In the past five years, informal science institutions (ISIs), science communication, advocacy and citizen action groups, funding organizations, and policy-makers in the UK and the USA have become increasingly involved in efforts to promote increased public engagement with science and technology (PEST). Such engagement is described as taking place…

Classroom discourse analysis has contributed to understandings of the nature of student-teacher interactions, and how learning takes place in the classroom; however, much of this work has been undertaken in teacher-directed learning contexts. Student-centred classrooms such as problem-based learning (PBL) approaches are increasingly common in…

Group strategies--group discussion, feedback, collaboration--seem so widely used in postsecondary writing as to have attained the status of lore. In seeking pedagogical community, writing teachers too often gloss over or deny the reality of competing voices. To understand the traditional appeal of the trope "community" for American…

Making diagrams of the relationships among data is not a new idea: however, the utility of computerized hypertext techniques makes the task more feasible, on a wider scale of data. Data maps using "EntryWay" (a hypertext editing program) were made based on qualitative data from eight different research projects, including: a discourse…

A study examined the nature of interactions that occurred among the participants of a two-year collaborative writing project with a particular focus on the manner in which they "positioned" one another. Subjects were three students (who were all in the sixth grade at the start of the study and in eighth grade at the end) who had…

A current trend in composition consider writing a social act where texts are produced because of and in response to social contexts. Classroom practices are just beginning to change and acknowledge the power that discourse communities assert on writers. Composition teachers must also acknowledge the importance of community-governed reading…

This collection of essays is intended to increase cultural awareness and provide new information about the nature of writing in a number of the discourse communities central to modern economic life. The book focuses on academe, journalism, industry, computers, finance, and law. Essays and their authors are: "Coming to Terms with Different…

Examines the organization of discourse communities around the production and legitimization of particular forms of knowledge and social practices and the way students learn, or fail to learn, the conventions of a discourse community. Suggests writing teachers consider the pedagogical implications of teaching the conventions of any discourse…

Criticizes the application in public schools of the new "cultural literacy," which is restrictive and can lead to intellectual stagnation. Suggests a wider, more active concept of cultural literacy, which involves building new knowledge, accommodating new perspectives, and reading beyond the narrow, traditionally defined notions of our…

A study examined the assessment of instructional documents written by undergraduate engineering students in a 300-level technical writing course. The six documents were independently ranked by nine readers--three writing faculty, three engineering faculty, and three technical writing professionals. Besides ranking the documents, the nine readers…

The affirmation of individual creativity in writing is what sets this book apart from other process-oriented rhetorics. Conversational in tone, the book's third edition boasts a writer-to-writer perspective that will put students at ease. The book "walks" students through the main elements of writing from discovery and research to…

Service learning discourses have often addressed questions of representation through reciprocity, asking what various participants receive from service learning community experiences. In the process of researching an article about reciprocity, a writing teacher found that reciprocity was often defined as an exchange of learning for some form of…

This paper describes how freshman composition teachers can provide students with tools for integrating different classes and navigating the university experience by introducing students to discourse community theory and viewing freshman composition as a foundation for Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC). It begins by describing how discourse…

This book constitutes the first comprehensive overview of service-learning in composition studies and should be of particular interest to educators at the high school through university levels who want to combine writing instruction with community action. In the book college-level case studies are woven into discussions of how service-learning…

This paper is based on an ethnographic study that examined the study abroad experiences of 20 male Japanese students in Vancouver (Canada) from a post-colonial perspective. This perspective allows the researcher to view the Japanese students studying in the West as deeply embedded in a transnational context where global and national ideologies and…