What is Writing in Undergraduate Anthropology? An Activity Theory Analysis

How students learn to write in the disciplines is a question of ongoing concern in writing studies, with practical implications for academia. This case study used ethnographic methods to explore undergraduate writing in two upper year anthropology courses at a Canadian university over one term (four months). Student and professor interviews, classroom field notes, surveys, and students’ final papers were analysed using a framework drawn from activity theory and informed by genre theory. Four themes emerged from the data: anthropology as school; the familiar vs. unfamiliar; reading; and hidden rhetoric. Findings suggest students approach disciplinary work primarily as students rather than emerging professionals, and this role is adopted because it is familiar and few opportunities are provided to practice other professional activities. Extensive reading was seen as important by students and professors. Students demonstrated high skill levels in finding and using sources, but expressed frustration and resistance to the use of discipline-specific jargon, especially that of theoretical/sociocultural anthropology. While professors linked extensive reading with writing development, students did not make this connection. The rhetorical nature of literacy tasks was largely overlooked or hidden, and explicit instruction on disciplinary writing was infrequently provided to students, who felt they were expected to already know how to write research papers. Analysis of student papers showed a variety of rhetorical moves in their introductions, though familiar academic moves such as including a thesis statement were seen frequently while more sophisticated moves such as establishing ethos were little seen. Papers that used more sources and were longer received higher grades. Overall, students demonstrated a range of levels of writing development and disciplinary enculturation. The activity theory framework used in this project was useful in providing a model to structure analysis. Its explanatory power, however, is limited unless an alternate conceptualization of activity (such as Ilyenkov’s) is used that integrates the notion of genre as social action. In conclusion, adequate study of activities such as disciplinary writing requires theoretical and methodological complexity and is best conducted in research collaborations that include expertise in a variety of methods and from a variety of approaches

Analiza opowiadań kanadyjskich nauczycieli pisania akademickiego: zbiorowa autoetnografia

Writing instruction in Canadian universities takes a variety of forms. While there are few formal departments for writing studies, many institutions do have a writing centre – a place that offers writing instruction to varying degrees. The writing centre may be housed within a department, a library, or within a student services unit. Its position within a university may indicate the degree to which writing is valued by the administrative body. The goal of our paper is to share insights into the ways that writing professionals perceive, work in, and adapt to current demands for writing instruction in higher education. Using a collaborative ethnographic approach, three scholars at different career stages explore their experiences with writing centre work. Using data consisting of individually written reflections, our analysis revealed four major themes: (a) initial experience with writing centres, (b) community, (c) frustrations and tensions at work, and (d) mentorship. In this paper, we discuss our findings within the framework of positioning theory in order to understand how we position ourselves as scholars, mentors, and educators, and how we are positioned by others within the fields of writing studies and higher education. This study raises awareness about the value of writing centre professionals’ contributions, the place of mentorship within higher education, and the support required for continued writing centre work.3833134520Studia Edukacyjn

Learning About Plate Tectonics Through Argument-Writing

In a quasi-experimental study (N=60), grade 7/8 teachers students were taught to write arguments in content-area subjects. After instruction, students drew on document portfolios to write on a new topic: “Do the continents drift?” In a MANCOVA, students who participated in argument instruction scored significantly higher than a control class on the combination of dependent variables. A stepwise discriminant analysis indicated that instruction most strongly affected argument genre knowledge, which in turn accounted for variance in the other dependent variables. The features of argument texts that were most strongly associated with science learning were: the number of argument moves, the number of science propositions taken up from source documents, text length, and text coherence. These results support a constructivist model of writing to learn in which students use genre knowledge to select information from source documents and construct genre-specific relationships among ideas