| Writing courses are required in the college curriculum because composition instruction is presumed to equip undergraduates for the demands of educated literacy. Thousands of writing teachers across the nation, dutifully reading and responding to student writing, assume that their well-intentioned labors succeed in teaching students to write. With so much good faith thus at stake, it is crucial to ask: Does writing instruction work the way teachers assume?; Students, however, often report that they learn how to write, not from composition teachers, but from practice over time in classes that require written performance. I argue that it is time to question what students take away from writing instruction. Highlighting the gap between pedagogy as imagined by academics and as experienced by students, Lee Ann Carroll coins the term faculty fantasies for academic illusions about writing and learning to write. Many language scholars doubt what a general composition course can accomplish, given the context-dependent nature of writing. This dissertation questions the transferability of writing instruction and works toward a solution to the current crisis in the field of rhetoric-composition by synthesizing scholarship and research.; Turning to the newly reconceptualized field of genre studies as a promising approach to teaching writing that transfers, I examine the effects of a genre-based pedagogy that emphasizes genre, not as text types, but as rhetorical social action. I conducted ethnographic writing research that tracks the learning experiences of participants for two (in some cases, three) years following a genre-based approach. Participants with a solid grasp of rhetoric and genre function were able to translate their knowledge into an accelerated ability to learn how to learn to write in new discursive situations.; Transferability is not open to facile explanations; the complexity of learning to write has yet to be fully explained. But focusing the goals of writing instruction on rhetorical awareness and genre analysis, rather than on improving writing in general, holds the promise of a pedagogy that carries over into the actual literacies of students writing in college and beyond:... |
