{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Engaged Writers & Dynamic Disciplines Podcast","description":"Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I\u2019m Mary Hedengren and every semester, I feel like it\u2019s New Year\u2019s Day. \u201cThis semester,\u201d I say, \u201ceverything\u2019s going to be different.\u201d I revise my classes, everything from switching two minor assignments to rehauling the entire curriculum. I try to create assignments that will catch my students\u2019 attention, prepare them for their other classes, and, because I teach dozens of students, be interesting to grade.   But how do I know if the assignments I find interesting are effective? Or even that the students will think they are interesting? In Engaging Writers and Dynamic Disciplines, Chris Thaiss and Terry Zawacki explore how students learn to write in their majors, and how instructors write in their disciplines. These two things are not synonyms. Disciplines are dynamic, even before you account for all of the interdisciplinary work that goes on between them. Thaiss and Zawacki interviewed scholars from across a wide variety of  disciplines and found that \u201cmany of our informants describe changes in their disciplines that allow scholars to work in alternative ways--ways that might formerly have been closed to them\u201d some of these scholars are hesitant about these new ways of writing, but many embrace them (44).   I remember the first time I wrote an article that was truly alternative. It was an article for Harlot about the biopower of zombies and I referenced everything from Foucault to World War Z to Joshua Gunn. I wrote about my personal experience dressing up like a zombie for a \u201ccapture the flag\u201d 5k and about buying a shirt off Etsy. And the whole thing was littered with hyperlinks and quirky footnotes and a half dozen pictures, which cost the journal nothing because the whole thing was exclusively online. This was a far cry from the time I literally sent three copies of an article in a manila folder, through the mail, to England for a more traditional journal. I\u2019m not the only one who has had such exhilarating experiences encountering disciplinary writing in new ways.   Because we remember the heady rush of talking about scholarly topics in slightly less than scholarly ways and the sheer joy of doing something new and \u201cfun,\u201d we might be tempted to assign these new forms of writing to our students, to show them the great diversity of our discipline. If I was able to write the first draft of \u201cThe Biopower of Zombies\u201d in one sitting, chuckling to myself in an airport terminal in Ohio, certainly my students would also delight in such open forms of scholarship, right?   According to Thaiss and Zawacki\u2019s research, \u201cthe undergraduate students we interviewed and surveyed from across majors showed much less desire to experiment with format and method in their disciplinary classes than to conform to their professors\u2019 expectations\u201d (92). It\u2019s maybe not surprising that scholars who are already pretty familiar with their field would have an easier time adapting to the variations than students who are just learning the ropes for the first time. But not all \u201calternatives\u201d are equal.   Experimenting with new ideas (eg \u201cIs our obsession with zombies a result of increased non-state organizations?\u201d) is different than having to learn a new format (e.g. casual academic tone with generous hyperlinks). Over all, Thais and Zawacki suggest, that students crave structure and predictability, knowing what the professor is looking for, even more than the wide-open freedom of many disciplines.  Think about it: the seasoned professor knows not just what\u2019s appropriate in biology or economics writing, but they also know what kinds of articles can be written by post-docs and what can be written by old-timers, they know what kind of writing different journals prefer. So professors, thinking about \u201cgood writing\u201d can actually be combining academic, disciplinary, subdisciplinary and personal writing preferences in ways that baffle students. Sometimes they over generalize and assume that one class taught them \u201cscience writing\u201d and sometimes they over patictularize, thinking that one teacher was just \u201cpicky.\u201d Students do the best they can with the limited expereince they have.   This is especially evident at the beginning of the semester. One of Thaiss and Zawacki\u2019s student informants pointed out that the first couple of assignments provide a lot of experience in what the class is supposed to be (125), and getting graded feedback provides a sense of not just what that professor is looking for, but what \u201ccounts\u201d in the field. While \u201cthe mature writer in a field has encountered a sufficient range of course environments to develop an over all sense of disciplinary goals and methods\u201d while novices \u201chave not yet encountered the array of exigencies and therefor genres that typify it\u201d (109). Following Perry\u2019s developmental stages, Thaiss and Zawacki suggest three stages in disciplinary writing: When a writer with experience in very few course\u201d comes up with generalized \u2018rules\u2019 When the writer encounters many different instructors and perceives inconsistency, which is \u201csometimes interpreted as teacher idiosyncrasy\u201d (110) A writer reaches an \u201carticulated, nuanced idea of the discipline\u201d (110). Over all, it\u2019s not surprising that Thaiss and Zawacki conclude that  students need both frequent writing in a variety of teachers and courses (in order to encounter that variety of a discipline) and the change to reflect on the choices they\u2019ve made and why to begin to process how those differences occur (121). Other prescriptions are include frequent and detailed feedback on writing, and explicitly teaching what are the \u201cgeneric academic\u201d principles of writing and what are discipline specific. None of these are radical sounding to those of us in composition, but they do remind me of all the things I need to change next semester. Next semester. Next semester everything\u2019s going to be different.   If you ever had a book inspire a change in your teaching, feel free to drop us a line at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com I\u2019d love to hear it. Until next week! ","author_name":"Mere Rhetoric","author_url":"http:\/\/mererhetoric.libsyn.com","html":"