The Politics of Writing in the Disciplines: a Missionary's Tale

The Politics of WID 1

The Politics of Writing in the Disciplines: A Missionary's Tale

This essay is offered principally in a narrative mode. It outlines a set of related events that for me have underlined and clarified many of the assumptions I have been in the habit of making about writing in the disciplines and the power of genre. These events also clarified for me, in some surprising ways, how powerful institutional assumptions and their related politics can be, and highlight some important lessons about how we as rhetoricians need to interact with other discourse communities.

Before beginning my tale, let me unpack the theoretical assumptions that make the tale worth telling. Some time ago now, Judy Segal, Anthony Paré, Douglas Vipond and I published an article in CCC called "The Researcher as Missionary: Problems with Rhetoric and Reform in the Disciplines." In that article we discuss the politics, ethics and miscellaneous hazards of being ethnographers of other discourse communities. The missionary metaphor is intended to suggest ways in which ethnographers of writing in the disciplines, like the proverbial missionaries of colonial times that we like to think are long past, sometimes presume to tell local cultures their business without having the slightest idea of how those cultures operate. We argue that such ethnographers must walk a very delicate line between being mute bystanders and being missionaries eager to help the natives throw off their ignorance of their own writing practices. We emphasize the need for careful, respectful, engaged and above all long-term interactions with other discourse communities before having the hubris to tell them what we think their writing practices mean, much less how to improve them.

In that article, we are primarily interested in the way we report our ethnographic findings directly to practitioners in other disciplines. But our argument applies with equal force to WID programs. When we as rhetoricians presume to help people in other disciplines nurture and teach writing, we must become ethnographers of those disciplines. If our role is to go beyond correcting commas, we need a deep, broad, and most important, internalized understanding of the discourse practices of the disciplines whose junior members we seek to inform.

This essay seeks to take this conversation about ethnography into the realm of WID and to raise some additional concerns about teaching in disciplines that are not one’s own. Told in the cautionary tale genre, the story illuminates some interesting problems of rhetorical boundary negotiations and raises troubling questions about the gloomy half-lit border space between what we practice and what we preach.

The point of the story is that, looking back on it from the vantage point of the passage of time, I can now step outside it far enough to see that I violated every single one of the principles we set out in the “Researcher as Missionary” article. I don’t want to fall into the trap of apologizing publicly for private and past sins of omission. Rather, I want to use the story as an opportunity to re-examine my, and by extension my profession’s, relationships with other disciplines and particularly with deeply buried pedagogical assumptions. The exercise of speculating on what I could have done differently, how I could have teased out a more productive relationship from what came close to being an interdisciplinary train wreck, provides an outstanding example of how important it is to operationalize one’s theoretical principles when they are put to the test.

I will tell the story first from my point of view as it unfolded over many months of sporadic interaction between me, a professor of business, and several representatives of an organization I will call Financial Certification Canada. Then I will try to unpack the subtext that will connect it more explicitly with the ongoing discussions (in these pages and others) of the power of genre, the understanding and teaching of disciplinary discourse, and the means of negotiating the minefields of WID.

Prologue

The tale begins with a plan by my university's School of Business and FCC to create a collaborative degree to be offered partly by distance education. Intended to provide career laddering for accountants, the degree builds on the two-year diploma in accounting offered across the country in two-year community colleges. By adding a third year of university courses, the diploma becomes a three-year university degree. These include further courses in accounting, business, etc., plus three "breadth" courses based on existing courses in the faculties of Humanities, Social Science and Communication and Culture (the last being my own faculty). In preparation for this university work, a writing course that was already part of the accounting diploma has been overhauled to meet university requirements and to provide the grounding that students will need for the academic writing required by the breadth courses.

I was not involved in the early planning stages of this degree, so I have only second-hand evidence of the reasoning behind its structure. Clearly, however, it was designed as a compromise between two needs. First, the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, which accredits the university's business school, insists that people who aspire to managerial positions need to know more than accounting, finance and economics. They need a broad understanding of how people and society work, As a result, students in the regular Management programs may take no more than half of their courses directly from the School of Business. Their other courses are a broad mix of prescribed and open options designed to ensure that graduates have been exposed to the liberal arts in sufficient quantity to prevent – theoretically – the tunnel thinking that would undermine their ability to manage well and flexibly.

The three-year program requested by the FCC required some modifications in order to accommodate this requirement logistically. A student in physical residence at a university for four years has ample opportunity to weave liberal arts and science courses into his or her program at graceful intervals throughout the four years. The student in the three-year program, however, takes the first two years in a college-level diploma program at various sites across the country. Because the design allows students to stop out after two years with their accounting diploma if they choose, the basics of accounting all have to be crammed into the first two years. For the students going on to the third year, the interdisciplinary breadth therefore has to be added on at the end of the degree in something of a rush.

In addition, the broad smorgasbord of courses available to on-site students simply isn’t available to the distance students. In particular, they do not have access to the senior courses that distinguish the four-year university from the two-year colleges at which they complete the first part of their degrees (a problem exacerbated by the fact that the cleavage between two-year colleges and four-year universities tends to be much sharper in Canada than in the United States). A package of advanced courses was needed – preferably a coherent, easily transportable package that students could complete at a distance.

I had, and still have, grave misgivings about turning a diploma student into a university student by tacking on three breadth courses at the end of their education. Our own Faculty of Engineering, for instance, recently realized that, by the time they tried to give their students broad creative thinking abilities in third and fourth year, it was far too late. By that time, students had internalized a concrete-sequential mode of thinking far too well to be jarred out of it by a few courses later. As a result, Engineering has radically reformed its first year to give students an experience of integrated, inquiry based learning, with the high tolerance for ambiguity that inquiry-based learning requires, right at the beginning of their program. But in the case of the FCC program, this admirable educational sequence was simply not do-able, and we had to be content with adding "breadth" at the end rather than throughout.

This scenario is obviously a perfect setup both for interdisciplinary collaboration and for serious boundary problems. This situation was complicated by the fact that the School of Business elected to contract out the development and delivery of the courses to FCC because of their experience with distance delivery. Content was to be provided by experts in the relevant fields, but the general shape of the courses and the process of development was to be controlled by Financial Certification Canada.

I can't stress enough how much difference this makes. The "general shape of the course and the process of development" sounds relatively neutral. As long as the material was developed by an expert in the field and subject to rigorous academic review by other experts in the field, the shape of the container was not seen to matter very much. Unfortunately, the shape of the container proved to exert a powerful level of control over epistemological stance.

Part 1: The WID Missionary Meets Business Communication

When the first part of the story unfolded I was the director of the University of Calgary's Writing Program. I was invited to oversee the redevelopment of the FCC’s business writing course to meet the needs of students who would eventually find themselves in a university program. I would not have to write the course; that would be done by a content developer with expertise in English, hired separately by FCC. But I would be responsible for academic review.

The course was packaged not as an interactive e-delivery distance course but as a fairly standard surface-mail correspondence course. I remain suspicious of distance-delivery writing courses, but in these circumstances, it seemed as though a remodeled distance course would meet a number of logistical exigencies and help students prepare for the writing situations that they would meet when they made the transition from the diploma-based section of the program to the third, university governed year. In that year, the breadth courses in particular would require "academic" writing of various kinds. Given the overlapping environments involved, it seemed to make sense to maintain the primarily business-writing orientation of the course. It could, I thought, be anchored in the discourse situation that the students would be negotiating at the time, but at the same time look forward to the academic situation in which they would later need to function.

Peter, the FCC representative, met with me several times to discuss how the course should be positioned in the program. I suggested that one course in the college section of the program would not be enough to prepare FCC trainees for academic writing, and made my carefully researched WID speech about how difficult it is to internalize one writing genre while immersed in a situation that requires quite another. His solution was to suggest that I compile all the information the students would need about university writing and place it on a CD.

This should have alerted me that the pedagogical differences between me and Financial Certification Canada ran very deep. Peter shared so few of my assumptions about writing that he simply could not hear what I was saying when I explained that writing was not a matter of compiling information. I now realize that I was not hearing him any too well either.

The writing course that was to be reformed was a reasonably well-executed but rather current-traditional course that didn't call for much sustained writing above the level of a memo. I asked for more writing connected to more critical reading. In order to suggest ways that the course developer could anchor the writing assignments in students’ present discourse environment (remember that at this point they would still be completing the first part of the degree in a purely accounting-based environment), I used the FCC Exam Handbook as a mine for situations that would make sense to accountants-in-training. Here is an example of one of my suggestions:

You could use a case like the one on p. 647, but instead of having students simply list the alternative methods that Kevin could use to calculate his company's net debt, you could ask for a two-to-four page report that discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each and defends one as the most useful in this particular context.

FCC sent my comments off to the content specialist who would do the actual work of redrafting the course. I have never been allowed to speak to this person. I have not even been allowed to know who this person is, nor she who I am. This extraordinarily blind review process has doubtless proven effective in developing materials in familiar territory where words have somewhat stable meanings and people share roughly the same assumptions about the discourse environment, the sorts of outcomes that can be expected from an assignment, and even what an “assignment” looks like. In this case, however, the process seriously exacerbated the boundary problems between rhetoric and accounting. It also revealed rifts in my own discipline that astonished me at the time, although I now think that it should have been obvious to me that my anonymous collaborator would not automatically share my assumptions about writing.

For what I saw next time around was nothing like the situated writing course I had imagined. It was a variant of the same business writing course with a single chapter on "Writing for Academic Audiences" grafted into the middle. "Writing for Academic Audiences" involved reading and answering simple questions about three reflective essays. The course designer, in other words, had interpreted my request for attention to "academic writing situations" as a request for a chunk of very current-traditional English 101: the sort of critical reflection on belletristic essays (“Once More to the Lake,” “Shooting an Elephant,” etc.) that I have spent much of my life arguing against. I won’t go into that debate here as it has been, and still is, waged endlessly elsewhere. But the essence of my distrust is that this form of writing instruction

does little to engage students with the nasty, smelly tangle of rhetorical purposes embedded in other forms of academic writing, to say nothing of non-academic writing.

What had happened, of course, was that the FCC had engaged two people from opposite sides of a semi-disciplinary divide that they undoubtedly did not know existed. This is a common problem: from a distance, most disciplines look relatively seamless. To a History professor, most physicists look pretty much alike, though physicists might violently disagree. Classic studies in the sociology of disciplines such as Gilbert and Mulkay underline how many differences can lie under the surface of what looks like a single discipline. So the FCC had hired someone – I still don’t know whom – who likely had a good track record of teaching writing from a somewhat current-traditional paradigm, and then engaged an academic reviewer – me – who works from a Writing in the Disciplines paradigm. The problem was accentuated by the way the content developer's assignment was phrased – not to create a new work in the Writing in the Disciplines mode, but to take an existing work and alter it to do a new job by extension.

I’ll come back to the larger significance of this episode later in the paper. For the moment, let me move on to the second part of the narrative.

Part 2: WID Meets the Breadth Course

At this point in the tale, three more characters come on stage. Dave and Linda are long-time instructors of two interdisciplinary courses in the Faculty of Communication and Culture, one on social aspects of information technology and the other about change. They had been asked to merge aspects of their courses into one course that would be the Faculty's contribution to the breadth offerings in the new degree. By this time I had been promoted to Associate Dean Academic, so I met this new turn of events not just as a representative of rhetoric but also as a representative of the liberal arts in general.

Jason, a faculty member in the School of Business who was responsible for managing the new collaborative degree. requested a meeting with me, Dave and Linda. The problem in a nutshell was that Dave and Linda were so steamed that they wanted to quit.

As the content specialists for the Communication and Culture breadth course, Dave and Linda were on the other side of the blind-review partition. They were angry over a number of issues, most of which seemed to be rooted in different assumptions about, not the content of the course, but the whole process of course design.

The surface problem was that the review process, designed to ensure that the course and most especially the exam would correspond to the FCC course template, was proving to involve more rewrites of greater complexity than they had bargained for, making the sum they had been paid for the course shrink in proportion to each new requirement. But the problem was not just a matter of financial return against time invested. The requirements that came anonymously over the blind-review partition were, it seemed to me, rooted in very different assumptions about knowledge. The message seemed always to be to keep it short, keep it simple, and provide clear answers. Dave and Linda, who wanted to ask the sort of questions that never have clear answers, were getting increasingly frustrated. They were convinced that at least one of their reviewers was a first-year student.