Writing in and across Disciplines
HARNESSING DISCIPLINARY BACKGROUNDS TO ENRICH WRITING PEDAGOGIES
Tom Muir¹, Tulpesh Patel²
¹Høgskolen I Oslo og Akershus, Oslo, Norway ²Høgskolen I Oslo og Akershus, Oslo, Norway
The aim of this roundtable is to explore the ways that different subject knowledges might be used to reimagine writing processes. Writing pedagogies often have a fraught relationship with disciplinarity: whether one sees writing as something crucial to disciplinary understanding (e.g. the embedded academic literacies approach) or something students should master in order to access disciplinary success (e.g. the socalled butler stance), the implication is that there is something neutral about the writing itself; the writing serves the discipline. An alternative to this may lie in the other areas of expertise writing teachers possess. Teachers of academic writing often come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds; the proposers of this roundtable, for example, teach EAP but also have backgrounds in neuroscience and literary criticism, and have recently encountered writing teachers with backgrounds in business, engineering and philosophy. If a writing teacher is also a chemical engineer, or an archaeologist, or a sociologist, might the act of writing be the object of one’s study, as well as the means of reporting on it? By making writing the object of a multidisciplinary enquiry, this roundtable aims to be a forum for discussing how the varied disciplinary backgrounds of writing teachers can be harnessed to enrich writing pedagogies. What does writing look like when viewed through the lens of a particular discipline, or the prism of many disciplines? Our hope is that this enquiry may produce reconceptualisations of writing that are surprising and imaginative, flares lighting the way into new kinds of writing pedagogy.