Acting Rhetorically: Entry-Level Students’ Induction into a University Discipline

Abstract

University teaching staff aim to induct students into disciplinary discourse by way of critical literacy—transforming new ideas into informed and supported arguments in ‘good’ academic essays. Teachers report, however, that many entry-level students fail either to develop informed opinions or to produce such essays—and some do neither. Disappointing results are generally blamed on student diversity (differences in background and school experience) and apathy, reinforcing the idea that students themselves are the problem: that it is their abilities and attitudes that have to be fixed, while the university system of which they are a part remains largely unchanged. Drawing on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) as a way to locate entry-level students’ writing as a rhetorical response within the university system, the study investigated a disciplinary induction—mapped from the first lecture to the return of the first graded essay—in a course in English Literature. A picture of the intended, taught and learned curricula at play in the induction was built up from the examination of tools in use—for example, the course out-line, course-book, lectures, essay questions and essays and from staff and students' interviews about aims, teaching and assessment practices. These components were evaluated against the aim of critical literacy, which, in keeping with the sociocultural thrust of the study, had been defined as argumentation in disciplinary debate. A key finding was that, rather than engaging students in disciplinary debates at the outset, teaching staff aimed to initiate critical literacy as a step towards joining the debates. Driven by the transmissionary model of education that traditionally services grading for selection, this staged approach tended to confound the aims of critical literacy as argumentation. The students themselves, in their essays, responded in various but generally consistent ways to the induction activity system’s central contradiction—critical literacy versus grading for selection. Their discourse stances reflected the pressure of the grading system on their writing and thinking at the expense of more complex learning. CHAT analysis suggests that the latter would more likely be achieved if students were invited into the conversations of the disciplinary debates from the outset. Working together in such a community of practice, students and teachers share and construct knowledge; texts are produced in response to current debates, and revised in response to peer and teacher feedback aligned to the rhetorical demands of debate; students and teachers collaborate on criteria and standards for evaluation; and students assess each other's critical literacy. Thus the students in a disciplinary induction, who are as valid a part of that activity system as the teachers and the university itself, would not be shielded from disciplinary debate but drawn into it—in a word, inducted, in the fullest academic sense.