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CHAPTER 1
Writing about Writing
A History
Barbara Bird, Doug Downs, I. Moriah McCracken, and Jan Rieman
The central strategy of writing about writing curricula — the element that unites the many approaches to writing instruction described in this book — is the course's focus on writing. The object of study in the course, the subject that students' writing focuses on, is some aspect of writing, writers, discourse, literacy, rhetoric, or related subjects. Since contemporary discussion on this approach to writing began in the mid-2000s, that has been the primary insight or innovative factor in this approach to writing instruction.
Yet, as in seemingly every aspect of composition pedagogy, the field has walked this way before, or, what's old(er) is new(er): WAW approaches are only the latest iteration of pedagogies with the insight that students would benefit from direct access to discussion about writing. Throughout modern composition studies (usually dated from 1963), theorists and teachers in our field have repeatedly raised the question, or offered the insight, of what could be learned if we taught not simply how to write but about writing through the eyes of practitioners and researchers.
All the Way Back
It's easy to overlook the fact that the most central works of rhetorical antiquity were effectively writing about writing approaches, focused on student discussion of primary texts on rhetorical discourse. Though we tend to see Aristotle's On Rhetoric as a text that discusses his rhetorical theory, the fact that it is actually compiled from his students' notes makes clear that Aristotle's mode of teaching rhetoric was not simply to show his students how to compose and deliver good speeches, but to make the course about rhetoric. Isocrates assigned texts on rhetoric, a pattern that also inhered in Quintilian's pedagogy, as he assigned his students Cicero's De oratore, the leading scholarly work on rhetorical theory of the day. This pattern of assigning students rhetorical texts to discuss continued through the Middle Ages, as demonstrated when Robert of Basevorn's The Form of Preaching (one of the early genre studies) was assigned to students not only to help them practice but to study the methodology and invention of sermons. Other rhetorical theory studied by students of rhetoric in Renaissance times included Cypriano Suarez's Jesuit rhetorical text De arête rhetorica (Abbott 2001) and Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique (Herrick 2009). One of the most widely used primary texts of this time was Erasmus's Copia, which included not simply advice on "how to invent and compose" but also extensive, cutting-edge rhetorical theory. Moving into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, widely popular works such as George Campbell's (1776) Philosophy of Rhetoric, Hugh Blair's (1783) Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, George Jardine's (1825) Outlines of Philosophical Education, and Richard Whately's (1834) Elements of Rhetoric and (1827) Elements of Logic and demonstrate a rich heritage of rhetoric and writing teachers making original rhetorical theory the content that students read, discussed, listened to, and wrote about.
These works were not simply "rhetorics" as we think of the contemporary textbook genre, which is largely understood as abstracting much older scholarly study of rhetorical theory and writing research into boiled-down how-to advice: no longer scholar-to-scholar communication that directly generates the knowledge driving the field. Rather, they were the primary texts that themselves developed and asserted state-of-the-art knowledge of rhetorical interaction. Students were encountering primary "research" (new philosophies of rhetoric and communication and observed results). This is the crucial distinction that the current turn in writing about writing pedagogy makes: the studied subject of the course is the work of people making knowledge — whether by reporting thoughtfully and deliberately on their own practices or by researching and theorizing others' practices through firsthand observation. In contemporary terms, this move from a text like The St. Martin's Guide to Writing (Axelrod and Cooper 1997) to a text like Donald Murray's "All Writing Is Autobiography" is a shift from presenting students with the second- or third hand reduction of existing knowledge to presenting them with the in-the-moment primary generation of knowledge. In a sense, then, this move returns students to the classical roots of and strategies for rhetorical instruction. The continuing principle is that students need to study — read, discuss, and write about — the what of rhetoric and writing to be fully equipped as an empowered rhetor.
Contemporary Composition Studies
Modern composition studies date from three sources: the advent of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (1950); rigorous research methods, such as those pioneered by Richard Braddock and George Hillocks, on the nature of writing and the effectiveness of various approaches to writing instruction (the early 1960s); and the expressivist and process movements in composition pedagogy (mid/late 1960s), including Rohman and Wlecke's 1964 insights on prewriting.
Particularly stemming from those expressivist and process movements, numerous calls for writing students to attend to public statements of practicing writers about the nature and activity of writing peppered the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Donald Murray's A Writer Teaches Writing (1968), Ken Macrorie's Uptaught (1970), and Peter Elbow's Writing without Teachers (1973) all insist, in some measure, that if writers learn from the articulated experience of other writers it will take them much farther than pronouncements from rhetorics and teachers who propound rules. By the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, Elbow and Pat Belanoff's A Community of Writers (1989) and Nothing Begins with N (1991) echoed these calls, stressing the value of writing students encountering what practicing writers have to say about the act of writing and their strategies for it. Writing professors throughout this time brought the occasional texts from burgeoning research on writing into classrooms — in our own writing classes as college students, for example, Macrorie, Richard Ohmann's (1979) College English classic "Use Definite, Specific, Concrete Language," and Winston Weathers's (1976) work on Grammar A and Grammar B. The approach to writing instruction that featured writers talking about writing found apexes in 1999 and 2001, with Wendy Bishop's The Subject Is Writing and Bishop and Pavel Zemliansky's The Subject Is Research. These texts featured writers and researchers penning pieces written specifically to and for undergraduate readers on various challenges and issues related to writing and researched writing. These were followed by one of the fullest textbook instantiations of WAW pedagogy to date, Elizabeth Sargent and Cornelia Paraskevas's 2005 Conversations about Writing: Eavesdropping, Inkshedding, and Joining In. This collection anthologized significant writers-on-writing statements and researchers-on-writing articles to offer students a full spectrum of discussion about various aspects of writing.
Another line of reasoning that developed throughout the 1990s and early 2000s was less interested in writers talking about their own writing processes and more interested in creating encounters for writing students with various apparatuses for theorizing and researching writing that had emerged over the preceding thirty years in composition studies. This movement is actually traceable to a literary approach to composition: Bartholomae and Petrosky's (1986) Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts: Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course. In it and the resulting Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, the two scholars argued that even developmental writers could manage, and would benefit from, direct encounters with very difficult texts, including scholarly texts that perform criticism of complicated literary texts. In creating a successful and widely used composition curriculum based on these principles, Bartholomae and Petrosky articulated an enduring principle eventually embodied in the current turn of writing about writing approaches: that students can, and should, engage directly with scholarship on the studied subject of a writing course. (This ethic then emerged in already-mentioned WAW texts by Bishop and by Sargent and Paraskevas.)
One of the first scholars to articulate a similar value for composition studies research itself was David Russell, in Joseph Petraglia's (1995) collection arguing against general writing skills instruction. Russell reasoned that most college composition courses, with the institutional mandate of teaching students "how to write" universally, were doomed (by the rhetorical principle stating that writing is situated within specific communities and varies widely across them) to fail unless they stopped trying to teach how to write and instead studied the theory and research of the field about writing in order to help students better understand the nature of writing and what they would need to learn in future writing settings in order to write successfully. Russell, though, proposed no specific curriculum for such a course. Anne Beaufort came closer in her 1999 study Writing in the Real World: Making the Transition from School to Work, identifying five specific knowledge domains in which students could learn concrete findings from composition and rhetoric that demonstrably aid college graduates in new writing situations: discourse community, subject matter, genres, rhetorical situation, and writing process knowledge. Beaufort demonstrated the power of mindful rhetorical articulation of declarative knowledge in these domains for boosting transfer, and was one of the earliest to advocate for teaching such knowledge directly and explicitly in order to foster learning transfer. And in 2003, John Trimbur's Composition Studies article "Changing the Question: Should Writing Be Studied?" suggested that composition pedagogy as a field had moved from the questions "Can writing be taught?" and "How can writing be learned?" to "Should writing be studied?" essentially a movement "from the workshop to the seminar room" (23). In Trimbur's terms, "The historical and theoretical construction of the first-year course, with all of its debates about literacy, rhetoric, culture, and technology ... laid the groundwork for a curriculum devoted to the study of writing" that would serve as "an intellectual resource for undergraduates" (23).
Indeed, after early moves in the 1990s, in the early/mid-2000s many members of the field were creating curriculum and texts for students that materialized the value of our field's knowledge for students. Linda Flower's (1993) Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing articulated her and others' work at Carnegie Melon, offering students the language of her socio-cognitive understanding of writing. Bonnie Sunstein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater's (2001) Fieldworking textbook brought professional research methods to an audience of first-year composition students even more accessibly than Mary Sue MacNealy's (1998) already usable Strategies for Empirical Research in Writing. Both works not only invited but expected students to use the methods of writing researchers to build their own knowledge of writing. Nancy DeJoy's 2004 Process This: Undergraduate Writing in Composition Studies explicitly described an approach to writing instruction in which students learned about writing by research and writing into the field. While that book was in press, Debra Frank Dew's 2003 WPA: Writing Program Administration article "Language Matters: Rhetoric and Writing I as Content Course" was articulating the value of writing about writing composition courses for raising students' awareness of the existence of a field of professionalized writing research. By 2009, Laurie Grobman's "The Student Scholar: (Re)Negotiating Authorship and Authority" theorized students as "new, emerging writers, not outsiders begging to be let into a community that needs them as outsiders to function" but insiders (188).
Finding Our Ways to WAW
Variously, these scholarly and teacherly conversations brought each of us editors to explore WAW approaches in our own classrooms. Based on Jardine's "First Philosophy" course, Barbara initially attempted an updated version drawing on contemporary writing theory in the fall of 2003. Meanwhile, in 2002 Doug was working from Russell's challenge to reframe FYC as disciplinary guidance on (essentially) how to learn to write later, and Bartholomae and Petrosky's evidence that first-year students could thrive on complex disciplinary readings to develop a spring 2003 pilot of the course he eventually described in his and Elizabeth Wardle's CCC article (2007). That article caught the attention of the field as a comprehensive articulation of a range of principles of which many had been more individually articulated in the works previously cited. Jan learned of the approach in conversations with other writing scholars who were considering it (Mark Hall and Tony Scott) and, coming from a PhD in modern British literature, her gradual shift to feeling like and being a rhetoric and composition specialist coincided with her introduction to a WAW curricular approach. Moriah became aware of WAW pedagogy from a presentation on an MA student's instantiation of a WAW curriculum that led to FYC student writing that amazed her. For her, the combination of Grobman's, Russell's, and Trimbur's articulation of the reality of, and need for, this shift in pedagogy, which make students participants in developing knowledge about the nature of writing and its workings, was persuasive.
While many faculty who are currently employing WAW pedagogies in their own courses and in their writing programs might point to Downs and Wardle's research as a motivator for their work, in fact the intellectual roots of writing about writing run long and deep in the field, and as we have found in our own paths to WAW and as many of the pieces in this collection suggest, the progenitors of what we are currently calling WAW are widely varied and diverse, tracing from many areas of the field. That diversity was reflected in early research on contemporary WAW approaches conducted in 2009 and 2010 by Downs and Wardle (2012). Survey responses led them to a three-category taxonomy of major WAW approaches, emphasizing literacy and discourse, language and rhetoric, and writers and their practices (140). Several years later, our work in compiling this collection suggests that so much diversity exists in course designs and purposes that it might be impossible to taxonomize. Newer scholarship on transfer and "teaching for transfer" (Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak 2014) as well as on threshold concepts (Adler-Kassner and Wardle 2015) are motivating approaches as well, as chapters in this book demonstrate. So too is composition's turn to translingualism and its increasing awareness of multimodality.
Among reasons for the current wide implementation of WAW approaches — and for the breadth of approaches to writing instruction that find their way under its umbrella — is this deep and rich history, from antiquity and through every decade of composition studies' modern existence, of calls, theories, and curricula that pull our attention from "how-to" instruction to study "about" writing and rhetoric.
CHAPTER 2
Threshold Concepts as a Foundation for "Writing about Writing" Pedagogies
Elizabeth Wardle and Linda Adler-Kassner
"Writing about writing" courses enact a foundational principle: that "our field has particular research- and theory-based views of writing, how it works and gets accomplished. Some of that research and theory can and should be taught to undergraduates, ... and learning about writing in this way has a positive impact for student writers" (Wardle and Downs 2013). This approach extends from three premises: (1) postsecondary institutions are constituted, in part, by the disciplines within them; (2) disciplinary identities are constituted when individuals participate in a shared knowledge base and shared practices (i.e., ways of defining and investigating questions, and ways of representing what is learned) related to the development and interrogation of that base; and (3) courses in disciplines engage students in exploration of both knowledge and practices from that discipline.
While there is no single writing about writing curriculum, there are core principles and concepts that extend from these premises that form the foundation of a curriculum and upon which individual instructors build when they construct courses about writing as a subject of study. These are linked to our discipline's knowledge base — what we have called, borrowing from Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land (2006b, 2006c), the "threshold concepts" of writing studies. Threshold concepts are "concepts critical for continued learning and participation in an area or within a community of practice" (Adler-Kassner and Wardle 2015, 2). Meyer, Land, and Baillie (2010) write that an approach to learning and teaching rooted in threshold concepts "builds on the notion that there are certain concepts, or certain learning experiences, which resemble passing through a portal, from which a new perspective opens up, allowing things formerly not perceived to come into view. This permits a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something, without which the learner cannot progress, and results in a reformulation of the learners' frame of meaning" (ix).
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