Considering Writer Identities and Agencies: Content Curation's Complex Composition
An enduring issue that writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines programs face is how to help faculty outside writing studies understand writing in their scholarly disciplines in ways that allow them to articulate rhetorical moves that are familiar to “insiders”. Our university writing program has turned to Content Curation Projects (CCPs) as an avenue for helping faculty engage the writing and thinking processes of their disciplines during our Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Academy.
Modeled on the National Writing Project Summer Institute, the WAC Academy seeks to develop a community of instructors of writing. The WAC Academy is open to all instructors at ECU, across all disciplines. During the Academy, participants will have time to read and write, prepare demonstrations of research-based model lessons involving writing, and talk to colleagues about techniques they have used successfully to help their students become better writers and thinkers.
In planning the 2013 WAC Academy, Dr. Will Banks and I revised the participant’s final product in order to create a more engaging, meaningful, and useful process and product. CCPs offer faculty a method to identify significant genres in their discipline, explain how they work (rhetorically and socially) in context, and explain why particular formats, values, and rhetorical moves common and valued. In other words, participants consider three questions: 1. What are significant genres in your discipline? (Identify) 2. How do these genres and their components function, rhetorically and socially? (Analyze) and 3. Why does the discipline function the way they do? (Explain)
These projects reflect the work of museum curators who identify a theme, select significant and related artifacts to display, contextualize the artifacts and theme, arrange the artifacts in a meaningful way within the theme, and curate the exhibit’s artifacts individually and in relation to the theme. In the process of creating a CCP, faculty consider the themes and concepts important to their discipline or field, identify significant types of writing and genres, consider how the genres work individually and as a whole, and narrate curate the types of writing individually and all together as a complete “exhibit”.
Inquiry Focus
Using discourse analysis to unpack one instructor’s language used in his CCP to discuss two writing assignments in an interdisciplinary, writing-intensive course, I seek to explore the student-writer and instructor-writer identities constructed. As a result of this initial examination, issues like the role of interdisciplinarity, self-directed learning, and instructors as reader-responder work together to form ---------------
Data/Artifacts
As a former participant of the WAC Academy, frequent writing program collaborator, and a mindful and savvy writer, Dr. Daniel Goldberg’s CCP was an ideal source for data collection. EXPAND ON
In Dr. Goldber’s curation of two writing assignments from his Introduction to Health and Humanities course ------
Role of Assignment
While curating this artifact, the assignment itself seems to serve as a mediating tool for the instructor, through which he can connect with and support his student writers. Rather than structuring himself or his students as acting in this context, the assignment is the subject enacting verbs.
Each [assignment] requires a little bit more independence, a little bit more self-directed learning. So it offers a little bit more creativity to the learner in selecting the topic and building the thesis as they move on… It’s designed to encourage confidence, especially with students who may not have had as much experience writing… It is to provide them with a direct stem to which they can really sort of grapple with and really focus their answers.
The assignment, rather than the instructor, requires independence and self-directed learning, offers creativity, encourages self-confidence, eases anxiety, and provides a direct stem. The assignment, as described by the instructor, is facilitating student learning while positioning the learner for success by setting them up to “grapple with and really focus their answers”.
Assignment #2 continues this theme as the assignment’s personification opens up space, responds to other literature, gives room for students to exercise intellectual faculties and think critically, and requires them to grapple with difficult tasks. While the creation of these assignments and the use of scaffolding and structuring of the assignments for student success is clearly a product of the instructor’s careful crafting, he does not directly take credit for it. Instead, it is the disembodied voice of the assignment bequeaths power to a text instead of those creating or negotiating it.
Construction of Student-Writer
The assignment’s actions also contribute to the construction of student-writer identities in the course while it also provides some insight into the instructor’s perspective of the student-writers’ abilities, feelings, and ___ when they enter this course, and the student-writer identity the instructor hopes to construct or contribute to through the course’s content and writing activities. Let’s return to the block quote above.
Each [assignment] requires a little bit more independence, a little bit more self-directed learning. So it offers a little bit more creativity to the learner in selecting the topic and building the thesis as they move on… It’s designed to encourage confidence, especially with students who may not have had as much experience writing… It is to provide them with a direct stem to which they can really sort of grapple with and really focus their answers.
In this small section of text, we can start to see the student-writer entering the class as lacking confidence and possibly having limited experience with writing. Later in this curation, the instructor (or the assignment) also describes a strategy to “ease the learner’s anxieties about writing”. But this text also reveals how the kind of student-writer he hopes they may become throughout the course: one who is a confident, independent, creative, and self-directed learner.
The instructor’s curation of assignment #2 continues to construct the student-writers identity while addressing some of the complexities of composing and encouraging student agency. Goldberg describes assignment #2 as one that
…opens up a little more space for learners to explore their own perspectives… [giving] the students a little bit more room to exercise their creative faculties and think about how they want to answer the question… And, of course, it requires students to actually grapple with the difficulties involved in writing a true persuasive essay form.
With the instructor’s on-going support and scaffolding, the assignment encourages student-writers to think critically about their topic and paper, developing their own perspective. This assignment’s the instructor’s desire to help student-writers evolve into confident, independent, creative, and self-directed learners. The instructor/assignment create opportunities for student-writers to consider their academic selves, exercising their “creative faculties” and thinking about “how they want to answer the question”. In his initial statement this persuasive writing assignment, he asserts that this task is intentionally less focused and a bit broader.
By inviting student-writers to think about their perspective on question(s), student-writers are encouraged to “exercise their creative faculties” to think about the content and focus of their composition, situate themselves in an academic community, and articulate their ideas on the issue, utilizing an effective, academic discourse. Utilizing and practicing this discourse not only affects their paper, but it is also affecting the student-writer identity <Holland et al. 169-179>. As they imagine this discourse community and its ongoing Burkean parlor conversation, they consider how they are situated within the community and conversation, the possible use and benefit of this genre and begin to embody their new, academic self.
Writing Isn't Easy
As the instructor curates the genre of persuasive writing, he introduces some of the complex and dynamic aspects of rhetoric and composition:
The persuasive essay is both personal and persuasive. It’s not simply a meditation. It’s not simply a piece of creative writing. In fact it is not a piece of creative writing although it is creative. But it’s also not completely an argument.
As Goldberg has expressed throughout his curation, as a teacher he wants to challenge these student-writers while also supporting them. In this section, he addresses a reality of writing: it is a messy process. <use and cite info from chp. 7 of Composing (Media)> He continues to discuss this topic by explaining,
This is not a philosophy paper. It’s not a logic paper. It’s somewhere in between. It challenges writers to really incorporate their own sort of authentic voice and to weave in and integrate their own personal experiences within the structure of a rigorous argument addressing a topic.
This discourse of ‘what it’s not’ in order to define what this kind of writing is reflects his earlier statements on the ambiguity of the assignment. But, as Goldberg explains, this is a purposeful use of un-clarity. As a result of ambiguity, the instructor hopes, “It challenges writers to really incorporate their own sort of authentic voice and to weave in and integrate their own personal experiences within the structure of a rigorous argument addressing a topic”.
Constructing an Instructor
In his heteroglossic discussion of the complexity and ambiguity of writing, Goldberg starts to directly build on certain aspects of his identity. While discussing the challenges of persuasive writing, he reveals more of his teacher-writer identity by offering a resource to his audience:
If y’all are really interested in looking into [the rigors of persuasive essays] further, go back and read Montaigne since he is the guy who actually invented the essay form, but you’ll see exactly that kind of thing in his essays: his own personal voice, his own personal judgment. That’s all the essays actually are. But he’s using authority, and he’s actually making arguments as well.
In this brief statement, Goldberg seems to be utilizing the marked, cultural resources for a kind of “self authoring” (Holland et al. 45). In this heuristic codevelopment, he simultaneously performs a cultural discourses contributing to his academic ethos and his status in the academic community of writing instructors by offering a relevant pedagogical resource for instructors and mentor text for student-writers, exemplifying his depth of knowledge of writing, the language of writing, and writing pedagogy. In other words, he is showing his membership to certain discourse communities.
Soon after this comment, he reveals another important construct of his academic identity and the values associated with it: interdisciplinarity. He explains, “The topic and the course itself, like almost everything I teach, are interdisciplinary. So the essays, to be done well, have to reflect such interdisciplinarity. And the best essays in this class they did so.” To expand on the implications of what interdiscplinary compositions may include, Goldberg provides examples of student topics, which include “deeply personal” narratives like encounters with health care systems along with themes like religion, gender, race, history, and ethics. In addition to these examples, he also curates what “the best writers” in an interdisciplinary composition do.
… the best writers really did a remarkable job of integrating insights, approaches, and evidence from all these different disciplines into a cohesive whole that is not actually reducible to the sum of it’s disciplinary parts.
Subject or Object?
Considering the objectifying and mediating language Goldberg used to curate his first two artifact, assignment #1 and #2, to discuss an interdisciplinary ideal he does not talk about an object (paper) or action (writing). Instead he describes and gives agency to the student-writer and the complexity of what they do.
In the very next line of his curation, Goldberg utilizes a dialogic perspective: “…the assignment forces students to come to grips with the dominance of biomedical and scientific paradigms in our sort of shaping our understandings of the world”. In this context, the instructor indicates the assignment’s agency over the student-writer while the student-writer is also active, creating meaning of complex concept in the course.
Goldberg goes on to curate some of the significant aspects of his discipline and course: “… these paradigms are actually so dominate – and this is one of the major themes that we explore in the course – that they are often invisible”. Relationship of interdisciplinary position and our understandings of identity ---- Making the invisible visible EXPAND ON
Interdisciplinary Membershipping
A significant purpose of his course design and writing assignments becomes clear when Goldberg comments, “This essay asks students to make the invisible visible. To come to grips with the dominance of biomedical and scientific paradigms. And then to be able to critically evaluate them”. The instructor and writing assignments work toward student-writers achieve a degree of intellectual and social belonging in the larger conversation of interdisciplinarity. In other words, the instructor’s objective is to facilitate the student-writer’s process of interdisciplinary membershipping in order to include student-writers in a social aspects of academic disciplining.
Riley (2006) discusses membershipping as a communicative practice involved in the negotiation of identity. His research examined membershipping strategies to examine a fundamental question in social interaction: “how do individuals go about signaling and recognizing the roles and discursive positions which they consider themselves… to be occupying in specific situations?” (Riley, 2007, 297). In other words, how do we negotiate identities?