by the WIC Team

Dr. Vicki Tolar Burton, Professor of English and Director of the Writing Intensive Curriculum, retires after 29 years at Oregon State University at the end of 2019. WIC Interns Matt Fuller, Alex Werndli, and Regan Breeden, and WIC GTA Marisa Yerace, sat down with Vicki to discuss her work, experiences, and legacy as a writing teacher, rhetoric scholar, and Writing Program Administrator.

On the Writing Intensive Curriculum at OSU

What drew you to WAC/WID studies?

I think I have an interdisciplinary mind, and I’ve always looked at things from multiple directions. I’ve had jobs where I was working in different environments, from labor law administration to the National Institutes of Health. I saw different kinds of discourse, and they all interested me. So Writing Across the Curriculum felt like a good fit for me from the start. This job requires rhetorical sensitivity, specifically an understanding of audience and context and an ability to persuade people to do the right thing for their students, which I also enjoy.

How have you articulated the value of the WIC program to the university community and beyond?

The WIC requirement’s purpose is to help OSU undergraduates become effective writers in their discipline. The WIC program’s purpose is to support faculty who teach WIC courses, to help them employ best practices for teaching writing in their discipline, and to help with the assessment and certification of WIC courses. The best argument for the WIC program’s value is the success of WIC faculty who feel their teaching has been improved and even transformed by taking the WIC seminar or gaining support from another aspect of WIC. These confident teachers of writing in the disciplines become the face of the program and the best argument for the program.

WIC gains value in the university through collaborations between the WIC director and staff and WIC faculty and academic units, as well as with other writing entities like the Writing Studio (formerly the Writing Center) and the Writing I and Writing II courses.  

On Teaching Writing

When did you begin teaching writing? What kinds of writing have you taught?

I started teaching writing the day after I turned 22. I was in a master’s program at Duke University. Duke arranged with different school systems to employ their grad students as regular salaried high school teachers. So, I went to a really interesting high school in Westport, Connecticut, which is a bedroom community to New York—very artsy, and a lot of brilliant people live there, and their kids go to the public high school. The faculty were among the most interesting faculties I have ever taught with, because many of them had other careers in the arts and business, finance and publishing—all different fields—then they decided to be high school teachers as a second career. It was an amazing education for me. That was my start, I was teaching 10th grade English. When I got married, my then-spouse was in the Air Force, so we moved around and I was always able to get a job. If I couldn’t get a teaching job, I did something else, like labor law administration. I’ve taught 6th grade through PhD students, including community college. I’ve taught at a historically black university in Charlotte, Johnson C. Smith University. So, I’ve had a quite varied career—all this before I got my PhD at Auburn and then came to OSU.

What do you wish more people knew about teaching writing?

One thing is the value of robust revision in response to feedback. Also, I wish more teachers and students knew how to give feedback that is both specific and encouraging, that helps writers prioritize revising tasks and say, ‘Hey, I can do that. I can fix that.’  I would like to free faculty from the urge to line edit all student writing. We need to help students get the big things right first—audience, purpose, organization, accurate content—and leave correctness for a much later stage.   

What do you think people struggle with most with when teaching writing?

One of the big challenges is helping students identify, understand, and practice the particular kind of writing that is valued in their field. Faculty often assume students understand this by osmosis, just because they are majors, but many don’t. Teachers need to articulate these characteristics to students. The other biggest challenge is probably giving effective feedback that leads to robust revision.

What are the qualities of a successful teacher of writing? Are these qualities the same as those of an effective writing program administrator?

I don’t think they’re necessarily the same. I think you can be a great teacher of writing and know that you’re not suited to direct a program. And, that’s good—you have other gifts. Successful writing teachers are student-centered. They’re not just delivering information under the banking model—making deposits of information in students’ heads. They have clear standards, so the students know what’s expected. They design writing assignments that require critical thinking and push students out of their default position. Successful teachers of writing are committed to the success of all levels of students, not dismissing struggling students, not overlooking middling students, not leaving the best writer on their own. Every writer can improve with the right feedback and practice.

A successful WPA has to have a larger vision of the program’s purpose and be able to keep all the parts moving in the right direction. After my grandson, 4, visited my WIC office, he told me he has an office with a big round table like mine and two computer screens. “What kind of work do you do in your office?” I asked. “I sit in a big black chair, and I spin,” he replied. So there is that part, too.  

Why teach writing?

I teach writing because I believe it’s something that is important in people’s lives. Writing is a skill that people need, and I think it helps people become who they are—find themselves, find their best selves, share what they know, discover new knowledge. And if they can improve as writers and gain confidence as writers, then they can make choices in their lives and not be held back by lack of communications skills. I love teaching writing; I’ve always loved it. I like reading what students write, I like giving them feedback, I like talking to them as writers.

On Rhetoric

“Rhetoric and Composition” wasn’t always as clearly defined of a field as it is now. What led you to become a rhetoric scholar?

There were very few places, when I was getting my PhD, that had a Rhetoric and Composition PhD. I had rhetoric and composition coursework in my English doctoral studies.

Rhetoric and Composition was a clear choice. When I was teaching in Charlotte, North Carolina, I participated in faculty development based on the National Writing Project. It brought together teachers from many disciplines around teaching writing, especially as a process. I remember thinking, ‘That’s brilliant! I want to do that.’

I was drawn to more study of rhetoric because of a project that I happened into. When I was first working on my PhD, an elderly family member gave me an old book that was published in 1834. It was the spiritual journal of an 18th-century British Methodist woman who had the same name as my mother’s family. And this elderly relative said, ‘Somebody gave me this book and said this woman might be kin to us. Maybe you’d like to have the book.’ That night I looked at the first ten pages, I realized the author, Hester Rogers, was from England and I hadn’t been able to pin anybody in our family to one place in England, so I put the book away.

Then, a few months later, I had a dream. About the book. That I hadn’t read. And the dream was the book was important. And that I should read it! I sometimes have really strong dreams, so I got up in the night and–we had moved, everything was still in boxes and I had to go through boxes to find this book–but I found it. It wasn’t very long, so I just stayed up the rest of the night and read it. I didn’t say, This is the best thing I’ve ever read, but her writing style was very Jane Austen, even though she was writing pre-Jane Austen. That was kind of intriguing to me; she was obviously educated. I started trying to find out who Hester Rogers was. But this was pre-internet search, pre-Google, so I was just looking in the library at Auburn.

The first place I found her was an engraving of John Wesley’s (the founder of Methodism) deathbed scene, and she was in the room with John Wesley when he died. I said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting!’ Not only was she in the room, she was kneeling next to his bed, she was physically the closest person to him, and she had her hands up on the bedclothes while he was dying. I thought, ‘There’s definitely rhetoric in that picture.’ So I started looking for her, just for my own satisfaction. And I started thinking of the whole project rhetorically – and historically – so I started applying my rhetorical knowledge to something I was personally interested in, and I ended up writing my dissertation as a rhetorical study of Hester Rogers’s journal and her place in early Methodism. My argument was that she was used as the model of the ‘good woman.’ There were other early Methodist women leaders who preached, but Hester Rogers did not preach, and I think they – the men – picked her because she was ‘the good woman in the pew.’ In the 19th century, the preaching women were silenced but Hester’s journal went into more than 40 American editions. The women preachers were protected by John Wesley until he died, and then the men said, ‘Ladies, you can go home now, we have plenty of men to preach.’ So the ‘Good woman’ became the woman who was teaching Sunday School, leading the women but not running the church. It took more than a century, almost two, for Methodist women to get back in the pulpit.

That’s how I got into rhetoric: because I wanted to know something, and I wanted to have a frame for looking at it, and rhetoric worked for me.

On Her Legacy and Future Plans

What kind of legacy do you hope to leave at OSU?

The WIC teachers I’ve trained and supported and the OSU students across the university who have learned to write in their majors: they are my legacy.

The wonderful WIC GTAs and interns who have learned about writing program administration from working with WIC and taken that knowledge forward: they are my legacy.

A sustained and sustainable WIC program that contributes of OSU’s excellence in the land grant mission: this is my legacy.

And the undergraduates and graduate students I have taught in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film, and especially the graduate students from across the university who have completed their degrees at least in part because they found my course, WR 599, Writing Workshop for Thesis and Dissertation Writers Across the University: these writers are my legacy.

I hope part of my legacy will be a contemplative one. I introduced the thesis and dissertation writers to contemplative practices that could help them with stress, focus, with balance—and with writing. Once in the airport in Portland, one of my former dissertation writers came running over and said,  “I’m on my way to Sweden to give a paper. I’ve been wanting to tell you that Amy (someone also in WR 599) and I taught our whole lab how to meditate.” I love the image of an OSU lab of grad students learning to meditate together.

That’s the beauty of cross disciplinary learning. That the lab is good for more than just measuring things, it’s good for mutual support.  So part of my WIC legacy of writing in the disciplines is that WIC led to teach WR599 and to all of the graduate students who have finished and defended and gone out in the world, some of whom have taught their labs to meditate.

What is next for VTB?

I plan to spend more time with my Oregon grandkids and with my East Coast grandkids. I’m going to do lots of hiking, some traveling, and, I hope, lots of writing. 

Dr. Vicki Tolar Burton will be presenting at two upcoming conferences: the 71st Conference on College Composition and Communication (March 25-28, 2020, in Milwaukee, WI), and the 19th Biennial Meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America (May 21-24, 2020, in Portland, OR). She also has a chapter, “Ethical Writing in the Disciplines,” forthcoming in After Plato: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Teaching of Writing, and an article, “Mapping Dual Credit for College Writing: Notes from the Oregon Trail,” forthcoming in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, written with Jordan Terriere-Dobrioglo.

“We Are Nothing More Than Stories”: An Interview with Natchee Barnd

By Marisa Yerace, WIC Intern

Natchee Barnd is an Associate Professor in the School of Language, Culture, and Society. A 2017 WIC Seminar alum, he taught the Ethnic Studies WIC course, Public Discourse and Writing on Race, last Winter term. He also recently published a book, Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism, last year. In this interview, WIC Intern Marisa Yerace chats with Natchee about his research, his book, teaching a WIC course, and his writing process in general.

Q: How long have you been at OSU? What is your research specialty?

I’m newly-tenured, so it’s like a whole new world now. I’ve been here seven years, I’m a comparative ethnic studies scholar. I also have expertise in indigenous studies and I do cultural geography, race and space, and indigenous geography work, more specifically.

Q: Let’s talk about your new book! What do you want people to know about it?

I would say it’s an interdisciplinary book. It reflects my training (ethnic studies) and my approach to questions or problems.

I had a question about what indigenous geographies look like, and how do they continue? What sort of practices are used to maintain them? The question wasn’t so much whether they did continue—I knew they did—but more of, “How do they do this?” What are the ways in which they’ve done this, from sort of infrastructural questions—like streets and street-naming—to artistic versions of that to cultural practices and performance?

This is all rooted in a notion of geography and space as always in production. It doesn’t just exist out there. We only understand it as we exist and engage with it and make sense of it. That, in turn, shapes how we see ourselves—by the way we engage with it and the structures we’ve created. I wanted to see how that works with native communities in the more mundane ways. What about those more nuanced ways we make meaning and sense of the world? When we see a forest, do we just see trees? Do we see them as potential resources? Do we see it as relatives, as part of the stories of our creation? Those are all very different questions which create different kinds of space, and then we reflect and create different kinds of identity based on the answers to those.

Some people say we are nothing more than words. I agree with that. On my syllabi, I say “We are nothing more than stories.” That’s the way we convey our understanding of the world, is through our words, through our languages. Without that we can’t actually produce or reproduce or sustain. We can’t make sense of the world. We’re just kind of bumbling around with no ability to process anything.

Q: What was your writing process like for your book?

It’s a project that sort of stretched over time, a small piece started in a dissertation, and a lot of that dissertation was written—actually, I think I kind of paralleled this as I wrote the book—at some point I hunkered down and was practicing writing every single day. Literally, every day I had to write, so when I was finishing—I had been working on it for years as an ABD—I had a deadline and I thought, now it’s a 9-5 job. I was writing every day.

I think all writing instruction or guidance tells you that you need to practice it like anything else. You need to practice that craft every day. Writing, for me, has always been a means of thinking. Like many people, I wrote to think. I edit a lot—I try really hard to not edit as I go. I definitely get into these modes where I’m writing every day as much as I can, in spurts. I allow myself to go where the writing or the thinking’s taking me, and sometimes I go elsewhere and come back. I trust that is always, in some way, going to be beneficial.

I did the same with the book, I spent a lot of time every day—just carving out a little bit of time, whenever I had a little bit of spare time. Sometimes I had a word count, just trying to get to 300 words. I think it was more word count than time, ‘cause you can say you’re going to write for three hours but if you only write 300 words you’re not very productive. I thought, if I aim for a small amount, and it went from there—it was great, it felt more productive. I think the psychology is really important, you have to feel like you’re making moves, it’s so easy to stop yourself or make excuses, or undercut your writing, and as a faculty person there are so many things that take you away from your writing. You have to carve it out. My process was always about trying to protect that time, and then letting it flow as loosely as I possibly could.

My schedule was different every single week, but I would try to block it for a morning time—I’m a morning writer, I’m a morning person and morning thinker. Somehow, if I could both work out and write at the same time, like really early in the morning, that would be amazing, but for some reason I can’t figure out how to do that. I feel like exercise and writing are the same in my mind: you have to make the choice to get that done in the beginning, before other things sort of overtake your day.

Q: Do you still try to write every day?

I try… I have other things I’m working on and those kind of keep me going.

Q: What other kinds of writing do you do?

I write for different audiences. I do stories for speculative nonfiction stuff. I have a course that’s a methods class which is an archival research and writing course that then also delivers, as a spoken tour, an actual tour of the community. I’ve written a few pieces for those with my students.

I was writing a conference presentation, which I write for oral delivery, but I’m finding my written and my oral styles are actually coming closer together. I tend not to actually change a lot, depending on what the argument was at different points. In my book, I started off with narrative beginnings, and then I go into a more formal and academic analyses and discussion. I usually start with a story and then I use that as an illustration or encapsulation of the analysis they’ll see later.

Q: Do you find that there are specific Native American genres in writing, or specific aspects of Native American genres?

Yes. Story is always a sort of major writing and telling mechanism—speaking, conveyance, communication mechanism. I think everyone tells stories, but in this case, there’s a difference between stories that are explicitly understood as stories and stories that are more than stories.

This is in my brain right now. I have a Native American Activism and Assimilation class, and throughout the term every week they are assigned—in addition to the usual scholarly pieces and poems here and there—they are assigned stories from graphic novels based on either trickster stories or native sci-fi-slash-fictional stories, and I give them to them for a couple reasons: one, because there’s a lot of information in them, and two, they’re enjoyable and accessible and easy-to-read. I think people will think of them like fables, like sort of Aesop’s fables or something like that. This is something I kind of realized this term more than I have before—they were just kind of looking at the moralistic outcomes, like what is the lesson? And those were definitely part of the stories, but what they would miss was actual traditional knowledge also embedded in them.

Let’s say I would have a story that’s eight-to-ten graphic novel pages. That’s just a little bit of dialogue, but also a lot of imagery. There are little indicators. They describe a location or they mention something about an animal doing something with another animal. If you’re looking at just the moral of the story, there’s a lot of information—biological, geological, geographic, botanical, zoological—all these pieces of information are actually being conveyed. If that story then gets meshed-up with some other stories in the network of stories, then that story is going to be read differently.

The one we talked about in class, for example, was a story about a racoon who sees a rock that kind of looks like a person, pushes it down, and after running under it, getting squished. There was this moral lesson around the treatment of elders and mischievous behavior, but what was being missed was the anatomy of the raccoon, why it looks the way it does. The story ends up talking about the shape of the racoon and why it moves the way it does and the body form. The rock itself was a very distinctive rock, so if you’re from a particular area, you’re locating the story to a very specific place in the world. It’s not an abstracted, generated story about just a rock that could be anywhere—no, it’s a very specific rock in a very specific place, so if you’re from there, you’ll know what that is. Then that story is attached to that place, and there are other elements of the landscape.

Actual knowledge that’s embedded in that may seem like context or decoration. I think those are really important in native stories—they are not abstracted. Usually they are very specific about place and relationships. Maybe there’s a relationship between two animals that hunt together, and Western science has always told us that they’re both predators—why would they cooperate? Then, in recent years, they find out, Oh, they actually do that. I think that’s something unique about those stories. They aren’t always writing, per se, but now they’re in writing form a lot.

It’s opening up students’ awareness of what’s there and what they may not be able to access and being okay with that. I’ve told them, sometimes you can’t access this, you don’t know all the things, but you should be able to see the possibility that this is connected to something more and realize these stories are not just fictionalized accounts and the reason they have the detail. In a novel, you have detail to try to craft a reality or what seems like a reasonable, tangible, kinesthetic experience. In this case, details are not created for that effect—they’re conveying certain information and knowledge that’s been passed along from direct experience, basically through a scientific process—engagement, learning, observation—so it’s in the form of a story, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hold that knowledge.

For students, it’s a matter of recognizing you’re just reading this in a really simplistic way, but what if these are all real things (which, I argue, they are)? The value of the story becomes so much more intensified if you’re losing those stories. In order to sustain a culture, it becomes harder if all of that knowledge is embedded in those stories. One story is not going to be enough: you need all those stories. I think that’s where I tend to leave them.

Q: What was the topic of your Winter WIC course? How did you design it?

The WIC course I taught last winter is called Public Discourse and Writing on Race. A lot of times what I try to do is connect an external motivator to courses, so in this case the timing was such that Oregon had just passed a requirement for K-12 to teach ethnic studies in the curriculum. There’s a task force that is working through that curriculum, trying to lay out what those curriculum guidelines will be, so I asked my students to target high school, and to write to this task force or to teachers to explain to them why discourse around race in particular was a really important thing for them to consider while constructing these classes.

It was a persuasive set of essays. They had to use the material and draft this over the term and pitch it to these educators and their administrators—who will be thinking about how we implement this in 2020, so this was a real thing. I had one of the task force members Skype in and talk to them about what they’re doing so the students saw that this was something that can go outside of the classroom. It’s not just me as an audience, it’s different teachers.

It shaped their writing: how do you pitch this to someone who, maybe, is nervous about doing this, they don’t know how to incorporate this, they don’t understand this element of discourse, how a racial discourse works in a way that is not just “Let’s add another story besides Martin Luther King, Jr.?” How do we think about the larger discourse, which is not just adding stories or adding historical events, but thinking about how we understand race through discourse as a whole? It’s something that’s more fundamental.

So that was their charge. I find that when there’s something really concrete, they do really, really well with it, having to craft a voice, figuring out what to expect, what their audience will know and they don’t know, how to provide examples to help them make their argument—and they had to think about what that person would be concerned with. Part of that was because Ethnic Studies doesn’t have a single sort of audience. Some disciplines they have a single audience, or a fairly narrow set of audiences. Ethnic studies can apply to any audience, so it’s a matter of in which capacity you want to write. You’re dealing with the fact that most folks think they understand race and racism, but they do not very well, so you have to undo some of those commonsense understandings which are not really right.

In this case it was very specific, it was helpful to have educators and administrators who would be funding those classes, to point to those folks and think about how you need to talk to them opposed to the general public. Some students were thinking about their high school teacher–“Oh! I have this one teacher who this would really resonate with.” I need to circle back to see how they did with that.

Q: How would your course change when you change the external motivator?

I always shape courses specifically to the kind of tasks they deal with, or I would change the materials, but there are certain ones I think I gravitate towards because they make sense to me. I would definitely adjust things based on what I thought my goal was.

Q: How do you incorporate informal writing into the WIC course?

Informal writing matches my practice of just wanting to let myself write without the editing voice as much as possible. When you have informal writing, people need to be aware it’s okay to just write—don’t edit, don’t worry about spelling, get those ideas out, get moving. I think students tend to want to be efficient, get it done once, get it done right, validate themselves, they did it right, got it done the first time—and I have to remind them, “That will never happen, you will never get the perfect thing down.” I tell them I want them to fail, and fail as early as they can, and I say “failure” loosely—they hate that though. They don’t like process-oriented as much as they like outcome-oriented. It’s hard to sell that.

In [my WIC] class, and I need to do more of this, I had them project, like pre-flection of what they expect to see, what sort of questions they need to be thinking about, before getting into a reading, as a sort of guidance. I have these great pieces I’ll give to students, but they won’t always know what to do with it or why I’m assigning it. It’s not necessarily that I’m looking for a main point, it’s thinking about certain things to look for.

I had them writing each time we met—sort of pre-thinking, post-thinking, as a way to generate thinking on the spot, getting used to the idea, all those things. We were going to read this piece that was a critique around tourism culture and the power dynamics that were at play, specifically in the Caribbean. I asked them to think—before they read, before they knew anything about what the piece was about—to imagine they were going to the Caribbean on a trip. Why are they going there, what are they doing, what do they see? Just sort of thinking through the normative visions of what it means to go to the Caribbean. A lot of the thoughts were about vacation stuff: the ocean, sunshine, they were having fun. And then they get this piece that has a pretty dark turn to it—while folks are here as tourists, here’s the other side of what’s happening in this community, how people are locked in by economic disparity, by race, by the history of this particular island. It sort of really flips that and makes people rethink how they imagine themselves in relation to the Caribbean. But they wouldn’t have thought about it quite as strongly as if they hadn’t envisioned it, it would’ve been easy to pretend as if—but I already had the evidence of what they’d been thinking, and they have to reconcile that.

With things that are pre-reading, they usually have some ideas and thoughts that they can utilize. Sometimes it’s just questions. It’s just a way to really up the amount of processing they do. And they have something to write about later! “I thought this, and now—” How do you feel embarrassed? Not that my goal was to embarrass them… in that case it kind of was.

Q: What are your primary goals for writing assignments in your WIC course?

They’re the goals that were laid out for us in some ways. I think a lot of the students came away from this knowing who you write to matters—your audience. It’s helpful to understand there are different ways of writing, different modes of writing. I have them do that exercise of thinking about, “What are the different kinds of things you write? What are the kinds of things professional you could write? What are the different kinds of audiences that are out there?” With Ethnic Studies, because it doesn’t have a specific kind of audience—it’s not a science audience, it’s not a policy audience, it could be any and all of those things—being clear about what that audience is, at first, and then crafting writing to match is critical.

There’s the idea of revision. It seems to be a novelty to students. Everything I’ve written in my book, I’ve probably edited, like, a hundred or two hundred times. I have draft after draft after draft of those things. The idea that revision is making it better, is making your thinking better, is obviously important to WIC, so that’s one of my purposes.

Then, for me to see which ways their writing is applicable to current, real things. I think those are my goals for them.

Q: How did the WIC faculty seminar help you teach your WIC course?

I was doing it [the seminar] right before I was doing the class. I was a lot more thoughtful about how to make it most productive for students—how to actually develop their writing and thinking. I was a lot more encouraged to use the kind of creative prompts I normally like to use.

I like to be a little more flexible, and that can be frustrating to students, and I think in this case I had to have that stuff prepared, with a purpose and why I was going to do those things. I think, if nothing else, it gave me a space to kind of plan out that class a little more thoroughly. I don’t always like to plan that detailed, but I think those were some of the best things about it.

We used a lot of techniques from the seminar—write and pass, process memos. I was just talking about process memos the other day in (my non-WIC) class. It’s a kind of way for me to get a sense of what they think they need help with, and it’s a way to minimize the labor. It can be an all-encompassing thing if you’re doing a Writing Intensive and unlimited feedback. It’s a way to narrow down what they think they’re having trouble with, or that they really want attention to, and then I can maybe do one more thing in addition to that, so they have three things to deal with rather than 55. It really refines your thinking and your labor, which is crucial!

Q: Has your WIC training affected your teaching outside of the WIC course?

Yes! I mean, I say yes, and here I am this term thinking “Aah! I should’ve used more of those strategies!”

I definitely am still using some of the assessment time-saving techniques of not pointing out every little thing, and thinking, What are the three important things? I guided my TA to do the same, and I think those are important strategies because this is a class of forty, so I can’t spend the attention that I could on a WIC class. I think that works better, not just for me, but also for students. They feel it’s more accessible, more successful—they can actually meet those goals.

I remember using a lot more of [the WIC techniques] even the term after, ‘cause they’re so successful, they’re so helpful as engagement tools.

Q: What advice do you have for other people teaching or designing WIC courses?

I think if you take the seminar it’s helpful. It gives you a good frame for getting out of the idea that, no matter what the discipline is, the writing and the writing intense model is somehow external to the content, and that it’s one more thing you have to do, rather than using it as the tool by which to do the thing you want to do. That was a good thing for me to be reminded of, the thinking through writing. I can’t ask them to perform this final writing without having given them the chance to practice that, and have those revision processes, and understand what writing is and use it as a way to move along thinking. It’s a simple reframing, and it’s common sense, on some level. You have your content and you’re like, Oh, I have to make them write multiple things, and this is actually a really great way to get them to think through this material.

Teaching and Learning Genres in the Disciplines: An Interview with Chris Nelson

By Ruth Sylvester, WIC Intern

Last winter, we featured an interview with Dennis Bennett on the new undergraduate Writing Studio. In this issue, we talk with Chris Nelson, director of the graduate Writing Center. We asked Chris to share his ideas about teaching genre.

WIC: The second WIC learning outcome addresses students learning about how to write in their field: “Students in writing intensive courses shall demonstrate knowledge/understanding of audience expectations, genres, and conventions appropriate to communicating in the discipline.” Why is it important for students to learn to write in a variety of genres?  What kinds of assignments do you think are effective in teaching genre?

Chris Nelson: Genre allows us to define the ways groups of people communicate—not just the conventional forms that we use but also the values and perspectives that form those groups. The genres that we find in scholarly fields also tell us important things about how each field builds knowledge. When students first enroll in a writing class at a university, they are exposed to important, conventional ways of communicating ideas in academic settings. This exposure is important, because it is necessary for becoming familiar with the norms of academic writing: summarizing, paraphrasing, arguing, analyzing, synthesizing. We often encounter these tasks on their own—in exercises, activities, or even formal assignments.

But the purposes these tasks serve can seem unclear to many students when separated from the knowledge-building activities for which they are used. Instead, when we recognize genre, we understand that writing plays specific roles in exploring and communicating ideas in a field—that there is a social function that writing plays. In short, genre takes us from the commonly understood situation of writing for an individual teacher (not to mention for a grade) and allows us to consider the more rhetorical purposes that a document must accomplish if it is to be a worthwhile or useful piece of work for other scholars who share your interests. For example, when we see a white paper in engineering, we know that the writer is synthesizing current information about a given research direction to query other engineers whether that research direction is worthwhile. The function of that document is to prompt the evaluative expertise of the community to decide whether a research idea has merit—so it is ultimately the writer of the white paper who benefits from the genre, assuming the writer has done their job of meeting the conventional expectations of that white paper.

Students who learn to write a variety of genres, then, have the opportunity to learn about, and become part of, a larger community of knowledge builders who not only share similar interests but also communicate their ideas in expected ways. So, genre allows us to become acculturated to both the knowledge and the discourse of a given field.

This becomes a bit of a trick for any writing teacher, because assignments must require students to implement conventional forms of communication (which themselves can indeed be interrogated as the writer gains proficiency, but that is another conversation) while at the same time enable them to experience communicating ideas meaningfully. For me, any assignment that engages students in writing for specific audiences can be effective at promoting genre, but a teacher who is able to welcome students into conversations about the roles that document plays for specific audiences helps them to see that an assignment has purposes to accomplish, rather than being an arbitrary exercise for a grade only. That can be quite a tall order, but to me seems to be the role that a teacher in any discipline plays—answering the question of how to guide students into the standard practices of our fields so that they, too, become knowledge builders.

WIC: How do writing tutors address genre in the Graduate Writing Center?

Chris Nelson: Like all writing center tutors, Graduate Writing Consultants are trained to identify the rhetorical purposes of a given document: purpose, audience needs, formal conventions, and so on. The Graduate Writing Center takes that training a step further by working with what we might consider to be the professional academic forms of writing: scholarly journal articles, conference posters and presentations, funding proposals, and of course theses and dissertations. Ideally, a writing consultant would be familiar with writing and knowledge conventions in each discipline, but that is knowledge that would take years to accumulate—if it even is possible! Genre allows us to prompt writers to teach us about content and communication expectations in various fields. Their awareness of research writing conventions allows consultants to define formal expectations and allow writers to determine whether those conventions operate similarly to or different from the types of writing they encounter in their own fields.

In some respects, genre allows us to explicitly define with students the codes, so to speak, of writing—codes that many scholars absorb and learn to implement over time as part of their own graduate education, even though they may not have learned to name these codes directly. These are important conversations, since graduate students are very adept at identifying conventions in their fields, but may remain unaware of the reasoning or purposes behind these conventions. By enabling us to identify explicitly the expectations of content and communication, graduate students not only learn, but also show consultants, ways of communicating in their fields. So, consultants learn about writing in various fields just as much as students do. By virtue of that learning, consultants can then ask more substantive questions about content or the ways that content is conveyed in a given document.