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.

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.

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.

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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

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