Further,
I've also had the chance to work
with
many faculty, staff, and students in all fields through various
administrative roles, among them Director
of English Composition (most recently in 2003-2004), Director of Writing
across the Curriculum (1990-1998), and Chair of the English
Department (1998-2002).
In
addition, my teaching, writing, and
program
development have led to my being asked to serve as a consultant
to
schools, colleges, and other organizations locally, nationally, and
internationally.
Engaged Writers and Dynamic
Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life
Since 2000, colleague Terry Myers
Zawacki
and
I have been engaged in study of the ways by which learners/writers
become proficient in the discourses of disciplines. This research has
involved
- interviews
with publishing and
teaching faculty in a range of fields (fourteen as of 2005)
- analysis of
teachers' course materials
- a survey
of students in a range of degree programs (respondents identified 40
disciplines)
- student
focus groups
- analysis of reflective
essays written by students as part of a portfolio procedure to obtain
proficiency credit for Advanced
Composition
- use
of data compiled as part of George Mason University's discipline-based assessment
of student writing proficiency
This research has been
supported
in part by a grant from the Council of Writing Program Administrators
and
by internal assistance grants from George Mason University.
The first phase of this research
was
published in 2002 as a chapter, "Questioning Alternative Discourse:
Reports from across the Disciplines," in ALT.DIS:
Alternative Discourses in the Academy, eds. Schroeder, Fox, and
Bizzell (Heinemann). The project up to this point will be published in
2006 by Heinemann as Engaged Writers
and Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life.
Core
Research Questions to Faculty
Cluster One:
How do informants define “standards” for writing in their disciplines?
What do they see as alternatives, acceptable and unacceptable, to that
standard discourse? How do they see their disciplines changing to
accommodate alternative approaches and discourses?
Cluster Two:
Have informants sometimes written in alternative forms? If not, why
not? If so, why and how did they come to choose the particular
alternative form(s)?
Cluster Three:
a. What are their writing/learning goals for students and how closely
do these goals match the “standard” disciplinary discourse?
b. Do informants ever give assignments asking for alternative ways of
thinking and writing?
c. How open are they to students writing in alternative ways to
assignments they give? How do they treat such writing?
d. In particular, how do they treat student writing that shows
“alternative” syntax and organization (e.g, “errors” in Standard Edited
American English)?
*****************************
One tool of this research is a
survey
that
we
administered in Fall 2002 to some 300 GMU students enrolled in ENGL
302, Advanced Composition, a course required of all GMU
undergraduates
and tailored to the varying demands of writing in diverse majors. The
survey
is below. If you would like to use this survey for similar research at
your own institution, or if you would like to modify the survey, we
would
appreciate knowing. Please send email to cthaiss@gmu.edu.
Survey on
Writing in the Majors
1. What is your major?
2. Approximately how many courses have you
taken
with the prefix of your major, e.g. HIST, ENGL, PSYC, GOV?
3. Within your major do you have a
particular
area of interest or concentration? If so, what is it?
4. Are you aware of some specialties or
concentrations
within your major? If so, name some.
5. How aware are you of characteristics of
good
writing in your major? Circle one.
Very
aware
Somewhat
aware
Unaware
Never thought about it
6. List some characteristics of good writing
in
your major:
7. How have you learned characteristics of
good
writing in your discipline? Rank (1=most important):
_____ teachers
_____ reading
_____ fieldwork
_____ published writing guides
_____ other students
_____ articles on websites
8. How confident do you feel about your
writing
in your major? Circle one:
Very
confident
Somewhat confident Not
confident
Scared to death
9. From the following list, check those
writing
assignments you’ve been given in your major courses (those with the
prefix
of your major, e.g. HIST, DMIS, ITEU, CS) :
_____ Researched paper
_____ Journal, reflection paper, or narrative
_____ Collaborative project
_____ Lab report
_____ Impromptu in-class writing
_____ Critique, review or reaction paper
_____ Position/issue paper
_____ Summary, abstract or outline
_____ Letter (e.g. to an editor, a public
official,
a family member, etc)
_____ Other
______________________________________________
10. From those you circled above, which have
you
done most often?
11. Have you ever been given writing
assignments
in your major courses that surprised you? If so, describe briefly.
12. Have you ever been asked to write about
yourself
in an academic paper in courses in your major? If so, describe briefly.
13. Have any teachers in major courses
allowed
you or asked you to write in ways you thought were not typical of the
major?
If so, describe the assignment and how you approached it.
14. Have you ever been discouraged from
using
a style you thought would be a more original and/or individual way to
respond
to a writing assignment in your major? If so, describe briefly.
15. To what degree do your teachers in your
major
courses expect you to conform to strict guidelines for writing in your
discipline? Circle:
1 (not strict at
all)
2
3
4
5 (very
strict)
don’t know
16. Do you find that your teachers’
expectations
for writing in their courses are generally similar? If not, describe
briefly
a time you felt a teacher’s expectations were atypical.
17. Have you ever read any of your
professors’
writing? Check all that apply:
______ book
______ professional article
_____ conference paper
______ website article
______ assignments.
18. If you have not read any of your
professors’
writing, how aware are you of what they
might be writing?
Very
aware
somewhat aware not at all
aware
never entered my mind
19. Is English your first language? If not,
for
how many years have you been educated in an English-speaking culture?
20. If English is not your first language,
do
you recall any time(s) teachers in your major were dissatisfied with
your
writing because of something other than grammar or content;
organization,
for example? If so, describe briefly.
.
Conclusions
The following is based on
Chapter Five
of the book and was distributed in a presentation at the NCTE
Convention in Pittsburgh in November 2005.
************************************************************************************************
“Engaged
Writers and Dynamic Disciplines”: Research on Writing in the
Disciplines and Alternative Discourses
Researchers: Chris Thaiss and Terry Myers Zawacki, George Mason
University
Since 2000, colleagues Terry Myers Zawacki and Chris Thaiss have been
engaged in study of the relationship between "alternative discourses"
and writers' understanding of the conventions of discourse within
academic disciplines. This research has involved interviews with
publishing and teaching faculty in a range of fields, analysis of
course materials, surveys of students in a range of degree programs,
student focus groups, analysis of student essays, and use of data
compiled as part of George Mason University's discipline-based
assessment of student writing proficiency. This research has been
supported in part by a grant from the Council of Writing Program
Administrators and by internal assistance grants from George Mason
University.
Results and recommendations for practice will be published in a
forthcoming (March 2006) book from Heinemann: Engaged Writers and
Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life.
Conclusions
Good College
Writing Comes from What Writers Care About
Faculty informants put undergraduate student “engagement” ahead of
knowledge of scholarly conventions. Department assessment rubrics
balance concerns for disciplinary standards in method and arrangement
with concern for “original thinking.” Our most proficient student
informants all write about their growth in a major being dependent on
finding room for their own voices and interests.
College
Writers Must Confront the Tension between Convention and Individual
Desire
College writing tasks oblige writers to be original thinkers, but also
to identify and conform to expectations of teachers, disciplines, and
the academy. Most of our student informants did not feel unduly
constrained by such expectations, and most wanted to “give teachers
what they want.” Most of our students saw teachers granting them
freedom of subject and approach, but few saw much stylistic freedom in
majors. Both faculty and our most proficient writers saw themselves
having to negotiate between their desires as scholar/writers and
disciplinary conventions.
There Are No
Simple Rules for College Writers—Study the Reader & the Task
Most student informants saw teachers’ expectations and criteria as
similar in very broad ways, but differing significantly in details. For
example, students expected courses to demand research in support of
theses or hypotheses in writing tasks, but they saw teachers differing
greatly in such matters as attention to mechanical correctness and
definitions of valid evidence. They felt that every class demanded
their effort to understand teacher idiosyncrasy. Feedback on their
writing early in a course they found vital in this quest.
Everyone
Agrees on the Terms, but They Don’t Agree on the Meanings
Faculty and students across disciplines are amazingly consistent in use
of terms to describe qualities of “good writing” in their majors. This
apparent consistency masks the wide variation in connotations of these
terms. Similarity of terms makes writing seem a much simpler matter
than it is, both for student and teacher. It leads students to put
faith in textbook formulas that are of little use in actual classes
Part of the complexity of terms comes from teachers' being influenced
in their assignments and standards by what we identified as five
different environments of which they are members as teachers and
scholars: the academy, the discipline, the sub-discipline or area of
interest, the specific local unit (with its own policies), and the
individual's unique history. What students usually see as teacher
"idiosyncrasy" is actually the confluence of these often identifiable
environments.
College
Writers Move to Proficiency through Stages of
Development
College writing growth is developmental; it can’t be rushed or “taken
care of” in one or two first-year courses. We saw great difference in
proficiency and understanding between student informants with limited
experience in writing in their major courses and those who had written
in a variety of courses at different levels.
Students
Credit Responsive Teachers for Their Growth as Writers
Students see teachers, by far, as the most important influences on
their writing development in the discipline. Reading of work in the
discipline is also important. Teacher feedback on writing is vital, our
informants said; our most proficient student writers wrote and spoke at
length about the importance of those teachers who had shown the most
interest in their writing.
Some
Implications of This Research for Teachers
1. Careful assignment design: students benefit from models, rubrics,
and
disciplinary examples of terms like “clear thesis” or “concise
sentences.”
Teachers across disciplines need to be prepared to help students
negotiate the general terms
they and other faculty often use to describe their expectations (e.g.,
"logic," "clarity," "evidence"). When very real differences are cloaked
in the language of similarity, it’s understandable that students rely
only on other cues to guide their writing (feedback on the first paper,
lecture styles, etc).
2.
When we ask for "original
thinking" or "your own conclusions," we need to show what this might
mean--especially in writing based on the research of others.
Students have internalized an
array
of different messages about
“voice” and “originality.” Many less-experienced college writers think
that “voice” and “originality”
are only desirable in English classes. Many don’t understand what
teachers mean when they ask for original thinking, especially when they
are writing from research. When we talk about "voice" or "original
ideas" with our students,
we need to explore with them all the ways that their voice(s) can be
heard no matter what course/major they are writing for and what it
might mean to be original in their chosen disciplines and in the
teacher's particular subdiscipline and course.
3.
We can benefit students by explaining
the methods, scope, and discourses of our branches and research fields
within the larger discipline.
Between the sparse
principles
of “academic writing” and the
truly idiosyncratic desires of the professor, there exist
unarticulated and unexamined (by both faculty and students) concepts of
the writing characteristics of “the discipline,” of
specialties within disciplines, and of local or institutional
policies and practices. If faculty wish to impart these concepts
to students, then they need much more clearly to articulate the ways of
thought, procedures, and formal structures of what they call “the
field”—and to differentiate these from more localized or
subdisciplinary practices that also affect what we assign and
expect. It's often helpful for teachers to describe their own
research interests and writing, so that students can begin to see how
our practices align with and differ from a general concept of the
discipline.
4. Feedback
to
students on their
writing is crucial to student understanding of the discipline and the
discourse.
We were gratified to find
that most of our focus group students
had teachers in their majors who gave them feedback on their writing
and, often, the opportunity to revise. "How else can we improve ?" some
said.
To a person, these students said
that feedback on the first paper of a
course was the most useful information they received about how to write
for a given teacher.
Proficiency essay writers
credited
the detailed commentary of specific
teachers in the major for giving them the most insight into how to
write in the
discipline.
5. We should
help students find and express
their passions for learning within the assignments we give.
All our faculty
informants
talked passionately about their scholarship and their disciplines;
moreover, all emphasized the priority of undergraduate students'
"engagement" with the
subject. Moreover, most department rubrics include "original thinking"
as a criterion for student writing.
BUT only our most proficient,
experienced student informants saw a connection between their passion
for learning and their learning the conventions of the discipline. Most
of our focus group informants saw meeting their professors'
expectations as requiring submergence of their own voices and
interests. "Either get the grade or do what you want; you can't do
both."
6. We should
give students opportunities to write reflectively on their growth as
writers.
We were impressed by the
maturity
and discipline-awareness of the small fraction of focus-group
informants who said that they
had been asked by teachers to write occasionally about their growth as
learners and writers. These were more likely to have a "third stage"
understanding of disciplines, as well as confidence to realize their
own goals in a disciplinary framework.
Welcome!
I've been a faculty
member at GMU
since
1975, the year I finished my Ph.D. in English Literature at
Northwestern
University. I began here as an adjunct professor assigned to English
101,
then became an assistant professor in 1976, an associate professor in
1981,
and a full professor in 1994. Along the way I've had the chance to
teach
many different courses, from composition to business and tech writing
to
classical
mythology to contemporary social structure to Shakespeare's comedies to
advanced nonfiction writing to graduate seminars in the teaching of
writing
and literature.