclusion, Kuhn did an excellent job showing his reader the “internal structure” of scientific discovery. Like other historians, Kuhn does consider the “preconditions and consequences” of “discovery” (315). But he considers only those internal to the scientific community: scientific instruments and concepts. This makes me think of something I read in my history class. In it, the author connects Columbus’s “discovery” of America to the social conditions of his time, pointing out that if Spain was not so intent on over-seas trading, the shipping industry would not be so developed, and Columbus would never have the equipment and funding to launch the trip. I wonder what this author would say about the discovery of Uranus, which Kuhn says is an accident caused by the “magnification” of Herschel’s telescope and others’ mathematic computations of the orbits of stars. I learned a lot from Kuhn’s essay. But I think some reference to what was going on in society during the eighteenth century, outside the scientific community, could make this an even more interesting piece.

26. Sequencing to Engage Participation in Disciplinary Writing and Revision • 1. Students read, take notes on, and write an essay giving a tentative interpretation of the first two sections from E. P. Thompson’s lengthy essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” which appeared in 1967 in the history journal Past and Present. • 2. In groups, students compare what each of their essays seems to have focused on, been troubled by, and concluded, and what habitual assumptions and approaches might explain these differences and overlaps. • 3. Students read the first four sections of Thompson’s essay, noting what they had overlooked the first time they’d read the first two of these and how that and the additional two sections change their understanding of the essay, and revising their own essay accordingly. • 4. Students read the entirety of Thompson’s essay, again using reverse underlining to shift the focus of their attention and further revise and develop their interpretation. • 5-7: Students read and reread parts and then all of Chapter Three of Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American, taking different notes each time to develop and change their interpretations of what Schor has to say.

27. Sequencing to Engage Participation in Disciplinary Writing and Revision (continued) • Assignment 8. Students analyze Schor’s citation and use of Thompson’s essay and compare these to the interpretations of Thompson’s essay they themselves had developed earlier. They then use their comparison to reconcile the differences between the two and what those differences suggest about historical research. • Assignments 9-12. Students update Thompson’s and Schor’s research and analyses, using scholarship they’ve located postdating Thompson’s and Schor’s research publications but that cites them, and that pursues a line of inquiry related to but different than Thompson’s and Schor’s scholarship.

28. Key Elements of Writing/Reading Assignment Sequences to Participate on Disciplinary Writing and Revision • Encourage tentative, exploratory and open interpretations by having students first read only sections of a text • Each reading, writing assignment part of course-long research project, not discrete exercise (with teacher comments tailored accordingly) • Normalize, and even demand, changes in interpretation through revisions as part of sequence (with teacher comments directed toward possible changes, encouraging complication) • Have students develop own interpretations of a text before confronting other interpretations of same text (e.g,. explore Thompson before considering Schor’s use of Thompson) to authorize their participation in ongoing writing and revision of disciplinary knowledge • Give students experience of rhythms of recursive moves of academic inquiry—a luxury less available outside academic settings.

29. Selected Bibliography on Writing Assignments, Sequences, and WID Bartholomae, David. “Writing Assignments: Where Writing Begins.” Fforum 4.1 (1982): 35-45. Bartholomae, David, and Anthony Petrosky. Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts: Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1986. Björk, Lennart, Ger Brauer, Lotte Rienecke, and Peter Stray Jörgensen. Teaching Academic Writing in European Higher Education. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Coles, William E., Jr. “The Sense of Nonsense as a Design for Sequential Writing Assignments.” College Composition and Communication 21 (1970): 27-34. Cooper, Marilyn M. “The Answers Are Not in the Back of the Book: Developing Discourse Practices in First-Year English.” Developing Discourse Practices in Adolescence and Adulthood. Ed Richard Beach and Susan Hynds. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1990. 65-90. Deane, Mary, and Peter O'Neill. Writing in the Disciplines. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Ganobcsik-Williams, Lisa. Teaching Academic Writing in UK Higher Education: Theories, Practices, and Models. Houndmill, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Horner, Bruce. “Writing In the Disciplines/Writing Across the Curriculum.” The Routledge Companion to English Studies. Ed. Constant Leung and Brian V. Street. London: Routledge, 2014. 405-18.  Lea, Mary R., and Brian V. Street. “The ‘Academic Literacies’ Model: Theory and Applications.” Theory into Practice 45.4 (2006): 368-77. Lea, Mary R., and Brian V. Street. “Student Writing in Higher Education: An Academic Literacies Approach.” Studies in Higher Education 23 (1998): 157-72. Monroe, Jonathan, ed. Writing and Revising the Disciplines. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2002. Rankin, Elizabeth. “From Simple to Complex: Ideas of Order in Assignment Sequences.” JAC [Journal of Advanced Composition] 10 (1990): 126-35. Russell, D. (1991) Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870-1990: A Curricular History, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Thaiss, Chris, and Terry Zawacki. Engaged Writers, Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 2006. The WAC Clearinghouse. “An Introduction to Writing Across the Curriculum.” <http://wac.colostate.edu/>