Using a mixed-methods, multi-institutional design of general education writing courses at four institutions, this study examined genre as a key factor for understanding and promoting writing development. It thus aims to provide empirical validation of decades of theoretical work on and qualitative studies of genre and the nature of genre knowledge. While showing that both simplistic and nuanced genre knowledge promote writing development, our findings suggest that nuanced genre knowledge correlates with writing development over the course of a semester. Based on these findings, we propose an expanded view of Tardy’s four genre knowledge components and argue for their explanatory power. We recognize these genre components can be cultivated by using three particular strategies: writing for nonclassroom audiences, using source texts explicitly to join existing disciplinary conversations, and cultivating two types of metacognitive awareness (awareness of the writing strategies used to complete specific tasks and awareness of one’s levels of proficiency in particular types of writing knowledge). Findings can be used to enrich first-year or upper-division writing curricula in the areas of genre knowledge, audience awareness, and source use.

Researching writing-related dispositions is of critical concern for understanding writing transfer and writing development. However, as a field we need better tools and methods for identifying, tracking, and analyzing dispositions. This article describes a failed attempt to code for five key dispositions (attribution, self-efficacy, persistence, value, and self-regulation) in a longitudinal, mixed methods, multi-institutional study that otherwise successfully coded for other writing transfer factors. We present a “study of a study” that examines our coders’ attempts to identify and code dispositions and describes broader understandings from those findings. Our findings suggest that each disposition presents a distinct challenge for coding and that dispositions, as a group, involve not only conceptual complexity but also cultural, psychological, and temporal complexity. For example, academic literacy learning and dispositions intersect with systems of socio-economic, political, and cultural inequity and exploitation; this entwining presents substantial problems for coders. Methodological considerations for understanding the complexity of codes, effectively and accurately coding for dispositions, considering the four complexities, and understanding the interplay between the individual and the social are explored. We describe how concepts from literacy studies scholarship may help shape writing transfer scholarship concerning dispositions and transfer research more broadly.

everal of the pieces in LiCS' inaugural issue warn against easy valorization of marginalized groups' community-based literate practices (Flannery; Horner; Parks; Trainor). Bruce Horner cautions that fetishizing these and digital literate practices re-instates the autonomous model of literacy critiqued by new literacy studies scholars. Such fetishization presumes that liberatory power inheres in these literacies. This fetishization fails to join marginalized groups in using literacy to transform inequitable social relations (Horner 5-6). Similarly, Kathryn Flannery affirms community-based literate practices but argues that compositionists must emphasize the value of academic literacies, as do Steve Parks and Jennifer Seibel Trainor.

By analyzing Zen guided meditations, I argue that literacy researchers can improve the field’s conceptual tools by investigating experiential knowledge. Using work on procedural knowledge and the emotional bases of perception, cognition, and decision making, I show that experiential knowledge drives perceptions and action, thus shaping subjectivity. Because subjectivities (re)constitute larger systems, scholars should investigate how literacy interacts with experiential knowledge to learn whether and how it mediates personal and systemic change. To further such efforts, I show how some literacy practices use conceptual and procedural knowledge to revise experiential knowledge, and I outline an experiential approach to studying literacy.

Based on an ethnographic study of a writing course taught by a talented instructor who integrated process and critical pedagogy approaches, I argue that many students actively engage with the concerns of critical pedagogy when the classroom ethos strongly supports their agency’ their ownership of their developing ideas and texts.

This paper draws on two sources to theorize gender literacy. First, it examines several influential theories of social change embedded in community literacy scholarship. Next, it uses two of these theories to analyze qualitative data from an after-school program. In this program, university students mentored Latina middle-school students to promote both gender literacy and academic literacy. Based on this analysis, it argues that (1) only a collaborative, negotiated approach can promote effective social change, (2) that such efforts must include reflexive work by researchers to produce viable negotiations, and (3) that this approach highlights the intersection between pragmatic and ethical concerns that underlies effective social change.

I argue that literacy studies needs to define the role of peace in our efforts to pursue social justice. Drawing on the work of Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, I show that promoting peace is the means, as well as the end, of working toward social justice. Further, I demonstrate that the process of transforming alienation into connection is a crucial step in fostering peace. Using this framework, I analyze ethnographic data on one highly successful writing instructor's classroom literate practices to illustrate a pedagogical approach that helped shift both students and teacher from alienation to connection.

Discusses the relation between professional training and a humanities education. Notes that the humanities in general education and English studies in particular face pressure, in the wake of poststructuralism, to address extra-academic audiences--particularly working-class, working-poor, and lower-middle-class families--with a revised articulation of what a liberal arts education offers.

Preview this article: Responses to "Traditions and Professionalization: Reconceiving Work in Composition", Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/52/2/collegecompositionandcommunication1420-1.gif

David Flanagan, Robert von der Osten, Gwen Gorzelsky, Howard Tinberg, Ellen Cushman, Five Comments on "Students' Goals, Gatekeeping, and Some Questions of Ethics", College English, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Feb., 1998), pp. 210-219

Preview this article: Comments & Response: Five Comments On "Students' Goals, Gatekeeping, And Some Questions Of Ethics", Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/60/2/collegeenglish3681-1.gif