It won't really enhance the experience but it's a pretty good excuse to listen to Floyd.
So, the thematic nature of my life seems to have continued this week though the theme has changed. This week, instead of writing an essay about identity in writing, I'm writing a paper about composition's place in academia as a whole. Since writing my blog entitled "The Great Disconnect" I've noticed that there has been a lot about us, them, and we. Myself included! So, now that my status as a hypocrite has been covered, I would now like to try and recapture the essence of said disconnect since I've put in some relevant research towards it.
As last week, I was inspired to write in response to Bermuda's last blog. Go check it out, it's an evaluation of the elements of pedagogy; a subject that a lot of the masthead is debating over at the moment (and I encourage you to become part of it). He wrote that misunderstandings are created between majors such as science and English because they hold distinctly different value systems. Where science values the concrete, English values justified ideas. However, both departments are concerned with a level of "correctness." The problem is that the two departments are contributing to two vastly different discourse communities. It is these communities that set the criteria for correctness. So here, I would like to argue that this gap between communities can be bridged through cooperation and the university can be one big happy family.
It's a pretty big misconception that scientific majors are simply taught to regurgitate information. Their assignments are very similar to ours, in their papers they are instructed to apply theories and weigh evidence in a clear and concise way. It does require critical thinking, it's the subject matter that doesn't translate into the English department. Luckily, we have people bridging this gap. Discipline specific writing is on its way. In 2005 applied linguists from the Northern Arizona University set out to create a partnership between the chemistry department and the English department. This experience was documented in a collaborative article entitled "Creating and validating assessment instruments for a discipline-specific writing course: and interdisciplinary approach." I know what you're thinking, "that sounds rigid as hell," but actually it's pretty enlightening and covers the frictions that departments face when they need to compromise with each other. The key is approaching the situation with an open mind, the linguists went in ready to adapt a writing style to the chemists rather than overturning everything in the chemistry discourse community. They implemented a testing program that asked chemistry students to write essays that synthesize the ideas from up to six articles at a time. These were not graded on the terms of right and wrong, but rather to the point that a student justified his/her idea.
Teaching writing across the curriculum not only serves major pedagogical purposes but it also allows students to actively contribute to their own communities in a cohesive and effective way. So though the end game of the departments may be different, the need to convey them remains the same but the method in which they are conveyed seems to differ. By cooperating with other disciplines the method seems to overlap at many points. I think it's necessary for educators of composition to be able to show students that writing is an asset to any discipline while also accepting that not every piece of academic writing needs to be structured like a literary analysis. Hell, the over structured writing in freshman comp even turns me off the subject.
Anycrap, this is all coming of a bit dry to me so I'm gonna open up for some questions and comments. Here're a few: By merging disciplines to we risk watering down both of them in order to meet the standards of the other? Should we just become experts in our own respective fields and pay little mind to the ones that don't apply to us? Do we really need to coddle science majors? Are we really so different after all?
I tried,
-Rainamoinen
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