Two Early WAC Communities: Lessons for Today,” as well as a numerous essays that discuss the history of the WAC program at particular institutions: George Mason University, the California State University system, the University of Chicago, and Michigan Tech, to name a few. As Bazerman et al.’s chapter and McLeod and Soven’s book illustrate, histories in composition studies contribute to disciplinary knowledge by identifying the factors that have influenced some aspect of the field. In turn, that understanding of historical influences can provide insight into how the topic is currently configured in the discipline; also, histories often yield cautionary advice or recommendations for future developments in the discipline.
In addition to histories, another type of scholarship, according to North, is philosophy, what we would now more commonly term as theory; North himself described philosophers in composition studies as those who “try to get at the theoretical underpinning of rhetorical activity” (64). In composition studies, theory is often the form of knowledge-building that most depends on dialectic, which again, North defines as “the seeking of knowledge via the deliberate confrontation of opposing points of view” (60). At times, theory can be contentious. Consider, for example, McLeod’s and Maimon’s article “Clearing the Air: WAC Myths and Realities,” published in College English in 2000. The authors begin by identifying four ways in which they believe other scholars have mischaracterized the history, definition, and effectiveness of WAC. After discussing why others’ characterizations of WAC are “myths,” McLeod and Maimon then posit theories that they contend more accurately represent the relationship between WAC and writing to learn and writing in the disciplines, as well as the intertwined elements of WAC programs.
Often, scholarship in composition studies that is theoretical is developed because the author wants to expand on—rather than to correct—earlier scholarship. An example of such scholarship is Samuels’ article “Re-Inventing the Modern University with WAC: Postmodern Composition as Cultural and Intellectual History” (2004). Here, Samuels contrasts the traits of modernism and postmodernism, then theorizes that WAC is perfectly suited for the postmodern university because its focus on disciplinary discourse challenges students to examine the epistemologies of different disciplines. Thus, this article furthers knowledge about WAC by merging it with postmodern theory and educational philosophy; often, scholars in composition studies similarly apply theories that originated in other disciplines to issues in composition studies in ways that expand knowledge in our discipline.
The final form of scholarship identified by North is criticism, undertaken by those “whose approach to textual interpretation has a rhetorical basis” (64). One example of textual criticism in composition studies, specifically WAC, is Ochsner and Fowler’s article “Playing Devil’s Advocate: Evaluating the Literature of the WAC/WID Movement,” published in Review of Educational Research in 2004. For this article, Ochsner and Fowler analyzed eighty publications about writing across the curriculum (WAC) and writing in the disciplines (WID). Their analysis of these texts led the authors to identify several specific weaknesses in published scholarship and studies about WAC: these texts often don’t clearly distinguish between writing to learn and learning to write; texts about WAC privilege writing as the primary mode of learning and do not adequately acknowledge other modes of learning, such as speaking, listening, and reading; the effectiveness of WAC is too often based on self-reports of faculty and students rather than more independent measures of student learning; the financial costs of WAC programs—including faculty development, program administration, program assessment, and smaller class sizes—are regularly underestimated in WAC literature; and WAC literature often does not recognize the training required for faculty to teach writing well. What distinguishes scholarship as criticism is not that it is negative in its emphasis, but rather that it is scholarship that contributes to knowledge in composition studies by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of other scholarly texts.
Advice for Locating Scholarship
Most of the bibliographic work you will do in composition studies will entail locating and synthesizing scholarship. As you have undoubtedly learned during your undergraduate education, most scholarship is not readily available on the internet, especially through general search engines like Google and Yahoo. Whereas anything can be posted on the web, regardless of its accuracy, scholarly writing must meet more rigorous standards that ensure its credibility. One of the distinguishing characteristics of scholarly writing is that it is written by authors who are experts in the discipline and who use discipline-specific terminology when discussing ideas with readers who are also knowledgeable about the discipline; also, scholarly writing includes citations to other sources that the writer has consulted in developing the text. In addition, most scholarly manuscripts are subjected to peer review prior to being accepted for publication. Peer review means that others in the discipline who are knowledgeable about the topic being discussed read the manuscript, decide whether it’s worthy of publication, and offer suggestions to improve it prior to its publication. Scholarly writing is usually only accepted for publication if it addresses issues that are of interest to the profession, contains accurate, well-supported arguments, and makes an original contribution to the knowledge of the discipline. Published scholarship that has undergone peer review is generally considered credible and worthy of the attention of others in the discipline, who then read, discuss, and incorporate the knowledge produced by the text into their own work, thus continuing the disciplinary conversation.
Scholarship is published primarily as books, essays in edited collections, and articles in scholarly journals. To locate scholarship, you must use resources such as library catalogues and databases; the major databases and bibliographic resources for finding scholarship in composition studies will be discussed extensively in chapter five of this book.
For Writing and Discussion
1. Consider the issue in composition studies that you want to research as you read this book. How do you expect that the scholarship you locate will help you to better understand this issue?
2. North identifies three types of scholarship: history, philosophy or theory, and textual criticism. When doing bibliographic research in composition studies, how important is it that you find sources that represent all three kinds of scholarship? How might each of these types of scholarship contribute uniquely to your understanding of an issue in composition studies?
Empirical Research
Definition of Empirical Research
When North identifies another methodological community within the discipline as “researchers,” he is referring to those who conduct empirical research studies to build knowledge in composition studies. Because an empirical researcher collects data directly from participants in a study, empirical research is also known as primary research; in contrast, scholarship is sometimes called secondary research because it relies on knowledge gained through other texts, i.e., knowledge a writer gains secondhand. An empirical researcher builds knowledge by collecting and analyzing data, then publishing these results in article-length or book-length research reports.
Though North identified several methods of empirical research in his book, he admitted that his was only a partial list of the methods being used by researchers in composition studies. More complete explanations of empirical research methods being used in composition studies were published in the years following North’s book, in texts such as Lauer and Asher’s Composition Research: Empirical Designs (1988), MacNealy’s Strategies for Empirical Research in Writing (1999), and Blakeslee and Fleischer’s Becoming a Writing Researcher (2007).
Though there are many empirical research designs used in composition studies, most can be classified as being either qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative research designs study either a small number of participants (a case study) or a larger number of participants within their environment (an ethnography), and have as their goal the identification of specific variables that describe the participants’ natural behavior concerning an issue related to composition studies. The data in qualitative research are typically descriptive observations; the researcher then uses those observations to state more specific conclusions
