Writing-across-the-curriculum discourse community lines: Nature, criteria, and purpose in university classrooms

• Main Author: Haviland, Carol Peterson
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-1994
• Subjects: Higher education; Language; Language arts
• ISBN: 9798207912332

Writing-across-the-curriculum programs, which have focused chiefly on the differences that characterize writing in the various university disciplines, have encouraged faculty members and students to believe that while academicians function together within an academy and share some common ground, each discipline and its discourse is quite different from the other. This study argues that defining academic discourse communities principally by their disciplinary differences may obscure commonalities across disciplines that also may be important. It re-examines the primary WAC framework of discipline and proposes a second framework of pedagogy, asserting that the intersections of discipline and pedagogy are more useful than is either alone in explaining the discourse communities in which faculty members ask their students to write. As it reports an ethnographic study of two academic disciplines, accounting/finance and anthropology, the study probes two questions: (1) How do faculty members map and sustain the discourse communities in which their students must write, and (2) how may WAC projects help faculty members and students understand and describe what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how they might do it more successfully? It describes data gathered through interviews with faculty members, observations of classes, and reviews of course syllabi and of student writing. The interpretation of these data, which reveals similarities and differences that both observe and cross disciplinary lines, supports the addition of the framework of pedagogy to WAC considerations. It demonstrates that the inquiry into pedagogy can explain how faculty members theorize their roles, the roles of their students, and the nature of the curriculum. The study concludes by generalizing its work with WAC boundaries to a larger conversation about creating and using categories. It proposes that engaging the dualisms and contradictions found in the margins leads to a more fluid vision of discourse and other communities while it models productive boundary blurring for faculty members and students.