Empowering Writing in the Disciplines by Making It Invisible

Empowering Writing in the Disciplines by Making It Invisible

Local Knowledges, Local Practices makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of disciplinary methods of inquiry and argument. It provokes new insights into the theory and design of Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) programs while introducing us to disciplinary ways of thinking in fields as diverse as animal science, evolutionary biology, anthropology, political science, and Near Eastern studies. At its deepest level, it reveals the complex ways that writing is implicated and used in different fields. Throughout, the volume reveals ways that strategically designed sequences of assignments can deepen students' engagement with disciplinary problems and teach disciplinary ways of thinking, seeing, reading, analyzing, and arguing.

At first glance, the title's opening phrase, "Local Knowledges, Local Practices," seems an odd left-of-the-colon tag for hooking a reader's interest in writing. But soon the title's rhetorical purpose becomes evident. This book makes an implicit and sometimes explicit case against the conventional design of WAC and WID programs, which are usually characterized by "W" or "WI" courses that meet published criteria for kinds and amounts of writing and play a curricular role in institutional writing requirements. But this book's case against conventional WID programs is not polemical, and nowhere do these chapters suggest that Cornell's approach can or should be replicated elsewhere. Rather the message is that institutions must develop writing programs based on their own local situations. The local knowledges and practices illuminated in this volume are rooted in the peculiar history and culture of Cornell, and readers must repeatedly ask how insights from Cornell could be transported elsewhere.

Part 1 of the book—with chapters written by editor Jonathan Monroe (director of the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines at Cornell University), Katherine Gottschalk (director of First Year Writing Seminars), Keith Hjortshoj (director of Writing in the Majors), and Harry E. Shaw (director of the Knight Writing Program from 1986 to 1992 and chair of the Department of English from 1992 to 2002)—tells the history of Cornell writing programs and explains the underlying theories that motivate current practice. Part 2 consists of eighteen chapters written by faculty from thirteen different disciplines. Two disciplines—anthropology and government—are represented by several different professors teaching different kinds of disciplinary courses. Most of the chapters in part 2 can stand alone nicely, but their emphasis on disciplinary ways of thinking and arguing—as opposed to concerns about teaching writing—make fullest sense only in light of the "local practices" described in part 1.

So what are these local practices? According to Monroe, Cornell—in its hybrid status as an Ivy League private university as well as the public land-grant institution for the state of New York—"has been called the most complicated university in the country" (5). Cornell has a long tradition of teaching writing often characterized by resistance to a belletristic English department–centered approach to writing instruction.¹ In 1966, a decade before the advent of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement, Cornell situated the teaching of writing not in the English department but in a freshman humanities program taught by nine different disciplines. This program has evolved into the current first-year writing seminars taught by faculty or graduate teaching assistants from "thirty departments or programs in over 100 different subjects" (23). Cornell undergraduates are required to take two first-year writing seminars. All teaching assistants in the program take Writing 700: Teaching Writing, a course that gave rise to Fredric Bogel and Katherine Gottschalk's 1988 book Teaching Prose: A Guide for Writing Instructors (a work that has exerted a strong influence on my own teaching of writing). Although the first-year seminars must meet certain requirements for writing (for...