Chris M. Anson

Moving beyond the Academic Community: Transitional Stages in Professional Writing.

This qualitative study examined the transitions that writers make when moving from academic to professional discourse communities. Subjects were six university seniors enrolled in a special “writing internship course” in which they discussed and analyzed the writing they were doing in 12-week professional internships at corporations, small businesses, and public service agencies in a major metropolitan area. Participant-observer and case-study data included drafts and final copies of all writing that the interns produced on the job (including texts and suggested revisions by other employees), an ethnographic log of data and speculations arising from the group discussions, written course journals from each intern, transcriptions of taped, discourse-based and general interviews with the interns, and a final 15-page retrospective analysis of each interns writing on the job. Results showed a remarkably consistent pattern of expectation, frustration, and accommodation as the interns adjusted to their new writing communities. The results have important implications for the lateral and vertical transfer of writing skills across different communicative contexts.

Distant Voices: Teaching Writing in a Culture of Technology.

Sion some three thousand feet below, watching tiny airplanes take off from the airstrip and disappear over the shimmering ridge of alps to the north. Just below us is another chalet, the home of a Swiss family. At this time of day, they gather at the large wooden table on the slate patio behind their home to have a long, meandering lunch in the French Swiss tradition. Madame is setting the table, opening a bottle of Valais wine, which grandpere ritually pours out for the family and any friends who join them. As they sit to eat, the scene becomes for me a vision of all that is most deeply social in human affairs. They could not survive without this interconnectedness, this entwining of selves, the stories passed around, problems discussed, identities shared and nourished. For weeks, away from phones, TVs, computers, and electronic mail, a dot on the rugged landscape of the southern Alps, I have a profound sense of my own familial belonging, of how the four of us are made one by this closeness of being. Just now Bernard, the little boy who lives on the switchback above, has run down with his dog Sucrette to see if the kids can play. He is here, standing before us, his face smudged with dirt, holding out a toy truck to entice the boys. For now, it is his only way to communicate with them, poised here in all his Bernard-ness, his whole being telling his story.

Challenges in Learning Communication Skills in Chemical Engineering.

Communication across the curriculum initiatives face multiple curricular and pedagogical challenges that are especially appropriate for investigation within a scholarship of teaching and learning framework. Using qualitative methodologies, this study examined technical classes that emphasize speaking and writing. Four learning issues emerged in student reflection logs: integrating multidisciplinary information, managing varied audiences and feedback, aligning content and communication tasks, and addressing interpersonal team issues. Data indicated that students were resistant toward the incursion of communication in their engineering classes. Through reflective practice, teachers and cross-curricular consultants came to understand and address that resistance.

Writing across the Curriculum: An Annotated Bibliography

Acknowledgments Organization of the Bibliography Introduction Scholarship Bibliographies and Literature Reviews Collections and Special Issues History and Implementation Research Studies Theory and Rationale Pedagogy General Pedagogy The Arts and Humanities Math, Science, and Engineering The Social and Behavioral Sciences Business, Law, Finance, and Economics Textbooks Author Index Subject Index

Students’ Perceptions of Oral Screencast Responses to Their Writing Exploring Digitally Mediated Identities

This study explores the intersections between facework, feedback interventions, and digitally mediated modes of response to student writing. Specifically, the study explores one particular mode of feedback intervention—screencast response to written work—through students’ perceptions of its affordances and through dimensions of its role in the mediation of face and construction of identities. Students found screencast technologies to be helpful to their learning and their interpretation of positive affect from their teachers by facilitating personal connections, creating transparency about the teacher’s evaluative process and identity, revealing the teacher’s feelings, providing visual affirmation, and establishing a conversational tone. The screencast technologies seemed to create an evaluative space in which teachers and students could perform digitally mediated pedagogical identities that were relational, affective, and distinct, allowing students to perceive an individualized instructional process enabled by the response mode. These results suggest that exploring the concept of digitally mediated pedagogical identity, especially through alternative modes of response, can be a useful lens for theoretical and empirical exploration.

My Dinner with Calais

At the suggestion of a colleague, the narrator — a professor of oceanography — agrees to have dinner with Calais Steever, a professor of history from a nearby university, to talk about teaching. The conversation takes place in an informal but elegantly appointed bistro in a small city. Ever the skeptic, the oceanographer isn’t convinced at first that Steever’s passion for assigning students to write dialogues in courses across the curriculum would help his thoroughly fact-based, biologically oriented instruction. As the dinner proceeds, Steever shares examples of students’ dialogic writing from courses in such disciplines as philosophy, anthropology, biology, architecture, literature, chemistry, history, and political science. Slowly — but cautiously — the narrator begins to see possibilities for dialogic writing.