The future of writing and writing studies in the Asia-Pacific
This roundtable brings together eight emerging leaders from across subdisciplines of writing studies to present their visions for the future's field in the Asia-Pacific region. It was presented at the Australasian Association of Writing Programs 2022 conference, held on unceded Kabi Kabi country.
Session abstract
Writing is, Audre Lorde teaches us, “a vital necessity” by which “our hopes and dreams toward survival and change [are] first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action”. Lorde speaks of creative writing here, but the same notion is captured when Anne Surma articulates the imaginative dimension of professional writing in “mak[ing] present … the actually or apparently immaterial”, and when rhetoricians draw on the classical canon of invention. Writing, across these apparent disciplinary divides, has transformative action at its core.
This is a great responsibility. Writing’s impact, across creative, professional and academic spheres, demands that we take seriously its ethical dimensions: to act and to write responsibly, we must grapple with both the good and bad of our disciplinary histories, of our research, and of our teaching practices. It is also a great opportunity. Writing is a force that effects change, and as a field, we can do this most effectively when we work in solidarity across disciplinary, institutional and professional siloes. Lorde again: “without community, there is no liberation”.
As we – our disciplines, our colleagues, our students, our communities – seem pressed on all sides by accelerating natural disasters, increasing financial insecurity and income inequality, cuts to higher education and attacks on the arts and humanities, the space to reflect rather than react is ever-harder to come by, yet reflection is critical if we are to build a strong, cohesive, effective and sustainable field. In response to this exigence, this session brings together eight emerging leaders from across the field of writing and writing studies (including professional and technical writing, creative writing, academic writing and rhetoric) to share their perspectives on the discipline’s future directions and possibilities.
Presentations
Expand the accordion items below to access each presenter's script. Presenters are arranged alphabetically by first name.
This conference is being held on the unceded lands of the Kabi Kabi people. On behalf of myself and our panelists, I acknowledge their sovereignty and continuing connection to country, and pay our respects to the Kabi Kabi people and their elders. We extend this respect to all Indigenous peoples of this continent and surrounding lands.
These lands have been sites of art, science, law, culture and community for 80,000 years and counting, and sovereignty was never ceded. We offer this acknowledgement as an opening for all us to contemplate a way to join in decolonial and Indigenous movements for sovereignty and self-determination, and for linguistic and epistemic justice.
Always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.
I acknowledge that I Zoom from Kaurna Yerta. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, past and present, and to all First Nations people. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
In her 1951 account of early twentieth century upheavals, Hannah Arendt wrote of ‘homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth’ (2017, p. ix). Her words echo eerily in a contemporary context of environmental destruction, warfare, economic precarity and Covid-19. Emerging research reveals the psycho-social effects these crises inflict: people now are less open-minded and agreeable than two years ago (Burke 2022). Xenophobia and authoritarian politics are on the rise (Moss & O’Connor 2020; Roche et al. 2022), reflecting what Arendt called uprootedness, a condition wherein people feel they bear ‘no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others’ (p. 625), which increases susceptibility to structures promising ‘consistency’ to relieve ‘the never-ending shocks which real life and real experience deal to human beings’ (2017, p. 462).
Before 2020, my creative writing pedagogy was strongly dialogic. Now, I find this a challenge. Filled with social phobias, students are reluctant to speak up. When they do, disputes arise between clashing points of view. While diversities of opinion ought to be what makes dialogue interesting, the problem is the authoritative fixity with which many students cling to pre-formed ideas, refusing to respect thoughts that unsettle their own. A similar-though-different rigidity manifests through students who ask and ask, Where is the rubric? What do you mean there’s no one right answer?
This makes me ask, how I might alter my creative writing pedagogy to address students’ changed existential needs? If I can, perhaps classroom dialogues of openness and respect will become possible again. Towards this aim, I’ve been reflecting on The Need for Roots (2005) by Arendt’s contemporary Simone Weil, in which Weil posed a set of metaphysical needs attendance to which can counteract uprootedness. Weil’s work, I note, brings risks: she was often critiqued for an over-prescriptive absolutism resembling that I seek to redress (Eliot in Weil 2005, p. vii). Rather than straightforwardly adopting her prescriptions, I take her ideas as points for departure in multiple directions.
Two of the needs Weil raised are order and liberty. She defined these in non-standard ways. A person feels order when there is relative compatibility among obligations borne to others and themselves. Liberty arises from order as an ‘ability to choose’ from a ‘straightforward’ range of possibilities (2005, p. 9). Liberty and order are reciprocal and ideally balance in ways analogous to ‘rest and exercise’ (p. 11).
Order becomes threatened when carrying out one obligation requires compromise to another. Given the multiple factors always at play, order is perpetually at risk (p. 11). This is acceptable. Absolute need-satisfaction is both impossible and unadvisable (p. 9); healthy need-satisfaction fluctuates rhythmically within liveable ranges (p. 11). However, Weil noted that the compromises to order in her own era tended to exceed liveable parameters, producing problems. In our era, too, daily conflicts of interests abound. For instance, wearing face-masks to uphold public health obligations can produce guilt about environmental sustainability, and vice versa. Students struggling to pay skyrocketing bills often rely on unpredictable casual employment, the schedules and hours of which compromise class attendance.
Weil posed that when needs for order are insufficiently met, people are liable to seek ‘poisons’, including totalitarian ideologies. To avoid this, art and literature can provide less toxic substitutes via ‘examples of ensembles in which independent factors concur’ (p. 10). Regarding creative writing pedagogies, this makes me wonder whether an increased emphasis on writing structure and form as literary evocations of artistic order might in curious ways help speak to some of the existential anxieties of students today.
However, there are risks, namely the very authoritarianism I seek to avoid. Order’s relationship with liberty is therefore key. As earlier noted, Weil associated liberty with choice (Weil 2005, p. 9). Liberty is compromised when choices are too limited, but also when they seem overly broad, which triggers overwhelm at the impossibility of grasping all options and implications (Weil 2005, p. 9). In revision of my earlier suggestion of literary form as a subtle address to students’ existential needs for order, I now note an importance of simultaneously mobilising literary form in address to needs for liberty. This seems possible via exploration of form as something with which to experiment, for instance using John Kinsella’s analogy of a generative ‘box’ that a writer can ‘push against’ towards novel possibilities of creative play. Assignments and learning tasks in general may be approached via a similar frame: clear communication of assignments and learning tasks can support needs for order, but there must be equal scope for liberty via chances for students to make learning their own. Even rubrics can be boxes for pushing against – and beyond.
To close, I note that Weil considered attention ‘the rarest and purest form of generosity’ (in Fitzpatrick 2022). Thank you for gifting this to me. Students’ needs are differing and dynamic, making pedagogy always a work-in-process. I’ve shared some of my working and processes, hoping to in response hear and learn about yours, too.
We need to “claim the discipline of professional writing as a legitimate and significant area of pedagogy, analysis and research … not merely … as a market-driven, instrumental field, whose raison d’etre is simply to teach students rules, formulae and mnemonics for writing pithy documents” (Surma, 2000). This is Anne Surma, writing more than twenty years ago, yet it could have been written today – or certainly a couple of weeks ago, when Australian media was awash with claims of “kids today can’t write”, based on results of our national K-12 standardised testing regime. Surma argued that we must approach writing as rhetorical and ethical, and yet twenty years later, we find university writing classes dominated by genre- and skills-based models, which trickle down through teachers to produce high school graduates who struggle with higher-order aspects of writing like audience (Australian Education Research Organisation et al., 2022), and upwards through our graduates who enter the workforce and struggle to adapt to evolving workplace genres and interpersonal aspects of writing (Graduate Careers Australia, 2015; National Skills Commission, n.d.).
This is an instrumental problem – because another thing that has not changed in the last twenty years is the need for disciplines to justify themselves in instrumental terms, nor the need for students to get and perform in jobs. But this is most of all an ethical problem – when we talk about technical and professional writing, we are talking about writing that shapes the world and structures our daily lives. It has incredible impact on our individual and collective practices and experiences – impact that is often unrecognised because the writing itself is so mundane as to go unrecognised. This makes technical and professional communication very powerful, and very dangerous. When we approach it through rules and formulas, through mastery of white Australian English, through genre models of existing successful texts, we literally reinscribe the inequities of the present even as we pay lip service to narratives of inclusion and social mobility.
The recent moral panic over “AI essays”, generated from large language models, is an instructive one. Commentators were quick to announce “the end of essay assessments” as well as many forms of professional writing, as were some of my colleagues. In reality, technologies like this have been under discussion for years (Laquintano & Vee, 2017; Hart-Davidson, 2018), have been being used in workplaces (Knowles, 2022), and in universities, as Scott Graham memorably put it, “it’s just too much work to cheat that way” (Graham, 2022). But the bigger takeaway to me is: like all the other technologies that have heralded the end of writing before it – Grammarly, spellcheck, the ballpoint pen, the codex – we are not going to outrun this technology without Silicon Valley startup money, and indeed not even with Silicon Valley startup money. And nor should we.
Technology changes, writing changes, as it should. Yet these language models offer little that is new – they’re not even remixing, but literally re-writing existing work from large corpuses of academic and professional documents (Noble, 2018; Vee, 2022). The fear that these technologies will so easily supplant human writers points to people’s sense that effective writing is about more than mechanical correctness and conformity, that it’s about being a human living in a body operating in a society – yet we too rarely teach it that way.
So how do we do equip students to write effectively in novel, rapidly changing, increasingly urgent circumstances? To write towards linguistic, epistemic and social justice?
Anne Surma gave us some of the answer 20 years ago: we begin by foregrounding the rhetorical and ethical work of writing, with mechanics following. bell hooks gives us some of the answer: “any radical pedagogy must insist that everyone’s presence is acknowledged … and genuinely value[d]” (hooks, 1994, p. 8, original emphasis). As a teacher-scholar of rhetoric and technical & professional communication, I see the vital work of writing classes as building spaces where we all learn with and from each other, integrating prior and emerging knowledge – practices of collaborative and ongoing knowledge-building that we continue throughout our lives. Understanding writing as an always-emergent, always contextualised social practice in this way positions writers to assess, deliberate and respond to writing situations that are novel to them as they move into new contexts, as well as to situations that are novel to all of us, as in the example of “AI writing”. Graduates of such programs are well-equipped to operate as what Lisa Melonçon and Joanna Schreiber describe as “critical pragmatic practitioners” – writers with the practical skills needed to get and perform in jobs and society, and the critical and ethical skills needed to make those jobs and societies better.
A little later on in
References
Australian Education Research Organisation, Jackson, C., Lu, L., Knapp, P., Wan, W. L., & Groves, O. (2022). Writing development: What does a decade of NAPLAN data reveal? https://www.edresearch.edu.au/sites/default/files/2022-10/writing-development-report-aa.pdf
Graduate Careers Australia. (2015). Graduate Outlook 2014: Employers’ Perspectives on Graduate Recruitment in Australia. https://www.graduatecareers.com.au/files/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/graduate_outlook_2014.pdf
Graham, S. S. (2022, October 24). AI-Generated Essays Are Nothing to Worry About. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/10/24/ai-generated-essays-are-nothing-worry-about-opinion
Harper, R., & Vered, K. O. (2017). Developing communication as a graduate outcome: Using ‘Writing Across the Curriculum’ as a whole-of-institution approach to curriculum and pedagogy. Higher Education Research & Development, 36(4), 688–701. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2016.1238882
Hart-Davidson, W. (2018). Writing with robots and other curiousities of the age of machine rhetorics. In J. Alexander & J. Rhodes (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of digital writing and rhetoric. Routledge.
hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
Knowles, A. M. (2022). Human-AI Collaborative Writing: Sharing the Rhetorical Task Load. 2022 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm), 257–261. https://doi.org/10.1109/ProComm53155.2022.00053
Laquintano, T., & Vee, A. (2017). How Automated Writing Systems Affect the Circulation of Political Information Online. Literacy in Composition Studies, 5(2), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.21623/1.5.2.4
National Skills Commission. (2021). The state of Australia’s skills: Now and into the future. Australian Government. Retrieved November 14, 2022, from https://www.nationalskillscommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/2022-03/2021%20State%20of%20Australia%27s%20Skills_0.pdf
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press. https://nyupress.org/9781479837243/algorithms-of-oppression
Petelin, R. (2002). Another Whack at WAC: Reprising WAC in Australia. Language and Learning Across the Disciplines, 5(3), 98–109.
Skillen, J. (2006). Teaching Academic Writing from the “Centre” in Australian Universities. In L. Ganobcsik-Williams (Ed.), Teaching Academic Writing in UK Higher Education: Theories, Practices and Models. Bloomsbury.
Surma, A. (2000). Defining professional writing as an area of scholarly activity. TEXT: Journal of Writing & Writing Programs, 4(2), n.p.
Thomas, S. E. (2021). Writing Instruction in Australia. Composition Studies, 49(3), 176–181.
Vee, A. (2022, May 28). Automating Writing: How, Why, and for Whom? Panel: Trust the Machine: Inviting Algorithms into Our Textual Meaning-Making Process. Rhetoric Society of America, Baltimore, MD.
Vered, K. Orr., Thomas, S., & Emerson, L. (2019). From the Margins to the Centre: Whole-of-Institution Approaches to University-Level Literacy and Language Development in Australia and New Zealand. Across the Disciplines, 16(3), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2019.16.3.10
Hello everyone. It’s lovely to have the opportunity to present today. I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the Country I’m presenting from – the Wangal people of the Eora nation – and those of the Country I’m beaming into – the Kabi Kabi people. In both places, sovereignty has never been ceded and I urge us to consider how the future of writing studies is connected to decolonisation in the many places we teach, research, talk about and plan our writing. To keep my vision of writing studies to five minutes, I will talk about two aspects of writing studies – our curriculum and our institutional position.
In terms of the curriculum, I would suggest that the future of writing studies is caught between two seemingly divergent paths: an ethical imperative to Indigenise the curriculum, and the need to engage with and support our growing cohort of international students. I was hired as the second academic in writing studies at the University of Sydney in 2012. One of my interests in the position was to adapt the predominantly US-centric underpinning of rhetoric and composition to the needs of Australian students. I quickly began pairing work like Richard Scott Lyons’ “Rhetorical Sovereignty”, which argues for the rights of Indigenous students to pursue their own kind of writing for their own ends, with work like Aileen Moreton Robinson’s “Patriarchal White Sovereignty”, which argues that an ideology of whiteness works through our institutions to normalise the nation as a white possession. Using these works to critique how we ask students to write at Sydney reveals some large problems – including how traditional writing criteria privileges whiteness, how the university frames Indigenous students and students from ‘non-traditional backgrounds for study’ in a deficit discourse (disadvantaged and in need of support), and how core texts of writing often exclude Indigenous voices and alternative forms of expression. But, since 2012, the internationalisation of higher education – a trend in student enrolment – has brought the commitment to Indigenising writing studies into question – for eg, where a large first year unit I coordinate included 20% international student enrolment in 2015, that figure is now 70%. If this is the future, how does a decolonised curriculum benefit international students? I don’t have time to answer this in detail, but, in my experience, the same biases in the curriculum that support whiteness simultaneously disadvantage Indigenous and international students. Or, put another way, it is possible that decolonising the curriculum simultaneously creates more inclusive learning environments for international students.
In terms of our institutional position, again writing studies is pulled in two seemingly contradictory directions: the growth of the field to include all kinds of writing and textual production/analysis, and an institutional politics of austerity that limits the secure hiring and development of staff. The case of writing at Sydney demonstrates this – from two academic staff and two courses in 2012, we have grown to include 10 academic staff and more than a dozen courses; from 500 students a year to 1800 students a year. We grew from a Hub to a Department, to having a minor and an approved major. And yet, as a result of the austerity measures that gripped higher education from 2020, those of us from the University of Sydney have just endured a gruelling change process labelled ‘FutureFASS’ (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences). We lost the major, our departmental status, were amalgamated into English, and will likely lose units that house our disciplinary content in favour of large, surplus-generating first-year units. If this is indicative of the future of writing studies in Australia, the scholars that make up the discipline will need to continue to exercise creative thinking to find ways to stay true to our disciplinary prerogatives – to decolonise, to ensure student rights to their own language, to connect with and adapt research in rhetoric and composition – as the institutional sands continue to shift.
So that concludes my five minutes – thanks for listening, and I look forward to the discussion.
Defining what constitutes technical writing has long proved challenging for the field of technical and professional communication (TPC). Many researchers have hazarded attempts (Britton, Dobrin, See also: Dandridge, Harris, Hays, Hogan, Kelley and Massey, Limaye, MacIntosh, Straton, Walter, Zall). And many of those definitions have been rightly criticized for a number of reasons, including for a) emphasizing a positivistic rather than a humanistic view of language (Miller), b) sidelining women through narrow conceptualizations of technologies and workplaces (Durack), c) marginalizing the contributions of people of color by X (Jones, Moore, and Walton), and d) discriminating against the transgender community through cisgendered assumptions about professional attire and voices (Sánchez). It’s no surprise, of course, that these definitions of technical and professional communication have proved inadequate because definitions are, after all, exclusionary. As Jo Allen explains, “definitions draw lines: This is and that isn’t” (75). And those exclusions fail to acknowledge, as Pamela Ecker contends, “that all communication…is multidisciplinary and evolving” (570, 1995).
Nevertheless, despite the lack of consensus about what defines TPC, scholars have recently broadened the scope of TPC by identifying technical communication in a multitude of previously overlooked venues and analyzing those texts through a variety of lenses. In Technical Communication Quarterly alone, scholars have examined the role of TPC in an impressive array of contexts, including Indigenous language interpreters and translators (Gonzalez, 2022), urban foraging (Itchuaqiyaq and Matheson, 2021), historical markers (O’Brien, 2022), public policy development (Williams, 2022), fertility and period tracking apps (Novotny and Hutchinson), design thinking and making (Tham, 2021), Black family reunions (Allen, 2022), Black hair care on YouTube (Yusuf and Schioppa, 2022), open video game development (Thominet, 2021), ultrasounds (Frost, 2021), HIV risk communication on Grindr (Green), Chinese pregnancy and mothering social media (Wang, 2021), comics and graphic storytelling (Bahl, Figueriredo, and Shrivener), YouTube beauty videos (Ledbetter, 2018), and many more. Collectively, these examples highlight the significance of TPC to a wide range of communicative activities, and in so doing, they tacitly expand the definition of what constitutes TPC.
But within this augmented picture of TPC, podcasting remains conspicuously sidelined. In 2011–three years before the start of the so-called “golden age of podcasting” (Berry)--Christine Tulley penned an early analysis of the connections between podcasting, aural communication, and information technologies (2011). For the most part, however, the field of TPC seems not to have heeded her suggestion that podcasting “should be carefully observed as it continues to evolve” (272, 2011). To date, research about podcasting is primarily taken up by scholars working in neighboring disciplines, including media studies (e.g. Morris & Hoyt, 2021), communication studies (e.g. Kumanyika, 2015), journalism studies (e.g. Wallace, 2019), radio studies (e.g. Bottomley), sound studies (Sterne et al.), rhetorical studies (e.g. Choong & Bjork 2022; Detweiler, 2019), writing studies (e.g. Ceraso, 2018; Danforth, Stedman, & Faris, 2018), and the nascent interdisciplinary field of podcast studies (e.g. Berry; Llinares; Spinelli & Dann). When it comes to building a repository of knowledge about podcasting, then, TPC scholarship is on the outside looking in. But podcasting deserves a more prominent position in TPC scholarship.
To be clear: all podcasting is not technical and professional communication. Podcasting, as Eric Detweiler explains, “names neither a genre or a format. It is perhaps best defined as a medium” (2021). And it is misguided to position any single medium as always or solely the domain of technical and professional communication. All writing is technical writing? I think not. All speech is professional communication? Nope. Likewise, all podcasting is not technical communication. But some podcasting certainly falls under the purview of technical communication. And sorting out the points of connection between podcasting and TPC requires augmenting our understanding of podcasting beyond its position as a medium.
Although some authors define podcasting as a medium based on its unique distribution technologies (Hammersley 2004; McElhearn, Giles, and Herrington, 2006), Andrew Bottomley reminds scholars that podcasting “is more than a method of distribution” (165). Jonathan Sterne and his team, for example, suggest that podcasting is “a group of connected technologies, practices, and institutions” (pg?, 2008). Similarly, Jeremy Wade Morris and Eleanor Patterson contend that “[p]odcasting is neither limited to nor defined by its technologies. Rather, it is a specific set of practices and cultural meanings that are entirely intertwined with the technologies for its distribution, organization, and consumption (221-2, 2015). This sense of podcasting as an imbricated set of practices, cultural meanings, and technologies positions podcasting as more than just a medium and also aligns with research that understands technical communication as a posthuman “assemblage” (Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 2022). Together, this complex picture of both podcasting and technical communication opens up a multitude of opportunities to investigate the points of convergence between them. The question transforms from “How does this medium overlap with technical communication?” to the much richer question: “In what ways do the cultural practices, meanings, and technologies involved in podcasting intersect with technical and professional communication?” And concomitantly, “How can the tools of TPC inform our understanding of the cultural practices, meanings, and technologies involved in podcasting?”
While listeners are unlikely to hear podcasts in the traditional TPC genres (instruction manuals, user guides, technical reports, and grant proposals), many podcasts nonetheless fall into genres familiar to technical communicators. There are how-to podcasts, internal business communications podcasts, public-facing brand-building podcasts, oral presentations podcasts (TED podcasts), research communication podcasts, and so on. And although these genres of podcasts warrant consideration by TPC scholars, I focus in my current research project on a less obvious example of technical communication embedded in one of podcasting's most popular genres: true crime.
[sound cue: cliffhanger music!]
The disruption of recent years hardly needs rehearsing: online education under pressure, decreasing student engagement and increasing anxiety, difficult working conditions. Currently, with our union striking, university staff in Aotearoa New Zealand are facing declining wages in real terms and job losses, particularly for colleagues on casual or temporary contracts. And of course the pandemic has made the social inequities that shape our teaching context all the more evident. The weird optimism of the first pandemic year, where disruption was at least sometimes cast as potentially useful transformation, and more flexibility and recognition for students’ circumstances seemed suddenly enabled – seems flattened now: the university just grinding on, even as more and more of its community is alienated, grappling with a world changed. As V. Jo Hsu (2022) writes so evocatively in Octalog IV, these recent years have made all too evident how the university’s “unimaginative, unyielding metrics” fail to account for or value “lived realities that misfit our social spaces” (p.327) and the “broader networks” (p.328) that matter most, even as “the university … is made to absorb such stories as part of its own heroic trajectory” (p.327).
How to feel, then, as part of a discipline whose teaching, especially in first-year writing, is so much a teaching of “the university” – its values and practices, at least as they are enacted in writing? In this context, those of us teaching in Aotearoa may feel a new urgency to problematise these values and practices, teaching them as not fixed nor neutral, and indeed to seek a reconfigured setting for our teaching. In the brief time I have here, I’d like to reflect on how a deeper interrogation and location of writing and the teaching of writing in this place might be central to that work.
In Aotearoa, confronting the settler colonial dynamics of the university is the foundation of such a process; disciplines and institutions are approaching this in various ways while drawing on influential scholarship in decolonising education (see, for example, Bell, 2017; McLennan et al., 2022). Rhetoric and writing scholars too have theorised how our teaching and scholarship might better enable “rhetorical sovereignty” (Lyons, 2000) and “a foundation, a history, of local knowledges and meaning-making practices that breaks from … Western hegemonic models” (García and Baca, 2019, p.3).
How might first-year writing instruction in Aotearoa engage such dynamics, even partially or haltingly? We can present the civic practices and goals of writing instruction as occurring in a contested space, differentially experienced; we can embrace students’ right to use te reo Māori in class and in assessment; we can support kaupapa Māori approaches to pedagogy; we can feature course texts by Māori writers where they are expert voices to learn from, and that account for the history of violence and loss in colonisation and related realities today.
But teachers in our discipline are still presented with a significant challenge in facilitating conversations and knowledge-making from te ao Māori in such a way as to operate on their own terms, in the predominantly Pākehā institution of the university. The potential of writing to be a key site of negotiation between different epistemologies, and agency for navigating this context, is clear, and something we see enacted in student writing. But there is a crucial difference between opportunity to do this work, if students choose, and centering this work in the curriculum.
Working towards the latter may mean foregrounding openness and inquiry in writing assignments rather than mastery, attending more to the behind-the-scenes of how knowledge is made. And it may mean developing strategies for resisting “enclosure” (Tuck and Yang, 2012, p.3) in student work, where writing might acknowledge Māori experience but does not unsettle settler futurity or a simplistic national identity. And lastly it may mean rethinking our work of acculturating students to the university to better acknowledge its contested history, values, and practices.
Perhaps writing studies is particularly well-placed to do this work, with its awareness of knowledge-making practices and processes. I hope some sense of possibility for our discipline in Aotearoa might come from expanding the space of inquiry and exploration our courses offer our students, and rearticulating, relocating, our writing practices ever more in place here: taking up and problematising in more particular ways the nation and the university’s conventional terms for argument, reason, and community, as new ways of writing, to new ends, emerge in our classrooms, and we do our part in remaking the university in this place.
References
Bell, A. (2017). Working from where we are: A response from Aotearoa New Zealand. Higher Education Research & Development, 36(1), 16-20.
García, R., & Baca, D. (Eds.). (2019). Rhetorics elsewhere and otherwise: Contested modernities, decolonial visions. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English.
Hsu, V. J. (2021). Rhetoric as intimate practice. Rhetoric Review, 40(4), 326-329.
Lyons, S. R. (2000). Rhetorical sovereignty: What do American Indians want from writing?. College Composition and Communication, 447-468.
McLennan, S. J., Forster, M., & Hazou, R. (2022). Weaving together: Decolonising global citizenship education in Aotearoa New Zealand. Geographical Research, 60(1), 86-99.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society, 1 (1), 1-40.
Acronyms and initialisms are two different types of abbreviations formed by using the first letter of each word in a phrase. Acronyms are pronounced as a word (e.g. NASA), whereas initialisms are spoken as a sequence of letters (e.g. FBI). I want to start my contribution to this roundtable with one initialism and one acronym. Consider this part of your training as a university staff member – increasing your tolerance for acronyms and initialisms!
First, my initialism: CTL. Contextualised Teaching and Learning (CTL) is a set of instructional strategies informed by constructivist educational theory. The guiding belief of CTL is that skills learned through contextualised instruction are more transferrable. Contextualised instruction includes so-called authentic content that is taught with direct reference to real-life situations that are meaningful to students. Thus, transferability is achieved due to increased student motivation and the similarity between the contexts of learning and eventual real-life application.
Second, my acronym: AERO. The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) is the result of a policy initiative by every state and territory government to create a national education evidence organisation. In February 2022, AERO released a white paper titled ‘Writing and writing instruction: an overview of the literature’. Like much of the research about writing instruction, this white paper focuses on primary and secondary school contexts, neglecting to discuss writing instruction at the university level. Nonetheless, AERO shares some insights that can inform the present roundtable discussion featuring university lecturers from the broad field of writing and writing studies. In their white paper, AERO asserts that there are ‘3 key approaches to writing instruction, which continue to be used nationally and internationally with variable emphasis. These are the “product”, “process” and “genre” pedagogies.’ Writing as product was ‘the dominant approach to writing instruction in Australia, prior to the 1960s and 1970s’; it is highly structured and includes separate lessons for writing components such as grammar and spelling. Writing as process gained popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, and it emphasises different stages of writing (e.g. drafting, editing) rather than writing components. Since the 1980s in Australia, genre is the dominant pedagogy for writing instruction. In this approach to writing instruction, students are taught the specific features of different writing contexts or genres.
Clearly, contextualised instruction fits neatly within the genre pedagogy for writing instruction. For example, technical and professional writing students might be taught the genre of procedural writing, for which they are assigned to write a set of step-by-step instructions about how to access student support services at their university. Creative writing students might be taught the genre of the personal essay and then assigned to write and pitch their personal essay to an appropriate literary journal.
However, the contexts in which writing circulates are changing and diversifying. While the aforementioned examples could have been assigned to students at any point in the last several decades, there are many examples that are more precisely located in time. For example, up until relatively recently, most procedural writing was a set of written instructions printed in a booklet that was included with the product you were purchasing or sat on the bench next to the machine you were meant to operate. Now, procedural writing is more commonly used as a script for a how-to video on YouTube. A media release used to be a written document that was emailed to media outlets, but now it’s just as likely to be a social media post with accompanying images. Therefore, if a teacher is going to employ contextualised instruction and the genre pedagogy for writing instruction, they must now teach about the relationship between text and image, as well as videography, photography and platform practices.
But it’s not just technology that is changing the contexts in which writing circulates. These contexts are also diversifying as society becomes increasingly attuned to what it takes to produce content that is both accessible and inclusive. Accessibility is often perceived as a design problem, and inclusivity is often perceived as a problem for marketing and outreach, but accessible and inclusive writing is the foundation of any initiative that aspires to true accessibility and inclusivity. As university lecturers from the broad field of writing and writing studies, we should aspire to produce our own accessible and inclusive content, whether that is scholarly research, creative practice, professional writing or instructional materials. But we should also aim to imbue our students with these same values and the skills to achieve them. Doing so requires educating students about the diverse contexts in which their writing will circulate, which can mean educating them about topics such as pronouns and gender identity, ableist language, #OwnVoices or #RepresentationMatters, alt-text descriptions, First Nations languages and ways of being, and more.
It has been said that writing is a tool for learning – in other words, if we teach students to write well, then we are assisting in their learning in all areas of the curriculum. However, what I see as the future of our field is that writing instruction itself encompasses all areas of the curriculum. This presents two main challenges: First, as the contexts in which writing circulates are changing and diversifying, how do we keep up? In other words, how do we learn for ourselves and then teach the new skills and knowledge demanded by the changing contexts and genres? The second challenge is balancing this expansion against the need to cover the basic skills previously attended to by product and process pedagogies. These are the conversations I look forward to having with my writing and writing studies colleagues in the years ahead.
bell hooks said, “Often when the radical voice speaks about domination we are speaking to those who dominate. Their presence changes the nature and direction of our words ... Dare I speak to you in a language that will move beyond the boundaries of domination – a language that will not bind you, fence you in, or hold you? Language is also a place of struggle. The oppressed struggle in language to recover ourselves, to reconcile, to reunite, to renew. Our words are not without meaning, they are an action, a resistance.”
As a Black feminist rhetorician and researcher, I am intentional in finding ways to speak to you in a language outside of the place of struggle, doing work centered in recovery and reconciliation, in the hopes of reuniting and renewing our understandings and experiences as scholars and human beings participating in the new futures of teaching all writing, whether creative, or technical. This is the work of the antenarrative in writing and writing studies. Jones et al expressed that “Antenarratives open up a space that invites reinterpretation of the past so as to suggest—and enable—different possibilities for the future ... which unravels and reweaves threads of our field’s (his)story to open up new possibilities for the future stories we tell and enact.” They add that “Weaving more visible threads [of race and ethnicity] into the tapestry of our field requires more scholars contributing to the dialogue and a shift from general discussions of diversity to contextualized, targeted examinations of race and ethnicity.”
Truth is: we all experience and engage with writing as the people we are and the stories we carry within us. For this reason, we must consider ways that writing studies, “unravels and reweaves threads of the field to open up new possibilities for the future stories we tell and enact” about how to write.
The Black Technical and Professional Writing Taskforce also defined Black Technical and Professional Communication (which is where my work resides) as: “including practices centered on Black community and culture and on rhetorical practices inherent in Black lived experience. Black TPC reflects the cultural, economic, social, and political experiences of Black people across the Diaspora. It also includes the work of scholars in the academy and the contributions of practitioners. In all, Black TPC contextualizes the experiences and cultures of Black peoples through research, teaching, and scholarship.
Though race is only one element of my multiply-marginalized identity, it influences and impacts the way I write and how I am seen as a writer in this world. As someone who integrates multilingual elements in my own work, I also encourage students to incorporate cultural and community languages and dialects in their projects, regardless of whether the subject I am teaching is creative, digital, technical, or textual in form. I want students to understand how languages and dialects spoken at home and in their communities pass on generational stories, structure their identities, and decolonize language expectations in writing spaces. Valuing language and dialectical practices, I allow for students to tell stories that hold multiple layers of lived experiences. My role in writing studies is to work and learn together with my students to find the “new location to articulate our sense of the world” (Royster).
In truth, we all have so much to learn from one another and I strive to adapt both the style and content of my teaching material to reflect the richness of student voices in my classroom. Part of making space for diverse bodies is being open to learning new knowledges and cultural practices. As someone who incorporates my own cultural practices and lived experiences as a writer, maker, and composer into my pedagogical practices and scholarship, I encourage students to critically think of ways to incorporate their race, culture, gender, ability, sexuality or any other aspects of themselves that contribute to their identities in the projects they produce in the classroom as a way of learning about their diverse lived experiences. With these practices, students are also able to connect and work through their communities outside of the classroom space.
By centering my work on the self, knowledge-sharing, and cultural practices of collective community, I am ensuring that I am engaging in my writing studies research with race and ethnicity at the forefront, resisting the oversimplification and static conceptions of culture which often lead to ethnocentric and dehumanizing stereotypes and poor usability outcomes in varied marginalized communities.
Much of the knowledge I bring to my research comes from my own lived experience, as someone who knows what it feels like to be displaced and in turn, acknowledge the ways you then learn or at least attempt to hold space for a culture or heritage, in whatever ways make sense for self-definition and identity.
I gratefully acknowledge the Garigal people, traditional custodians of Guringai Country on which I live and work, as well as the Kabi Kabi people, on whose lands we meet today. I also pay respect to the proud Native American Cherokee tradition that planted the seeds of social justice in me as a child in Georgia, traditional land of the Cherokee until the Indian Removal Act of 1830. All stolen lands, never ceded.
I begin with a Cherokee Blessing:
"May the warm winds of Heaven blow softly upon your house. May the Great Spirit bless all who enter there. May your moccasins make happy tracks in many snows, and may the rainbow always touch your shoulder."
I feel blessed indeed to be offering the response to these thoughtful reflections on the future of our discipline. While “Octalogs” I-IV, held at The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and published in Rhetoric Review in 1988, 1997, 2011, and 2021, respectively, have, as Thomas P. Miller writes, “provided us with glimpses of how our discipline has responded to the historical changes that have swept across our field in recent decades,” [the place of classical rhetoric in our curriculum, feminist and other critiques of the Eurocentrism of the Rhetorical Tradition, and the social justice turn] (343), they have corresponded primarily with American culture and context. Until now, there has been no comparable multi-vocal analysis, inventory, or forecasting of the discipline in Australia, so this is a landmark moment for Writing Studies in Australia.
In the eight vignettes presented here, emerging leaders of the field specialising in different sub disciplines writing: rhetoric and composition, creative writing, technical writing, professional writing, academic support, and educational design present a more transnational “Australog.” They build on the sentiments of Hitt, Epps-Robertson, Hsu, and Skinnell (from Octalog IV) in calling for “reimagining structures that deny access to non-normative expressions of rhetoricity” (Hitt); rethinking “what we consider an archive and the kinds of methods and methodologies we need to account for extensive histories of rhetoric” (Epps-Robertson); how “thinking about our work as a practice of intimacy might orient us toward different objectives” (Hsu); and how we “have much to learn about—and from—bad people speaking effectively in the history of rhetoric”. . . and “are called by the times we live in to learn those historical lessons well” (Skinnell).
As an American-educated scholar who has spent my entire academic career in Australia as a dual citizen of the United States and Australia, and as one of the pioneers (translation: old folks) of rhetorical study in Australia, I regularly feel caught between two continents and educational traditions, continuously clashing and colliding. While there is no general education requirement in Australia, hence no required writing classes, the arguments around writing’s place in the curriculum are much the same here as in the United States and around the world. Regardless of its curricular status, writing (and rhetorical approaches to writing, in particular) almost always struggles for legitimacy and recognition as a discipline requiring specialised expertise. No one would claim, for example, that any academic could teach marine biology or neuroscience, yet many outside the field would argue that any academic can teach writing—and therein lies the problem: “writing” is usually perceived as grammar instruction, error correction, or language acquisition—not as an act of meaning making and social activism.
I am reminded of two articles that have informed and influenced my practice, one American and one Australian, one from Rhetoric and Composition and the other from Creative Writing. I have come to think of these articles as companion pieces or “bookends” on the state of our discipline—and our responsibilities within it—ten years apart.
In his 2005 CCCC Chair’s Address, Doug Hesse asks, “Who owns Writing?”:
To ask who owns writing is to ask most obviously about property rights, the buying, selling, and leasing of textual acreages. But I'm rather asking who owns the conditions under which writing is taught? Who owns the content and pedagogy of composition? Who may declare someone proficient or derelict? Who may assign praise or blame? As these questions suggest, ownership has the double sense of controlling use and assuming responsibility (p 337)
Who owns writing? The possibilities are everyone, no one, someone, and "it depends:' Your answer depends on whether you derive it through Wordsworth, Barthes, Althusser, or Rorty. Those who teach writing must affirm that we, in fact, own it. The question is what we should aspire to own-and how. (p. 338)
The richest programs of our futures feature writing in a welter of circumstances and genres, creative, journalistic, and professional, as well as civic and academic. They feature work in design—visual and aural as well as verbal. They fully imagine students in complicated worlds of school and work and politics, yes, but also passions, relationships, and art. They teach writing to these students and not to compliant essay generators producing scripts for Intelligent Essay Assessment. (347-48)
Hesse identifies five spheres that writing has concerned itself with: the academic, the vocational, the civic, the personal, and the belletristic, arguing that these spheres can be classified into two categories: those concerned with obliged discourse, to which he assigns the vocational and the academic [including required writing classes], and those concerned with self-sponsored discourse (in which he places the personal, the belletristic, and the civic). Hesse defines obliged as “writing that institutions require and sanction, whether through pay or grades,” and self-sponsored as “writing that people do for reasons of expression or social affiliation, not for direct material consequence (349-50).
While conceding that the profession must continue to recognise and honour the demands of obliged or required writing on our students, Hesse challenges the discipline to “also attend to self-sponsored writing, not only as target discourses but also as increasingly important forms of action in the world,” (350) a prescient observation in 2005.
He further observes that “writing in the civic sphere is now manifest as a self-sponsored activity to a greater extent than it ever has been. Yet most of us . . . teach as if the civic sphere were still institutionally sponsored, as if there were extractable principles, guidelines, and rules” (355).
In arguing for a blurring of the boundaries between obliged and self-sponsored discourses, Hesse writes:
Ours is the knowledge of what writing is and what it can be, the whole of it, in every sphere. Ours is the never-done knowledge of how writing develops, within a person or a populace. It is the knowledge of teachers' roles and families', of friends-and foes-of fertile textuality, of fulgent image, word, and sound. And with our knowledge comes responsibility, for writing, yes, but more for writers. And so it is that we singly and we together must own and own up to writing, not as colonists or profiteers, but as stewards (355).
Flash forward to 2014 Australia. In “University writing programs deliver, so let’s turn the page,” Dallas J. Baker, Donna Lee Brien, Jen Webb, and Lynda Hawryluk argue that not only is creative writing instruction often misunderstood on university campuses, but is just as often perceived as a threat to “western literature” [which we know is often “code” for white supremacy] (The Conversation).
Baker et al point to outdated Romantic notions of creative genius as fuelling the arguments that writing instruction doesn’t belong in the university because it can’t be taught, that creativity and literary skill are innate aspects of the writer’s character or personality. They argue that the quality of writing is less dependent on inherent talent than on a writer’s environment or education and that the best writers are deeply connected to their communities and use this social engagement to make meaning. However, they point to a lack of documented evidence for the success of writing programs, as those best placed to defend the place of writing in the University often do so in opinion pieces, devoid of hard evidence.
In calling for more research on the efficacy of university writing programs, the authors cite a series of meta-studies conducted by professor of psychology and education R. Keith Sawyer that:
shows that creativity and artistic ability are not inherent traits but skills: learned, and then developed through experience. Sawyer demonstrates that most successful writers are outward-looking and socially engaged, and have the highly developed domain-specific knowledge that is crucial to developing writing ability. The combination of this knowledge and social engagement is precisely what university writing programs impart (The Conversation).
Both pieces call for a reconceptualization of the required and elective, a merging of obliged and self-sponsored discourses. Both refute the paradoxical notions that anyone can teach writing (mostly applied to academic writing) and writing can’t be taught (usually applied to creative writing). Both demand a deep connection to community and sustained social engagement. And both admonish us to be good stewards of the discipline by boldly claiming ownership of and responsibility for writing. I would add that taking collective ownership through concerted action is our only hope for promoting social justice and maintaining pressure on increasingly bureaucratic institutions to recognize self-sponsored discourses as obliged discourses, students as human beings rather than numbers, and writing (invention) as a social act (LeFevre 1986) rather than a commodity to support the “real business” of the university (Thomas 2019).
Our “Australog” panelists unite today as co-owners of rhetorical writing instruction to turn the page, heeding these clarion calls to place social engagement at the centre of their practice and rewrite the rules of obliged and required discourses to reflect a rapidly changing world. In doing so, they claim human rights, trauma, disability, dispossession, labour precarity, neoliberalism, and various inequities as scenes of writing (Burke), demonstrating as never before the need for writing research and pedagogies grounded in activism and an ethics of care. However, in claiming ownership, they are also simultaneously redefining ownership as situated action and collective activism, rejecting its usual associations with colonizing and profiteering in favour of a shared civic responsibility for a reimagined curriculum–or in Hessean terms, stewardship.
Amelia Walker explores Hannah Arendt’s concept of “uprootedness” and its prevalence in pandemic living. She identifies the core perception problem with writing programs in Australia: the lack of objectivity and “single right answers” in educational environments firmly rooted in a Platonic notion of absolute truth.
Beck Wise admonishes us to be (and help prepare our students to be) what Lisa Meloncon and Joanna Schreiber describe as “critical pragmatic practitioners: writers with the practical skills needed to get and perform in jobs and society, and the critical and ethical skills needed to make those jobs and societies better.”
Ben Miller reflects on the work of Richard Scott Lyons and Aileen Moreton Robinson to consider how traditional writing criteria privileges whiteness, how universities automatically frame “non-traditional” students in a deficit discourse, and how writing textbooks often exclude Indigenous voices and alternative forms of expression.
Collin Bjork reminds us of what happens when, as Jo Allen explains, we inadvertently draw lines by definition: “This is and that isn’t,” and “how such exclusions fail to acknowledge, as Pamela Ecker contends, ‘that all communication…is multidisciplinary and evolving’” (570, 1995).
In reimagining rhetoric and writing’s place and possibilities in Aotearoa New Zealand, Hannah Gerrard asks how rhetoric scholars “might better enable ‘rhetorical sovereignty’ (Lyons, 2000) and ‘a foundation, a history, of local knowledges and meaning-making practices that breaks from … Western hegemonic models’” (García and Baca, 2019, p.3).
Per Henningsgaard points to rapidly diversifying “scenes” of writing (as Kenneth Burke might call them), calling academics to “aspire to produce our own accessible and inclusive content (research, creative practice, professional writing or instructional materials) and to also imbue our students with these same values and the skills to achieve them.”
Suban Nur Cooley points to an undeniable “truth: we all experience and engage with writing as the people we are and the stories we carry within us. For this reason, we must consider ways that writing studies, ‘unravels and reweaves threads of the field to open up new possibilities for the future stories we tell and enact’ (Jones et al) about how to write.”
The first steps to claiming ownership of/social responsibility for writing might include:
- More interdisciplinary/inter-organisational/transnational collaborations
- Stronger, more clearly demonstrated connections with social movements—making what traditionally has been a self-sponsored activity the goal of obliged (required) writing—by merging the two spheres.
- Organising and pushing back against neoliberal university agendas in order to keep academics at the centre of decision-making and writing on the agenda as a powerful means of activism and meaning-making in a rapidly changing world.
References
Baker, D., Brien, D., Webb, J., and Hawryluk, L. (2014). University writing programs deliver, so let’s turn the page. The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/university-writing-programs-deliver-so-lets-turn-the-page-33721
Burke K. (1969). A grammar of motives. University of California Press.
Hesse, D. (2005). 2005 CCCC chair's address: Who owns writing? College Composition and Communication, 57(2), 335-357.
Hurley, E. V., Epps-Robertson, C., Hitt, A., Hsu, V. J., Sackey, D. J., Martinez, A. Y., Ríos, G. R., Skinnell, R., VanHaitsma, P., & Miller, T. P. (2021). Octalog IV: The Politics of Rhetorical Studies in 2021. Rhetoric Review, 40(4), 321-348. https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2021.1981108
Octalog: The Politics of Historiography. (1988). Rhetoric Review 7(1), 5-49.
Octalog II: The (Continuing) Politics of Historiography. (1997). Rhetoric Review 16(1), 22-44.
Octalog III: The Politics of Historiography in 2010. (2011). Rhetoric Review 30(2), 109-13.
LeFevre, K. & Conference on Coll. Composition and Communication, Urbana, IL. (1987). Invention as a Social Act. Studies in Writing & Rhetoric. [Washington, D.C.] : Distributed by ERIC Clearinghouse.
Thomas, S. (2019). Learning to write by writing to learn: How writing centres and creativity can transform academic writing instruction. TEXT 23(1), Retrieved from www.textjournal.com.au/april19/thomas.htm
Presenter bios
Beck Wise is a medical rhetorician and technical writing scholar at The University of Queensland, where they are a lecturer in professional writing. Beck’s research investigates expertise, ethics and communication at the sites where individuals meet institutions, bringing together rhetorics of science, literacy studies and feminist theory to build better understandings of how writing shapes culture and equip writers across contexts to work towards justice. Beck’s work has appeared in TEXT and Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, among others.