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2 Voices in the Parlor: The Construction of Knowledge in Composition Studies

The first chapter of this book opened with an analogy that compared scholarship in an academic discipline to an ongoing conversation taking place in a parlor. Although a parlor seems a more antiquated reference now than it likely did when Kenneth Burke published this analogy in 1941, the notion of a conversation taking place within a designated space is still vital to an understanding of disciplinary knowledge. A conversation taking place in a parlor implies that those inside the room understand and practice conversation differently than do those who are outside the room. One defining element of the conversation in each academic discipline’s parlor is how the discipline creates new knowledge, specifically, which modes of inquiry the discipline values and what the discipline accepts as convincing evidence.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce you to how knowledge is constructed in composition studies. As a student and newcomer to composition studies, you need to learn about the discipline’s methods of creating and testing knowledge so that as you engage in bibliographic research, you can better assess the significance of each source you find, each voice you encounter in the conversation. Learning more about how knowledge is constructed in composition studies can also prepare you to search for the full spectrum of voices that contribute to knowledge about your research interest so that your bibliographic research is as comprehensive as possible.

The most well-known account of how knowledge is formed in composition studies is the book The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field, written by Stephen North. In this book, North proposes a taxonomy of knowledge in composition studies based on what he calls its “modes of inquiry—the whole series of steps an inquirer follows in making a contribution to a field of knowledge” (1). North argues that the modes of inquiry used in composition studies comprise three major “methodological communities” (1): scholars, researchers, and practitioners. Though The Making of Knowledge in Composition was published in 1987, it remains a core text in many graduate composition studies programs because it continues to serve as a helpful introduction to how knowledge is constructed in the discipline. Using the framework provided by North’s book, let us now examine further each of these core modes of inquiry in composition studies: scholarship, empirical research, and practice. The following sections provide a definition, some examples, and advice for locating each.

Scholarship

Definition of Scholarship

The most traditional mode of knowledge in composition studies is scholarship. North defines scholarship as a mode of inquiry that is text-based and that relies on dialectic, which he defines as “the seeking of knowledge via the deliberate confrontation of opposing points of view” (60). North identifies three major types of knowledge-makers who produce scholarship in composition studies: historians, philosophers, and critics. He describes them more fully as “those who seek knowledge about how rhetoric has been understood and practiced in the past [the historians]; or who try to get at the theoretical underpinning of rhetorical activity [the philosophers]; or whose approach to textual interpretation has a rhetorical basis [the critics]” (64). Although he says that many of the people he designates as scholars would self-identify as rhetoricians, he does not use that term in his own taxonomy of knowledge-makers in the discipline.

Examples of Scholarship

Examples of scholarship can be found for any issue in composition studies; here, the topic of writing across the curriculum (often identified by the acronym WAC) will be used to provide some concrete examples of the how scholarship contributes to knowledge in composition studies. One example of historical scholarship about writing across the curriculum is “The History of the WAC Movement,” an early chapter in Bazerman et al.’s Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum (2005). This chapter provides a concise history that describes the origins of writing instruction in colleges and universities in the late nineteenth century, cites some initial arguments for writing across the curriculum that emerged in the 1930s, and then traces how political and social changes that impacted college enrollments in later decades, along with educational reform movements in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, led to the recognition of a need to teach writing skills in multiple disciplines. The chapter then identifies when formal writing-across-the-curriculum programs were institutionalized and concludes by discussing the initiation of journals, conferences, and web resources that provided further support for the development of WAC knowledge and practice.

McLeod and Soven’s book Composing a Community: A History of Writing Across the Curriculum (2006) is also a history of WAC, but as a collection of twelve essays by different authors, it is both more selective and more detailed in its historical approach. Here, readers will find histories of particular emphases in WAC, such as Barbara Walvoord’s essay “Gender and Discipline in 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 or findings and to suggest implications for the discipline on the basis of those findings. Two well-known examples of qualitative studies in composition studies are Janet Emig’s case study The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders and Shirley Brice Heath’s ethnography Ways with Words.

Quantitative research differs from qualitative research in that it typically contrasts a treatment and a control group to test the validity of a hypothesis. As a simple example, a teacher may teach one classroom of students as she typically does, while she teaches a different classroom of students using an experimental pedagogy, the “treatment” that she is testing. While carefully controlling for possible interferences to the study, known as threats to validity, the researcher collects data from both groups of students to determine whether the new pedagogy has a significant effect on students’ performance. Findings in quantitative studies are typically reported numerically (rather than descriptively, as in qualitative studies) and often depend on rigorous statistical analyses. Two journals known for publishing reports of quantitative research in composition studies are Research in the Teaching of English and Written Communication. Yet another form of quantitative research is a meta-analysis, which is a study that selects from many prior quantitative studies according to carefully chosen criteria and then statistically consolidates their findings. The most well-known meta-analysis in composition studies is George Hillocks’ Research on Written Composition.

Examples of Empirical Research

For examples of how empirical research contributes to knowledge in composition studies, let us return to the topic of writing across the curriculum. WAC has been the subject of both qualitative and quantitative empirical research studies, and the published results of these studies extend the knowledge about WAC beyond what can be learned from scholarship. Much of the empirical research about WAC is qualitative. Beaufort’s article “Developmental Gains of a History Major: A Case for Building a Theory of Disciplinary Writing Expertise” (2004) is just one example of several case studies that have been undertaken to identify how an individual student learned the complexities of writing in a particular discipline. Other qualitative studies about WAC have focused not on student learning but on faculty development, such as Walvoord et al.’s In the Long Run: A Study of Faculty in Three Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Programs (1997), which examines the impact of WAC on several faculties’ teaching philosophies and attitudes, teaching strategies, and career patterns. A characteristic shared by many of the qualitative studies about WAC is that they are longitudinal studies, i.e., studies in which data is collected over multiple years.

Although quantitative research studies about WAC are less common, some are available. One example is Beason’s article “Feedback and Revision in Writing Across the Curriculum Classes,” published in Research in the Teaching of English in 1993. This study did not entail a treatment and control group; instead, a total of twenty students were randomly selected from writing classes in four disciplines, and the first and final drafts of these students’ multi-draft writing assignments were analyzed by multiple raters, who coded the feedback students received on their drafts and the revisions that students made. All of the data was then quantified so that precise conclusions could be drawn about the differences in teacher and student feedback on drafts, as well as the relationship between comments and the revisions that students made. Beason also compared the data from this study of feedback and revision in WAC courses to data from other studies about feedback and revision in traditional composition courses.

Beason explains in his article that he chose a quantitative design for his study because of its unique potential to contribute to the discipline’s knowledge about WAC, especially in contrast to the many qualitative studies about WAC that were already available:

Although [prior qualitative WAC studies] are insightful studies, a focused quantitative approach (besides helping create a needed balance in WAC research) allows a researcher to isolate and scrutinize selected phenomena that are affected by many classroom factors but that can still be singled out and examined in and of themselves. Coding such phenomena provides, moreover, a sense of order for complex behaviors and products that seem to be without patterns . . . (406)

He further comments that his study contributes not only to knowledge about WAC but also to knowledge about feedback on writing and revision. Because quantitative studies often analyze data about multiple variables, it is common for a single quantitative study to contribute to the discipline’s knowledge about more than one topic.

Another example of a quantitative research about WAC is a meta-analysis. Bangert-Drowns et al. published “The Effects of School-Based Writing-to-Learn Interventions on Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analysis” in Review of Educational Research in 2004. These authors quantitatively analyzed the reports of forty-eight previously published research studies about writing-to-learn curricula at a range of grade levels and in a range of disciplines (this latter variable is what makes this meta-analysis relevant to WAC). After consolidating the results of all these studies, using methods appropriate for meta-analyses, the authors concluded that “writing can have a small, positive impact on conventional measures of academic achievement” (29). Other conclusions of this meta-analysis are that the effects are greater if the writing prompts are used for a longer period of time and if the writing prompts require metacognition, but the effects are lessened if these writing curricula are implemented in middle school grades or if the writing assignments are too long. The results of meta-analyses are more noteworthy than the results of a single research study because they help to combine and appropriately weight the findings of many studies, thereby contributing substantially to knowledge in the discipline.

Advice for Locating Empirical Research

When you are conducting bibliographic research, do not dismiss empirical research that has relevance to your topic simply because its methodology and reporting may seem unfamiliar to you. Empirical studies provide valuable knowledge to the discipline, so much so that when Richard Haswell, one of the founders of CompPile (a major database in composition studies), noticed that two of the main professional organizations in composition studies have discouraged the publication of empirical research, he charged those organizations with waging a war on disciplinary knowledge. Haswell argues that the consequences of dismissing empirical research are severe: “when college composition as a whole treats the data-gathering, data-validating, and data-aggregating part of itself as alien, then the whole may be doomed” (219). Haswell cites others who share his stance, including Stephen Witte, who states, “A field that presumes the efficacy of a particular research methodology, a particular inquiry paradigm, will collapse inward upon itself” (qtd. in Haswell 220). To limit this threat, Haswell has coined the term “RAD research” to refer to research in composition studies that is replicable, aggregable, and data supported; he has also restricted CompPile’s use of the search term “data” to refer to “any study that systematically collects and reports facts usable in further study, through whatever research method (interview, ethnography, experimentation, descriptive measurement, case study, etc.)” (Haswell, CompPile Glossary).

When investigating an issue for your bibliographic project, you can use several of the databases that you will learn more about in chapter five—CompPile, WorldCat, ERIC and JSTOR—to search specifically for reports of empirical research. When using the CompPile database, you can locate empirical research by using the search terms for your topic in conjunction with the search terms “RAD research” or “data.” To find any book-length research reports published on your topic, conduct an advanced search of the WorldCat database, using the keywords for your topic along with the following Library of Congress subject descriptor: “English language—Composition and Exercises—Research” (it must be typed using two hyphens to represent each dash). Using the ERIC database, you can more easily identify reports of empirical research on your topic if you limit your search to just the two journals that publish the greatest number of empirical research reports about composition studies: Research in the Teaching of English and Written Communication. Additional journals that publish empirical research reports about topics in education more broadly are indexed in the JSTOR database; the journal Review of Educational Research, which published the meta-analysis about WAC discussed as an example here, is one such journal. After you have read chapter five to learn more about these databases, return to the advice offered here if your initial bibliographic searches on an issue yield insufficient empirical research.

For Writing and Discussion

1. Have you had exposure to empirical research methods, perhaps through courses you have taken in other disciplines? If so, how would you describe the value of empirical research as a means of constructing disciplinary knowledge? If you have not been previously exposed to empirical research methods, what questions do you have about this mode of inquiry based on what you have just read?

2. In his article about how some professional organizations in composition studies have discouraged the publication of empirical research, Richard Haswell depicts these actions as waging a war on disciplinary knowledge. What do you think of Haswell’s use of the word “war” in this context? Why do you think that those who are engaged in composition studies may differ in their assessment of the value of empirical research?

3. As explained in this section, two major types of empirical research are qualitative studies and quantitative studies. How might each contribute uniquely to the construction of knowledge in composition studies? In what ways might it be important when conducting bibliographic research in composition studies to look for both qualitative and quantitative studies?

4. Consider the issue in composition studies that you want to research as you read this book. How do you expect that empirical research reports you locate will help you to better understand this issue?

Practice

Definition of Practice

The final way that knowledge is formed in composition studies, according to North, is through the practical experience of teachers, tutors, and writing program administrators. North calls knowledge that is based on practical experience “lore,” which he defines as “the accumulated body of traditions, practices, and beliefs in terms of which practitioners understand how writing is done, learned, and taught” (22). North writes that practice doesn’t always contribute to disciplinary knowledge; instead, North sets the condition that practice can only deservedly be considered inquiry “whenever it contributes to lore—only when, in short, it produces ‘new’ knowledge” (33). He estimates that for a college teacher employed full-time, practice may qualify as inquiry “less than ten percent of the time” (34).

For North, one of the distinguishing characteristics of lore is that it is uncritical. This can be deduced from North’s delineation of what he calls “three of its most important functional properties” (24): anything can become lore if someone suggests it; there is no method of removing anything from lore, even if it contradicts other lore; lore is practical (24–25). North also discusses lore as ultimately individualistic:

But whereas in other communities the greatest authority over what constitutes knowledge resides with the community—lies, in effect, with public knowledge—here it lies with the individual Practitioner, and private knowledge. The communal lore offers options, resources, and perhaps some directional pressure; but the individual, finally, decides what to do and whether (or how) it has worked—decides, in short, what counts as knowledge. (28)