The Benefits of Disciplinary Information In Writing Assignments

Elijah ColemanInstructor, Department of EnglishWashington State University

Why disciplinary information in composition courses?• Sooner or later, our students will move on

to finding, examining, and using disciplinary information.• We have a unique opportunity, through

teaching and practicing information literacy skills, to engage students, to show them how information from their disciplines may be considered in a wide range of discourses, and how their disciplines connect to and are a part of other discourse communities.

How can we use it? Simple Assignments:• Informal writing assignments which build on

core writing skills, such as summary of a passage or text.• Write about and/or discuss how students

believe disciplinary information is used in their fields and how it is communicated to those outside.

For example: how might an engineer communicate complicated information to a client? How might an accountant for the engineer’s company

communicate that information? What might we say about the similarities and differences?

Complex Assignments:

◦ Find an issue or problem in your discipline which uses discipline-specific information and write a four to six page essay, in which you summarize and analyze how the information is used.

◦ In small groups, research a problem which might apply to all of your majors and write a report examining how disciplinary information may be used to resolve the problem. For example: a business major and hospitality major

discover information from a proposed sports facility has not been organized or presented clearly enough to show a need. They analyze the problem and propose simplifying the language and presentation of the information to make it more accessible and understandable for the broader public.

Assessment:Use course and program learning

outcomes and goals, including rubrics. ◦Our focus should not be on assessing the

information, but on the understanding and use demonstrated by a student.

◦Students should understand we may not be experts in their field, but we are experts in writing and information literacy.

We face a few challenges as teachers and librarians in using disciplinary information in assignments.

◦The diversity of our classes. Our classes are diverse in a number of ways, not

least of which is a student’s major. This provides a rare opportunity for students to work with people outside their disciplines.

◦Lack of background in a student’s field of study.

◦Plagiarism.

The bigger picture:

• Their audiences in other classes, and beyond college, may not be from their discipline. • We don’t have to understand all of it to help

them better learn how to use it. How many of our parents understood the technical and engineering of bikes when they taught us how to ride?• We can structure assignments in ways to

discourage or prevent plagiarism.

BenefitsStudents: ◦the opportunity to work with information

from their discipline, or from a discipline they would like to learn more about.

◦Reasons to care about the information they are locating and examining.

◦Opportunities to bring their interests to the writing class and to share with others what they are learning.

Teachers:◦Buy-in from our students.◦New and different opportunities to engage

with our students.◦The potential to make our classes and

instruction multidisciplinary.◦The opportunity to learn about topics we

might not have known about or known much about.

AcknowledgementsTomie-Gowdy Burke, Department of

English, WSUKate Watts, Department of English,

WSU