5: Writing the Borders of School and Professional Practice

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Charles Bazerman, Chris Dean, Jessica Early, Karen Lunsford, Suzie Null, Paul Rogers, & Amanda Stansell
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Writing researchers tend to be invested in understanding the writing practices within professional cultures because they are invested in helping students learn how to take up those practices. But what are the relationships between school activities and other professional activities? Are these sets of activities, as some scholars (Dias, Freedman, Medway, & Paré, 1999) have claimed, “worlds apart”? If so, then where are the boundary lines between these worlds, and how do learners and instructors negotiate the different roles they inhabit? If not, then how might we distinguish the different enculturation processes, and how might these processes vary from region to region? And what about students who are entering the academic professions?

The jury is still out about how to describe and research the relationships among schools, professions, and academic careers. The authors of the following chapters have taken different stances and approaches. Stephens examines how news reporters respond to comments on their articles made by news editors, comparing especially the reporters’ uptake (or not) of indirect and direct comments. Also interested in news reporting, Kohnen considers to what extent a science news editor’s tasks and commenting practices are similar to the practices of secondary school teachers. In a comparative study of how Brazilian and Anglo-American graduate students understand the genre(s) of book reviews, Araújo focuses on how the two groups express criticism. Finally, Carrasco et al. introduce the concept of a “learning career” to identify different aspects of enculturation as graduate students work in a Mexican physiology laboratory.

--KL