Engaged Writers & Dynamic Disciplines Podcast

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and every semester, I feel like it’s New Year’s Day. “This semester,” I say, “everything’s going to be different.” I revise my classes, everything from switching two minor assignments to rehauling the entire curriculum. I try to create assignments that will catch my students’ attention, prepare them for their other classes, and, because I teach dozens of students, be interesting to grade.

 

But how do I know if the assignments I find interesting are effective? Or even that the students will think they are interesting? In Engaging Writers and Dynamic Disciplines, Chris Thaiss and Terry Zawacki explore how students learn to write in their majors, and how instructors write in their disciplines. These two things are not synonyms. Disciplines are dynamic, even before you account for all of the interdisciplinary work that goes on between them. Thaiss and Zawacki interviewed scholars from across a wide variety of  disciplines and found that “many of our informants describe changes in their disciplines that allow scholars to work in alternative ways--ways that might formerly have been closed to them” some of these scholars are hesitant about these new ways of writing, but many embrace them (44).

 

I remember the first time I wrote an article that was truly alternative. It was an article for Harlot about the biopower of zombies and I referenced everything from Foucault to World War Z to Joshua Gunn. I wrote about my personal experience dressing up like a zombie for a “capture the flag” 5k and about buying a shirt off Etsy. And the whole thing was littered with hyperlinks and quirky footnotes and a half dozen pictures, which cost the journal nothing because the whole thing was exclusively online. This was a far cry from the time I literally sent three copies of an article in a manila folder, through the mail, to England for a more traditional journal. I’m not the only one who has had such exhilarating experiences encountering disciplinary writing in new ways.

 

Because we remember the heady rush of talking about scholarly topics in slightly less than scholarly ways and the sheer joy of doing something new and “fun,” we might be tempted to assign these new forms of writing to our students, to show them the great diversity of our discipline. If I was able to write the first draft of “The Biopower of Zombies” in one sitting, chuckling to myself in an airport terminal in Ohio, certainly my students would also delight in such open forms of scholarship, right?

 

According to Thaiss and Zawacki’s research, “the undergraduate students we interviewed and surveyed from across majors showed much less desire to experiment with format and method in their disciplinary classes than to conform to their professors’ expectations” (92). It’s maybe not surprising that scholars who are already pretty familiar with their field would have an easier time adapting to the variations than students who are just learning the ropes for the first time. But not all “alternatives” are equal.

 

Experimenting with new ideas (eg “Is our obsession with zombies a result of increased non-state organizations?”) is different than having to learn a new format (e.g. casual academic tone with generous hyperlinks). Over all, Thais and Zawacki suggest, that students crave st