Sojourning in Disciplinary Cultures: A Case Study of Teaching Writing in Engineering - Couverture souple

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Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 160732802X ISBN 13 : 9781607328025

Editeur : Utah State University Press, 2019

Synopsis

Sojourning in Disciplinary Cultures describes a multiyear project to develop a writing curriculum within the College of Engineering that satisfied the cultural needs of both compositionists and engineers at a large R1 university. Employing intercultural communication theory and an approach to interdisciplinary collaboration that involved all parties, cross-disciplinary colleagues were able to develop useful descriptions of the process of integrating writing with engineering; overcoming conflicts and misunderstandings about the nature of writing, gender bias, hard science versus soft science tensions; and many other challenges.<br /> <br /> This volume represents the collective experiences and insights of writing consultants involved in the large-scale curriculum reform of the entire College of Engineering; they collaborated closely with faculty members of the various departments and taught writing to engineering students in engineering classrooms. Collaborators developed syllabi that incorporated writing into their courses in meaningful ways, designed lessons to teach various aspects of writing, created assignments that integrated engineering and writing theory and concepts, and worked one-on-one with students to provide revision feedback. Though interactions were sometimes tense, the two groups--writing and engineering--developed a "third culture" that generally placed students at the center of learning.<br /> <br />Sojourning in Disciplinary Cultures provides a guide to successful collaborations with STEM faculty that will be of interest to WPAs, instructors, and a range of both composition scholars and practitioners seeking to understand more about the role of writing and communication in STEM disciplines.<br /> <br />Contributors <br /> Linn K. Bekins, Sarah A. Bell, Mara K. Berkland, Doug Downs, April A. Kedrowicz, Sarah Read, Julie L. Taylor, Sundy Watanabe

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Maureen A. Mathison is associate professor and former chair of the Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. She was awarded the Charles Phelps Taft Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cincinnati and has published in Communication Theory, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Literacy, Written Communication, and numerous edited volumes.<br />

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Sojourning in Disciplinary Cultures

A Case Study of Teaching Writing in Engineering

By Maureen A. Mathison

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2019 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-802-5

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Integrating Writing throughout One College, Many Departments Maureen A. Mathison, 
1. Sojourners and Third Cultures: Raising Cultural Awareness in Interdisciplinary Programs Maureen A. Mathison and Mara K. Berkland, 
2. Professors Designing Assignments as Relational Activity: A Baseline for Connecting Thinking, Learning, and Writing Maureen A. Mathison and Linn K. Bekins, 
3. Teaching (Each Other) (about) Writing Doug Downs, 
4. Locating Common Ground for Diplomacy: Using Critical Thinking to Teach Writing Sarah Read and Maureen A. Mathison, 
5. Moving toward Successful Interdisciplinary Integration in Team-Taught Courses: Building Cultural Bridges through Assignments Mara K. Berkland, 
6. "I Don't Have to Argue My Design — The Visual Speaks for Itself": A Case Study of Mediated Activity in an Introductory Mechanical Engineering Course Maureen A. Mathison, 
7. I See What You Mean: Mechanical Engineering Students' Use of Visuals in a Research Paper Assignment Sarah A. Bell, 
8. Ideologies of Gender: Culture Clash between the Disciplines April A. Kedrowicz and Julie L. Taylor, 
9. Intercultural Collaboration: Respect, Relationship, Responsibility, and Reciprocity Sundy Watanabe, 
10. Sojourning, Resistance, and Trust Maureen A. Mathison, 
References, 
About the Authors, 
Author Index, 
Subject Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Sojourners and Third Cultures

Raising Cultural Awareness in Interdisciplinary Programs

Maureen A. Mathison and Mara K. Berkland

Disciplines have long been theorized as cultures with distinct ways of embodying knowledge and approaches to problem-setting and solving (Becher 1981; Becher and Trowler 2001; Snow 1963). Like cultures they embrace patterns of thinking and doing that regulate interactions. In that sense, disciplinary socialization is similar to cultural socialization. "Learning to read and write [and conduct one's self] in academic settings occurs through extended experiences in those settings, by meeting the expectations of those situations, and gaining from the opportunities for participation they offer" (Bazerman et al. 2005, 8). Through disciplinary-specific interactions, students come to learn the "symbols or values [which] represent a constellation of meanings or interpretations that frame a group's understanding of the world and guide social behavior" (Martin and Hecht 1994, 236).

Henry Bauer (1990) articulates the uniqueness of disciplines in terms of their respective practices, including verbal, spatial and mathematical abilities; preferences for theory over experimentation; and even in approaches to pedagogy (216). Elaborating on the cultural variation across disciplines, he explains: "Chemists and historians are not the same sorts of people working at the same sorts of tasks with only the specific objects of work being different, as collectors of coins might differ from collectors of stamps, say; rather, chemists and historians differ as much as do Germans and Frenchmen [sic], whose differences of language are part-and-parcel of different intellectual, political, religious, and social habits" (215).

Increasingly faculty are being invited to participate in teaching disciplinary writing in contexts distinct from their own (Dannels and Housley Gaffney 2009; Reave 2004), a situation in which they often find their culture at odds with that of the new discipline; the culture of one discipline does not directly transfer to another. Further, it is difficult to anticipate. As Sue Dinitz et al. (1997) explain, "until faculty actually become involved. ... they may have difficulty conceptualizing the tensions that may emerge" (41).

Teaching in another discipline creates challenges that have the potential for miscommunication, particularly because of the variation across disciplinary cultures. In the foreword to his book Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Communication, William Gudykunst (2003, vii–viii) writes that while most researchers have identified intercultural communication as a field that examines interactions between peoples of different cultures, many are beginning to use more expanded notions of culture, including interactions that Gudykunst labels "intergroup communication" — the communication between "ethnic/racial groups, able-bodied/disabled communication, and intergenerational communication" and so on (vii–viii). In line with Gudykunst, we view interdisciplinary interactions––the "direct, face-to-face encounters between individuals of dissimilar cultural or subcultural backgrounds" (Kim 2001, 141)––as instances of intercultural communication, where disciplines constitute individual cultures.

Applying an intercultural communication and interdisciplinary studies framework lends an invaluable perspective to examine interdisciplinary relationships. The two approaches help illustrate the points we are making and enable us to create an awareness that might assist colleagues address differences as they arise throughout their collaboration. They also advocate for reciprocity of action, ensuring that no one partnering discipline assumes the power and/or responsibility of the interdisciplinary relationship.

In this chapter, we discuss our experiences as interdisciplinary sojourners, which we later use as a context for our unique application of intercultural theory. Next, we demonstrate the connections between disciplines and cultures before establishing the usefulness of an intercultural approach to collaborative work across disciplines. We then identify five intercultural factors that potentially impede interdisciplinary collaborations, and using these factors as a framework, discuss how they potentially impact participants and their goals. Finally, we offer five maxims to raise cultural awareness in order to help avoid and decrease interdisciplinary tension and, ultimately, to help create more successful projects.

The Turn toward Cultural Awareness

Historically, the majority of writing instruction for students has occurred as stand-alone courses (e.g., technical writing). In our case, however, the writing faculty were embedded within a mechanical engineering department. Together with engineering faculty, we codesigned a multicourse curriculum that spanned the degree; students performed writing and speaking throughout their design courses, from their first through their last semester (for a description of a model for the engineering curriculum, see Kedrowicz et al. 2005). Members of the WID and engineering team each contributed unique knowledge to the project, considering such things as what types of writing and speaking would enhance the undergraduate curriculum, the point at which those might best facilitate learning, and so forth. Our collaboration is best described as "synthetic interdisciplinarity," where according to Lisa Lattuca (2001), "the contributions or roles of the individual disciplines are still identifiable" (82).

Our approach to teaching and learning was based on situated learning theories, where students learn best in context, that is, in the situation for which the knowledge is relevant and applied (Brown, Seeley, and Duguid 1989; Engeström 1987; Lave and Wenger 1991; Russell 1997). The WID consultants, as they came to be called, were embedded within the culture of mechanical engineering, collaborating with their faculty to design assignments and evaluate student writing; attending classes; providing writing instruction; and working closely with students to provide feedback on and assistance with their writing.

In this new role the consultants became, in Michael Byram's words, "sojourners" (1997, 1). Sojourners are distinct from tourists in that while the tourist temporarily seeks that which has transcended time and change, the sojourner is placed in a situation that indefinitely affects change. While the tourist's life may be "enriched" by the experience, that of the sojourner and the culture in which he or she interacts is forever in transformation because of continuing interaction and influence. Culture becomes fluid rather than static. Byram (1997) explains the role of the sojourner as a catalyst for change: "The experience of the sojourner is one of comparisons, of what is the same or different, but compatible, but also of conflicts and incompatible contrasts ... the sojourner has the opportunity to learn and be educated, acquiring the capacity to critique and improve their own and others' conditions" (1–2).

The consultants taught in an unfamiliar part of campus in an unfamiliar discipline, with mechanical engineering faculty and students. As a result, they shared more common views about the construction of knowledge and its dissemination than did the consultants. Essentially, the consultants were engaging in an intercultural immersion experience, where one person enters a new culture and learns to adapt. In immersion, intercultural competence––whether rightly or wrongly––generally rests on the ability of the outside member (in our case, consultants) to adapt to his/her new surroundings, initially at a disadvantage as he or she struggles to become communicatively competent, while simultaneously performing in the new culture.

Collaborating across Disciplines

Collaboration among disciplines has increased in the past several decades. A search of the term "collaboration" overwhelms with its millions of hits; it is ubiquitous, a mainstay of almost every discipline as problems become more complex, demanding different types of expertise to solve them. In writing, the concept picked up traction with the publication of Kenneth Bruffee's 1984 article "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind.'" Drawing from Oakeshott (1962), Bruffee concluded that collaboration was beneficial for students entering the academy because "To think well as individuals, we must learn to think well collectively — that is, we must learn to converse well. The first steps to learning to think better, therefore, are learning to converse better and learning to establish and maintain the sorts of social context, the sorts of community life that foster the sorts of conversation members of the community value" (640). According to Susan McLeod (2001), Writing-across-the-Curriculum was an early adopter of collaborative learning theory. The phrase "Only Connect," taken from E. M. Forster, was an early motto of the writing movement. McLeod explains how those in WAC saw themselves as connecting disciplines, faculty members, and students (viii) to bring about fundamental change in the way writing was positioned in the university. Many tenets of WAC philosophy have been taken up by its sibling, WID.

In his book Academic Writing Consulting and WAC, Jeffrey Jablonski (2006) outlines the history and theory of collaboration in WAC/WID. Rather than viewing collaboration as a unified practice, Jablonski carefully maps out three unique models that have guided its practice: the traditional or commonsense collaborative mode, the collaborative philosophy mode, and the consulting model of collaboration. The potential success of the commonsense mode is characterized by the harmonizing aspects of personalities that allow for productivity. Scholarly collaborative writing generally typifies this type of collaboration. Participants in the collaborative philosophy of collaboration tend to engage equally and learn from each other throughout the process, more of a dialogic interplay between partners. Finally, a consulting model (not to be confused with our use of the term) tends to address collaboration through specific channels: workshops, writing center models, writing courses, and expert advice (31–44). According to Jablonski, the first two models tend to take the social interaction of collaboration for granted, while the third, the consulting model, is focused more on the administrative level, without particular attention to the interactions of participants. What all three models have in common, however, are the challenges that collaborative interactions can pose. These range from depth of content knowledge, to ideological differences, to unique pedagogical understandings of effectiveness (e.g., McCarthy and Fishman 1991).

Like WAC/WID, collaboration is the bedrock of contemporary engineering. An abundance of literature exists that elaborates its importance (e.g., Murphy, Davis, and Yurkovich 2009). Engineering students often work in intradisciplinary teams in the classroom to solve bounded engineering problems, but they also collaborate across disciplines to solve complex multidimensional problems (e.g., Terpenny et al. 2006). Professional engineers regularly collaborate with nonengineering experts, for example, in industry, government, and business to provide cleaner air, design safer infrastructures, and develop improved technical devices. And funding agencies today favor interdisciplinary teams because of their synergistic and innovative approaches for solving complex problems (Paletz, Smith-Doerr, and Vardi 2010). Learning to work with others is a timely hallmark of engineering professionalization, one that draws on the ability to be flexible in working with others.

Marie Paretti et al. (2009), however, identify a key difficulty for engineers in collaborating with those in writing. Drawing on Maura Borrego and Lynita Newswander (2008), Paretti et al. believe cognitive flexibility is the most important factor for successful collaboration as it allows for participants to "recognize, value, and adopt multiple epistemological frameworks; that is, they not only recognize other areas of expertise, but they recognize and can adjust to different ways of approaching, studying and disseminating knowledge" (79). Writing, Paretti et al. claim, stands apart from other contexts in which engineers collaborate because unlike other disciplines, writing is often not recognized as a "robust academic discipline" but as a skill lacking intellectual engagement. In other words, the value of writing is not directly viewed as solving complex engineering-related problems. As Bauer (1990) has articulated, practices are regulated by disciplinary members who often hold very highly differentiated perspectives and habits from those outside their own discipline. When they collaborate, differences in epistemologies and ideologies, as well as their concomitant expectations for performance, are highlighted, potentially causing tension.

Much of the discussion on disciplinary tensions has centered on the incompatibility or collision of practices. While first used to explain the conflict between academic and student literacies, Mary Louise Pratt's (1991) notion of "contact zones" has been employed to discern and bridge the differences one encounters across disciplines. These zones are known as the "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other" (34). Rolf Norgaard (1999), for example, employs Pratt's term to better understand how to rhetorically navigate and negotiate undergraduate disciplinary beliefs about expertise in engineering by "foregrounding the social dimensions" of writing (54). Charlotte Brammer, Nicole Amare, and Kim Sydow Campbell (2008) employ the term to alleviate difference through identifying commonalities, rather than differences, across disciplines. They argue that the "'culture shock' of writing faculty working across the curriculum can be averted by helping writing teachers develop a better understanding of colleagues in other disciplines and their attitudes toward writing" (12).

"Culture shock" remains a central challenge when members of different disciplines collaborate. Anson's (2002) casebook aptly illustrates some of the situations that regularly occur when collaborating in other disciplines, from students (and we believe professors, too) believing in the separation of form and content (Moore Howard 2002), to issues of determining the 'who's, when's and how's' of instruction (Zeleznik et al. 2002). While suggestions of negotiating expertise and finding common ground can attenuate some of the tensions that may occur, few researchers have approached the "clash of cultures" through examining the day-to-day interactions between members of distinct disciplinary cultures as they collaborate.

To date, approaches to improving interdisciplinary collaboration tend to emphasize the relational aspects of interacting and mentoring when engaging in cross-curricular teaching. Deanna Dannels (2005), drawing from Keller's 1983 biography of biologist Barbara McClintock, advocates an approach with a "sincere willingness to 'lean in'" (3), in order to develop a sensibility toward the "organism," which for Dannels would be the disciplinary context and associated practices into which she is immersing herself. J. M. Zeleznik et al. (2002) offer another approach for collaborating. They advocate a method for interdisciplinary mentoring, in which members of the disciplines are "'given the chance to learn from each other as [they] seek a common goal" (231). In this way, dialogue is ongoing, with opportunities to provide cultural instruction regarding assumptions about disciplinary expectations.

Dannels (2005) rightfully articulates the necessity for opening one's self up to another, much like an anthropologist whose goal is to move from an etic to an emic perspective when studying a culture; only in understanding the phenomenon from an insider perspective can one ably discern what and how things mean in particular contexts. "Leaning in" is a starting point for an interdisciplinary collaborative stance but, as we argue, only a starting point, for it addresses WID from the perspective of WID and not the partnering discipline. What is lacking, at least in the discussion, is the reciprocity of commitment and action from the other.

Interdisciplinary mentoring supports the mutual sharing and respect of knowledge, as it emphasizes the more constructive aspects of collaboration. Mentoring tends to focus on the conscious education of interdisciplinary collaborators and entails ongoing negotiation from their respective perspectives. While important, this approach, too, has limitations as it addresses issues as they arise, but does not, in anticipation, proactively address them.

(Continues...)

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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Utah State University Press
• Date d'édition: 2019
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 160732802X
• ISBN 13: 9781607328025
• Reliure: Broché
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 226
• Éditeur: Mathison Maureen
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne