Written Communication Jan 2024

Tracing Discursive Turbulence as Intra-active Pedagogical Change and Becoming

Ryan M. Ware ; Julie L. Zilles University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

This article reports on a mentoring case from a transdisciplinary, longitudinal writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) initiative in which the situated complexities of integrating new writing pedagogies were observed and supported. Considering this case through an agential realist lens, we introduce the concept of “discursive turbulence”: an emergent quality of situated semiotic activity produced from the continual mixing of discourses. Discursive turbulence can emerge in myriad and complex ways, including fits-and-starts of pedagogical development, mismatched discursive alignments, affective signs of struggle and intensity, and nonlinear patterns of change. Through a series of four vignettes, we illustrate discursive turbulence as it emerged while pedagogical changes around writing were being implemented by an environmental sciences professor. We suggest that discursive turbulence is to be expected in heterodisciplinary spaces, and we argue that attention to discursive turbulence will lead to more robust accounts of learning, becoming, and literate activity, as well as new ways of supporting pedagogical becoming.

Journal
Written Communication
Published
2024-01-01
DOI
10.1177/07410883231207105
CompPile
Open Access
Closed
Topics
writing pedagogy writing across the curriculum multimodality literacy studies
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