Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie

Beyond the word count

Kristen Allen — 2024-09-27

Despite the best efforts of their instructors, first-year students often misinterpret or even ignore assignment sheets, leading to unmet learning outcomes and demoralising marks. Like academic writing as a whole, assignment sheets often contain conventions, terminology, and expectations that are unfamiliar to incoming undergraduates. In this paper, I propose an activity which calls students’ attention to assignment sheets as a genre, helping them meet the practical requirements of their assignment as well as develop their genre awareness. Students work in groups to rank the major goals of their current assignment as specified in the assignment sheet and use previous student responses to consider the diverse ways in which these goals can be fulfilled. Using this exercise, students can discover the close generic and rhetorical connection between the assignment sheet and the written responses it generates, as well as the variety of successful uptakes that are possible within the assigned genre.

Introduction: Special Issue on Teaching Academic Writing in Canada

Sarah Seeley — 2024-08-01

This article introduces a Special Issue of Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie: Teaching Academic Writing in Canada. It contextualizes the research and pedagogical discussions contained herein, and it underlines how these contributions emphasize two major trends on the Canadian landscape of academic writing: the movement toward decolonizing academic writing and diverse approaches to writing in the disciplines and writing centre practices.

Truth and Reconciliation through web design

Theresa Bell — 2024-08-01

We explore relationality and decolonization within the context of our shared attempts to blend Indigenist (Wilson & Hughes, 2019) and Western approaches to information sharing on a redesigned writing centre website. To reflect and honour the importance of story-telling in Indigenous ways of knowing and being, our core discussion is framed as a conversation that is experiential, reflective, and relational. We explain how the redesigned website supports students’ learning about themselves as academic storytellers through invitational, meaningful, personal online experiences. By telling the story of where the project started and our motivations, choices, emotional experiences, and lessons learned, we articulate an actionable, broadly adaptable pedagogical approach to decolonizing academic writing support.

Inked: Graduate Writing Groups as Writing Centre Pedagogy

Michael Cournoyea — 2024-08-01

In the post-pandemic era, Canadian writing centres are ideally positioned to organise and support graduate writing groups. At the University of Toronto’s Health Sciences Writing Centre, we have begun offering a weekly, multidisciplinary graduate writing group for students in the health sciences. Inked: the Health Sciences Writing Collective aims to bridge the gap between high-commitment co-working groups and low-commitment accountability groups. We outline how the group emerged, how it addresses graduate challenges, and how it builds self-efficacy and community among members. We argue that this move to group-centred, indirect instruction presents an exciting direction for writing centre pedagogy in Canada.

Examining AI Guidelines in Canadian Universities: Implications on Academic Integrity in Academic Writing

Faith Marcel — 2024-08-01

Academic integrity is a crucial aspect of higher education that fosters intellectual honesty and upholds the principles of fairness and trustworthiness (Stoez & Eaton, 2020; Kang, 2022; Eaton, 2022). As the introduction and integration of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies becomes increasingly prevalent in educational settings, it is imperative to examine how Canadian universities are addressing the implications of AI on academic integrity (Eaton, 2022; UNESCO, 2023). This study aimed to examine the existing AI guidelines and policies developed and implemented by Canadian universities and analyze their alignments and gaps in relation to their academic integrity policies, particularly in the domain of academic writing in Canadian higher education contexts. In this research study, sixteen Canadian universities were selected for document analysis, and through an examination of their existing polices and guidelines on AI, results revealed insights into both challenges and opportunities for faculty, students and stakeholders around teaching academic writing while upholding academic integrity in higher education.

Individual and Collective Self-Efficacy for Teaching Writing in a Multidisciplinary Sample of Canadian Faculty

Kim M. Mitchell — 2024-08-01

Background: Teacher self-efficacy can be defined as the confidence teachers hold about their individual and collective capacity to influence student learning. While many faculty assign and assess student writing as part of their course activities, they often perceive the act of writing as separate from rather than complementary to their teaching of subject matter content. This paper will report on the combined findings of two large survey studies of 385 faculty at Canadian universities, polytechnics and colleges. The purpose of the study was to assess faculty individual and collective self-efficacy for teaching writing.

Methods: Data was collected from faculty via an electronic survey distributed by email or social media (Twitter). Faculty responded to the Individual and Collective Self-Efficacy for Teaching Writing Scales. They also responded to open-ended questions asking them to relate how they felt about their abilities to guide student writing.

Results: Participants’ average age was 49.9 years with 14.5 years of teaching experience. Participants reported their individual self-efficacy for teaching writing at 77.2% while feeling that their departments as a whole were only 60% confident at teaching writing. Higher individual self-efficacy for teaching writing were found in faculty who were in combined research and teaching positions, PhD prepared, with prior formal education in teaching writing, and with 20 or more years of teaching experience. No statistically significant findings were observed with the Collective Self-Efficacy scale. From the qualitative survey data three themes were identified: 1) Blaming and lamenting; 2) Is teaching writing our responsibility? 3) Hopeful efforts and recognitions.

Conclusion: Overall, the data is rife with narratives of blaming students and institutions for student inability to write and faculty questioning their role as writing instructor. These narratives drown out the narratives of faculty who have a passion for teaching writing. Future research should focus on the development of formalized workshops to support faculty teaching writing and changing their attitudes toward the developmental and disciplinary shared responsibility of writing instruction in higher education.

New Tropes for Old

Srividya Natarajan — 2024-08-01

Many of the celebrated and generative tropes that defined the work and self-image of American writing centres—tropes like Stephen North’s “fix-it shop in the basement,” Andrea Lunsford’s “Burkean Parlour,”and Kenneth Bruffee’s “conversation of mankind”—also helped create and affirm an apparent scholarly and pedagogic consensus about writing centre praxis in the Canadian context. I examine the way such tropes imagine our practices—dialogical guidance, collaborative learning, scaffolding, and relationship-building—and the bodies and minds that are enacting them. Using sonnets, narrative, and reflection to propose alternative tropes, I explore how the entry of othered bodies and minds, new perspectives, and marginalized cultures into the writing centre world might change the way we relate to each other and the way we re-imagine our collectivity.

Welcoming Writers, Welcoming Instructors

Marci Prescott-Brown — 2024-08-01

Canadian scholars increasingly recognize the importance of diverse and inclusive writing pedagogies to welcome students of various races, languages, orientations, genders, and abilities. Yet, if instructors do not feel welcomed into using the tools of antiracist and decolonial writing pedagogies, they often will not use them, and many feel very new to the task. Using microlevel language policies (in both direct and indirect ways) can be a helpful way to integrate these pedagogies into writing instruction effectively; they can help instructors to both signal and live out their commitments to inclusive writing pedagogies.

In this paper, I will use analytic and reflective methodologies to explore my assignment of an argumentative paragraph and the processes around it to demonstrate some simple, effective ways writing instructors can integrate antiracist and decolonial writing pedagogies into their teaching. Ultimately, I demonstrate that multimodal assignments can encourage linguistic, digital, and textual diversity in student writing and are thus vital to inclusive pedagogy.

Doing our work in a good way: a framework of collaboration and a case for Indigenous-only writing classrooms

Lydia Toorenburgh — 2024-08-01

Since fall of 2021, UVic has offered a section of the foundational writing course, ATWP 135: Intro to Academic Writing that is dedicated for Indigenous students. This course provides a space for first-year Indigenous students to find a sense of belonging with each other and in the university more broadly, experience anti-oppressive grading practices (Gaudet 2022), develop the confidence to access Indigenous student supports, and navigate the broader institution. In this article, the authors (an Indigenous staff working as the Tri-Faculty Indigenous Resurgence Coordinator and a non-Indigenous faculty serving as the course instructor) discuss the development, delivery, and impact of this initiative. We share an example of promising practice for institutions to consider in the interest of supporting Indigenous student success and retention. In doing so, we also offer a model for collaboration across disciplines and across cultures based on shared values of vulnerability, openness, and honesty.

Teaching and Learning in a First-Year Writing Skills Transfer Course: Investigating College Professor and Student Experiences

Taunya Tremblay — 2024-08-01

When Seneca Polytechnic replaced EAC150, an essay-based English course, with COM101, a first-semester writing course based on writing skills transfer, we saw the opportunity to investigate both professors’ and students’ experiences of the new approach. Specifically, we wanted to know how professors conceptualized and taught COM101 and also how students connected their writing for COM101 with other writing they did at Seneca, their workplaces, and in their personal lives. From 2018–2020 we conducted qualitative surveys with professors and mixed-method surveys with students and applied inductive, thematic coding to all qualitative data. The data results were encouraging: student responses indicated that COM101 positively affected their writing and reported transferring writing skills to other areas of their lives. In addition, professor responses indicated that they actively engaged with skills transfer pedagogy, despite the fact that COM101 demanded a significant change in approach. In professor responses that indicated resistance to the new approach we found valuable lessons about the core ideas of transfer, including negative transfer, and the difficulties that anyone – professors and students alike – face in new learning situations.

A Diverse Contributing Body

Christin Wright-Taylor — 2024-08-01

In 1962, the CCCC released a report titled “The Freshman Whose Native Language is Not English.” In this report, the chair argued for separate courses dedicated to teaching language-diverse students and staffed by instructors specially trained in Linguistics. Paul Kei Matsuda (1999; 2013) argues that this moment marks the institutional divide between U.S. Composition and Applied Linguistics that would go on to create a vacuum of knowledgeable peers in Composition. This vacuum meant that new composition theories interested in language learning were not held accountable by scholarship in Applied Linguistics. If Matsuda’s assessment of this division of labour is correct, it begs the question: does the same division of labour exist in a Canadian context between Writing Studies and L2 writing? How have these two fields related historically, and what implications does this relationship (or lack thereof) have on the future of writing instruction in Canada’s increasingly language-diverse classrooms? The purpose of this paper is to construct a narrative of the history of the relationship between Writing Studies and L2 Writing as it pertains to one of Canada’s two writing organizations: the Canadian Association for Studies in Language and Literature, also known as Inkshed.

To that end, this paper excavates the Inkshed newsletters and conference programs from 1980 onward for archival research elucidating any potential cross-pollination between Writing Studies and L2 Writing. To further explore the relationship between these two fields in Inkshed’s past, this research builds on the work of Miriam E. Horne who composes a rich picture of Inkshed’s development in her book, Writing in a Community of Practice: Composing Membership in Inkshed.

The findings from this paper reveal that not only did Writing Studies and L2 Writing scholarship “cross-fertilize” during the tenure of Inkshed, these two fields remained closely linked through the decades. In other words, at the writing of this paper, there does not appear to have ever been an institutional division of labour between Writing Studies and L2 Writing in the Canadian context.

Ultimately, these findings contribute to the broader narrative of how Writing Studies has professionalized in a Canadian context. They also contribute to the ongoing conversation regarding how writing instructors, writing program administrators, and writing centre professionals can best support culturally and linguistically diverse writers in Canadian classrooms. By drawing on this longstanding relationship with L2 Writing, Writing Studies scholars and practitioners are uniquely situated to move into the future of higher education equipped with language-based writing theories that are rooted in a community of knowledgeable L2 Writing peers.

Two perspectives on generative AI now

Boba Samuels — 2024-05-22

Two recently published books present perspectives on the impact of generative Artificial Intelligence on writing. Baron’s book attempts to discuss the question of how we might maintain distinctions between the writing done by humans versus that done by genAI, while Tenen’s book takes a historical view of the use of technologies in writing and what that implies for writers currently.

Doctoral Student Reading and Writing: Making Our Processes Visible

Melanie Doyle — 2024-01-21

Reading and writing are core components of what it means to be a doctoral student. Although reading and writing are known to be discursive, socialized practices, doctoral programs often focus on the output of these practices and position reading and writing as generic, universal skills. Through collaborative self-study, we sought to examine our reading and writing processes and see what we could learn as doctoral students by making these processes visible. From our analysis, we discovered that understanding our reading and writing processes enabled us to use effective reading and writing strategies; revealed the benefits of blurring personal-professional boundaries; and contributed to shaping our identity as emerging scholars. We conclude that supporting doctoral students to examine their personalized reading and writing processes, opposed to solely focusing on output, can support them to look inward, locate meaning within themselves, and recognize the multiplicity in what it means to read and write at the doctoral level.

Exploring the Writing Process of Multilingual Postsecondary Students

Tessa E. Troughton — 2024-01-21

With an increasingly multilingual population made up of domestic and international students at Canadian universities, there is a knowledge gap about the writing practices of multilingual students and the needs of multilingual academic writers. In order to address this knowledge gap, more research is required about the writing process of multilingual postsecondary students in Canada. The purpose of this study was to learn in detail about the writing process of multilingual postsecondary students in a mid-sized university in eastern Canada. A qualitative methodology consisting of semi-structured interviews was followed. A small sample size of seven participants consisted of young adults enrolled at the bachelors or graduate level who were recruited through posters on campus. The interviews were transcribed, coded holistically, and thematically analyzed using software. Themes reveal the writing process, prescriptive instruction and adherence to rules, planning prior to writing, prior knowledge of academic writing, and experience versus inexperience in writing. The meta-themes were continua of agency/following instructions, experience/inexperience, and explicit teaching/finding their own methods Secondary findings highlight the impact of instructor feedback on learner attitudes and English language learners’ need for extra time to develop their academic English. Additional findings show that multilingual postsecondary students use translanguaging as a strategic tool when composing in English. These findings offer insights into the translingual writing process of multilingual postsecondary students.