Abstract Summary
The presenter reports a case study on voice development in written coursework completed by two multilingual doctoral students in interdisciplinary programs at a U.S. university. The findings suggest that, although understudied, lower-stakes writing tasks provide important early-stage opportunities for scholarly identity building in anticipation of independent thesis/dissertation research.
Abstract :
The institutionalized genre of the thesis or dissertation counts as an important rite of passage for novice scholars. However, before taking on this challenge, doctoral students in the U.S. are normally tasked with various analytic and reflective writing assignments in their graduate coursework, a practice that can be traced to the writing-to-learn pedagogy of the Humboldtian research seminar (Kruse, 2006). While such written coursework could serve as an important early stage for scholarly identity construction, most research to date has focused on culminating research genres including conference papers and (to a lesser degree) term projects (e.g., Prior, 1998); in contrast, the learning affordances and possibilities for voice development provided by lower-stakes tasks like reading responses and newer genres such as online discussion posts remain underexplored.
In this presentation, I report a case study that examined the linguistic and rhetorical strategies in term papers and other writing tasks completed by two multilingual doctoral students enrolled in interdisciplinary programs at a U.S. university. Data sources included the students’ written work, class observations, instructor feedback, interviews, and writing process logs. Drawing from dialogic theories of voice, I consider how the students presented themselves in their writing in terms of their disciplinary affinities and research interests as they moved between unique classroom ecologies. I show how the writers’ evolving academic selfhood was mediated by instructor and peer expectations, program and course requirements, and internalized notions of successful PhD students. I thus capture graduate-level writing as an integral part of doctoral students’ disciplinary becoming as they prepare for thesis/dissertation writing.
Kruse, O. (2006). The origins of writing in the disciplines: Traditions of seminar writing and the Humboldtian ideal of the research university. Written Communication, 23(3), 331-352.
Prior, P. (1998). Writing/disciplinarity: A sociohistoric account of literate activity in the academy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
