We see in WAW an opportunity to, borrowing the language of Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle (“Teaching”), teach students in MMPW courses not just how to write professionally but also “about” (553) writing in professional contexts. This shift in emphasis accommodates our increasing awareness that what students take with them across the academic-workplace boundary is less a set of explicitly transferable skills and more a generalized rhetorical capacity that enables them to successfully adapt to new rhetorical situations” (428).
Thus far, the authors argue, instructors have taught these courses using a genre theory focus or a client based focuses. Genre theory “approaches are shaped by a concern for teaching students methods for learning the sociocultural knowledge necessary to become savvy social actors” (432). Client based approaches “set up students in client relationships with a community business or organization,” turning students into protoprofessionals (434-5).The best approaches are those that combine the genre theory and client based approaches (431).
The authors share their own approaches to WAW-PW. Read’s approach is teaching workplace writing as research(ed) activity with the purpose of “situat[ing] research activity as a practice that is essential to lifelong learning in workplace contexts” (438). In this course, students “identify a genre that is key to their participants’ work and do an in-depth genre analysis in order to make an argument for how this genre functions for the participants, the participants’ organizations, or the industry at large. In addition, students take a more systemic view of genre by adopting Spinuzzi’s analytical tool of the genre ecology model…for visualizing the ecology of genres that mediate their participants’ work” (441). Meanwhile, Michaud’s course is centered on writing in a knowledge society, encouraging students to think about how different people, purposes and genres interact in the workplace.
The important part of these kinds of approaches is enabling students to develop mental schemas. Mental schemas are what allow a writer to adapt to a new rhetorical situation, and, importantly, mental schemas have more to do with learning to learn than with learning to write. In other words, it is important to recognize that it is not the teaching of any particular rhetorical structure or practice that matters for transfer; it is that students engage in the process of learning transformation” (434). And, of course, reflection is important too. (434)
Key Terms
- Learning transformation: the ability to adapt wide-ranging and flexible general knowledge, including habits of rhetorical thinking…to meet the particular challenges of a new writing context” (concept by Doug Brent 429)
- Professional writing: “the literacy practices of professionals-who-write in any of the diverse professional contexts of business, industry, government, and the nonprofit sector” (430)
- Pseudotransactionality: “writing that is produced to meet teacher expectations rather than to perform a function for the audience addressed” (concept by Spinuzzi 433)