Undergraduate Writing Assignments: Learning Genres Across the Curriculum Susan Chaudoir, PhD Candidate, Interdisciplinary Studies Secondary Education and Writing Studies

 Research context: brief introduction to one writing assignment research project  My PhD research project: one case study of disciplinary writing assignments

 Post-secondary research in Department of Secondary Education  Interdisciplinary nature of writing assignment research  Professor Marg Iveson, Faculty of Education  Professor Roger Graves, Faculty of Arts, OIS  Dr. Gerri Lasiuk, Faculty of Nursing, RPN, RN, CMHPN(C)

 Writing Across the Curriculum, Dr. Roger Graves  SSHRC-funded, national study  Web-based data resource Two research activities: 1.Quantitative analysis 2.Qualitative inquiry

 Research questions: What assignments are students asked to write? How often? Do they differ by discipline? How are assignments structured?  What we found from 9 disciplinary studies:  Analyzed more than 1,700 writing assignments, 350 courses  Students write a lot: % of courses have writing assignments  Variety of genres: 13 to 54 different kinds of writing assignments  Disciplinary differences: length, feedback, criteria, audience, structure  Chaudoir, 2011; Graves & Chaudoir, 2011

 My research question: How do students learn the genres they are asked to write?  Case study of one discipline: nursing  8 case studies of student writing in higher education in US, UK, and Australia  Discipline-specific, content-based writing instruction,  On-going feedback, sequenced assignments, and  Assignment-focused, peer-group writing collaboration.

 Relationship of rhetorical genre studies (RGS) and activity theory (AT) to education research  Socio-cultural learning theory (Burke, 1957; Bakhtin, 1986; Vygotsky, 1978; 1986)  Genre as social action: social understanding of writing based on definitions, interpretation, action and reaction [not perception] of situated text (Bitzer, 1968; Miller, 1984, 1994)  Social rhetorical view of genre: students approach to the writing task and what the student writes (Artemeva & Freedman, 2008)  RGS and AT account for the evolving dynamics of learning to write through language and recurring situations, especially in textually- oriented systems of activity (Bazerman, 2004; Russell, 2012)

 Relationship of rhetorical genre studies (RGS) and activity theory (AT) to post-secondary learning  Learning processes  most effective when students link what to do with how to do it (Wells, 1999; Carroll, 2002)  Writing instruction  alternatively conceived as “development of resources that enable the learner to participate effectively and creatively in further practical, social, and intellectual activity of the student’s major area of study” (Wells, 1999, p. 48)

 RGS and AT frame two goals of my project:  Identify teaching expectations and concerns of instructors who create/teach the writing assignments; and  Document the learning experiences of students who attempt to learn how to write the document and/or perform the writing task based on the writing assignment prompt.  Case study using institutional ethnography  Textual analysis of documents,  Observations of writing instruction, peer-group writing collaboration  Interviews with students, instructors, writing-tutor

 My questions and queries  How genres are taught? Dominant genres? Peripheral genres?  How do instructors teach writing assignments? Motives?  In what ways do writing assignment prompts enable/constrain students to write the document or perform the writing activity?  Do learning outcomes/objectives link between:  Discipline >> degree programs >> courses >> writing assignments

YOUR QUESTIONS? Undergraduate Writing Assignments: Learning Genres Across the Curriculum

Artemeva, N., & Freedman, A. (Eds.) (2008). Rhetorical genre studies and beyond. Winnepeg, MB: Inkshed Publications. Bahktin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bazerman, C. (2004). Speech acts, genres, and activity systems: How texts organize activity and people. In C. Bazerman & P. Prior (Eds.), What writing does and how it does it: An introduction to analyzing texts and textual practices (pp ). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Beaufort, A. (2007). College writing and beyond: A new framework for university instruction. Logan, UT: Utah State Press. Bitzer, L. F. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1, Burke, K. (1957). The philosophy of literary form. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carroll, L. A. (2002). Rehearsing new roles: How college students develop as writers. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Graves, R., & Chaudoir, S. (2011). Assignments across the curriculum: A meta-analysis. Paper presented at the 62 nd Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, April 9, 2011, Atlanta, Georgia. Available on the WAC website under “Faculty and Research Presentations” at: Hawthorne, J. I. (1996). College students' perceptions of the efficacy of writing assignments. (Doctoral dissertation, University of North Dakota). ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database. (UMI ) Light, R. J. (2001). Making the most out of college: Students speak their minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miller, C. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70(2), Miller, C. (1994). Rhetorical community: The cultural basis of genre. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp ). London: Taylor & Francis. Rogers, P. (2008). The development of writers and writing abilities: A longitudinal study beyond and across the college-span. Doctoral thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara. Russell, D. R., Lea, M., Parker, J., Street, B., & Donahue, T. (2012). Exploring notions of genre in "academic literacies" and "writing across the curriculum": Approaches across countries and contexts. In T. M. Zawacki & P. M. Rogers (Eds.), Writing across the curriculum: A critical sourcebook (pp ). New York: Bedford/St. Martin's. Stierer, B. (2000). Schoolteachers as students: Academic literacy and the construction of professional knowledge within master's courses in education. In M. R. Lea & B. Stierer (Eds.), Student writing in higher education (pp ). London: The Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1986). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wake, B. (2010). Preparing students to write: A case study of the role played by student questions in their quest to understand how to write an assignment in economics. In C. Bazerman, R. Krut, K. Lunsford, S. McLeod, S. Null & P. Rogers (Eds.), Traditions of writing research (pp ). New York: Routledge. Wells, G. P. (1999). Dialogic inquiry: Towards a sociocultural practice and theory in education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. REFERENCES: Undergraduate Writing assignments: Learning genres across the curriculum Susan Chaudoir, Research Showcase, March 10, 2012