Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing 23.1 (2011)
1
Introduction
Writing Programs and Coming of Age: Thinking outside the Scare Quotes
Tracy Whalen
University of Winnipeg
The idea for this special issue—and first issue under the new title Canadian
Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing —arose in the summer of 2009 while I was
meeting with two of my colleagues in the department of Rhetoric, Writing, and
Communications at The University of Winnipeg. That day we were tracing the outlines
of a proposed Master‟s program in Rhetoric, Writing, and Public Life. We were drafting a
package that addressed course offerings, rationale for a graduate program, staffing,
budgeting, and all manner of requisite minutia. This process of creating an M.A.
package for provincial consideration (a proposal still very much alive, but still a
proposal) prompted discussions about the future of our department: the courses we
might develop, the interdisciplinary crossovers we envisioned, and the connections we
might make with our downtown Winnipeg neighbours and with other academic
programs, locally, nationally and internationally. We noted that twenty years had passed
since the writing program began at The University of Winnipeg, a program that
developed into The Centre for Academic Writing and then in 2005 became Canada‟s
first department to have, as Brian Turner and Judith Kearns (2006) point out, the word
“rhetoric” in its department name. That afternoon, it seemed timely to extend our
ponderings about the future of our department beyond our institution and to invite
submissions for a scholarly collection addressing the coming of age of other writing
programs and relevant topics pertaining to writing research and pedagogy. What has
resulted, as you will see, is a lively international collection that represents scholarly
thinking from Canada, the United States, and Germany.
The phrase coming of age in this collection‟s Call for Papers, I noticed after its
circulation, was neatly enclosed in scare quotes. I had bracketed it off, likely marking
the phrase‟s colloquial and idiomatic personality in a scholarly call for article
submissions. I perhaps imagined the phrase as belonging to scholars like Margaret
Mead (1961), whose Coming of Age in Samoa has generated many recent book covers
with the same phrase (some intentionally drawing upon her title, others not). Despite its
meta-critical notation, however, the phrase wasn‟t really on my critical radar at the time.
The question bears asking, however: What might we mean when we say that a
discipline or a field of study is coming of age? What might that disciplinary stage look
like?
In his scholarly editorial piece about healthcare research, David Stevens (2010)
argues that the field of health services research (specifically, safety and quality studies)
has come of age, an arrival he equates with visibility and centrality as opposed to
disciplinary marginalization. He notes that researchers choosing to follow a path in that
field are not risking their chances for career success as they might have done in the
past. Stevens understands centrality as a discipline‟s mainstream status within
academic communities of practice. In their recent article in College Composition and
Communication, Louise Wetherbee Phelps and John M. Ackerman (2010) also
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emphasize the importance of visibility in the representation of a discipline.1 In their
report, they outline the goals and the successes of an ambitious endeavour called The
Visibility Project. This American initiative (coordinated by Phelps) was established by a
group of scholars who wanted to make doctoral studies in rhetoric, writing, and
composition visible in databases and information coding systems, which are accessed
by administrators, funding bodies, and government institutions. According to these
authors, external validation does not come solely from the “growth in the numbers of
programs, tenure-stream faculty, publications, and administrative positions” (p. 182).
Rather, visibility emerges from a strong presence in national taxonomies like that
produced by the National Research Council, which collects information about doctoral
programs and regularly evaluates them. My research and my informal discussions with
scholars from other Canadian universities suggest that courses in rhetoric, in writing,
and in communications (whatever the name of the program might be) certainly do not
want for students. Often, in fact, student enrolments threaten to exceed the capacity of
existing faculty and staff to accommodate them. Those teaching writing studies courses
at the University of Alberta, for instance, have seen spectacular success with their firstyear writing studies course, “Exploring Writing” (WRS 101), which is open to all students
and fulfills three credits of the English/Writing requirement in most of their faculties. In
the 2010-2011 year, instructors offered nine sections of this introductory writing studies
course and saw an average of forty students on the “alert list” for each section.2 Such
numbers are cause for celebration. Healthy student numbers go a long way towards
ensuring symbolic capital and visibility within the marketplace of disciplines, but the
work of Phelps and Ackerman indicates that graduate studies (specifically, doctoral
studies) and centralizing information systems are also necessary to becoming an
emerging field with symbolic capital.
As writing studies scholars Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Roger Graves, Heather
Graves3 and others have noted, centrality—a connected community of practice—has for
some time remained a challenge for Anglo-Canadian scholars working in the fields of
composition, writing studies, discourse analysis, new genre studies, and rhetoric. We
are not yet at the place Phelps and Ackerman describe south of the border. Tania
Smith‟s work (2006) reminds us that we are still working towards the professionalization
of practice that graduate programs represent and enact. (Things are slowly changing
here, however, a point I discuss below with reference to the University of Alberta‟s
1
Visibility is an issue of interest to members of the Canadian Association for Studies in Discourse and
Writing, too. The publication of this inaugural issue of the Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and
Writing has brought to the fore an ongoing debate over the publication‟s online status (i.e. whether it
should be an open access journal [with increased visibility] or accessible only through scholarly
databases with paid subscription access).
2
I would like to thank Betsy Sargent, Interim Director, Writing Studies, for discussing their exciting
initiatives with me.
3
Graves and Graves‟ introduction also points to the temporal and narrative implications of the term
coming of age. Discussing the development of writing instruction at the University of Winnipeg, they write
of “the birth of what we would call „writing‟ departments in Canada.” (p. 17; emphasis mine, scare quotes
theirs in this instance).
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Writing Studies Ph.D. initiatives.) It is noteworthy, I think, that rhetoric, composition, and
writing studies is considered “an emerging discipline” by scholars in the United States.
Clary-Lemon (2009) argues, however, that “the profession is struggling to emerge in
Canada” (p. 98). Graves and Graves‟ (2006) collection Writing Centres, Writing
Seminars, Writing Cultures: Writing Instruction in Anglo-Canadian Universities
underscores some of the challenges:
[w]ith the lack of structure to allow writing instructors to interact, the relative lack
of nationwide organizations to educate and promote the teaching of writing, and
the general scarcity of graduate programs to train individuals, writing instruction
in Canadian universities has been characterized by individual and local
responses to particular conditions. (p. 11)
This observation is borne out by the essays that populate their volume, where the “local
responses to particular conditions” characterize the narratives of different Canadian
programs. In his essay about the writing program at The University of Calgary, for
instance, Doug Brent (2006) tells us that the position of their Effective Writing Program
outside a department of English “resulted from a set of unusual and, I believe, fortuitous
circumstances” (p. 178). At one stage in its evolution, his institution designed an
interdisciplinary first-year model called University College, which included writing
instruction; this College later morphed into the Faculty of General Studies, which
morphed into a Faculty of Communication and Culture, which is where their writing
program is now located. Brian Turner and Judith Kearns (2006) point to the receptivity
of university administrators and the good will of English department members at the
University of Winnipeg. This local supportive environment, they argue, was central to
the independent development of our writing program, which has since flourished into a
thriving degree-granting department. Once again, the dynamics of a specific locale
proved central to a program‟s development. Reading Graves and Graves‟ volume, one
is also acutely aware of the power of individuals in discrete venues to generate thriving
programs embedded in other faculties or professional colleges. Jennifer MacLennan
(2006) describes her experience as D.K. Seaman Chair in the College of Engineering at
the University of Saskatchewan. A lone rhetorician, MacLennan worked from this
“autonomous entity” position (p. 199) to develop a small program of rhetoric studies
whose courses travel under the cloak of Engineering numbers. (Note visibility issues.)
The disciplinary fragmentation of Canadian practice tends to find provisional cohesion,
in the view of some scholars, in a shared understanding of writing instruction as linked
with Canadian identity (Clary-Lemon, 2009; Coe, 1988). This shared sense of
disciplinary identity has been instantiated, too, through a sustained process of defining
writing in Canada, a process that began in the late seventies and continues today.
Anyone who has watched a teenager come of age (or remembers one‟s own
coming-of-age) likely recalls how identity is formed through negation: a counter identity
developed in opposition to authorities or to the previous year‟s fashions. This same
coming-of-age impulse, one of negation, is frequently a means of disciplinary
development.4 The process of negation was instrumental, too, in shaping writing
instruction in English Canada, particularly the first-year writing course. As Kevin Brooks
4
Maurice Charland (2003) points to a similar means of community identification amongst rhetoricians who
have understood their field as distinct from philosophy, poetics, and literary criticism.
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(2002) has argued, the Canadian model developed in opposition to the perceived
“practicality, utility, and mechanical correctness” of the American composition class.
Anglo-Canadian resistance to the American model of first-year composition can be
explained by its national culture and affiliations: its British roots, its philosophical
idealism, and its belles-lettres tradition that saw writing as a means of elucidating
canonical works of literature and cultivating a civilized character (Hubert, 1994). The
disciplinary negation does not end there. Scholars working in rhetoric and composition
have historically understood themselves as not being English literature instructors, not
being remedial fixer-uppers, and not being Student Services employees positioned
outside the scholarly university environment.
But where would a coming-of-age story be without the pain, loss, or difficulty?
There‟s usually turmoil of some kind in this process. The bildüngsroman, that coming-ofage narrative we all likely read during our junior high- or senior high-school years,
centres on a sensitive character who faces inner turmoil, angst, and isolation on her/his
journey to maturity. The idea of coming of age is understood within narrative; it depends
upon temporality and history, upon progress and tēlos and advancement. While they do
not explicitly discuss their use of the phrase, the authors of Coming of Age: The
Advanced Writing Curriculum (Shamoon et al., 2000) connect coming of age with the
word “advanced” in terms of an advanced undergraduate writing curriculum. In her
historical account of writing instruction at the University of Toronto, Margaret Proctor
(2006) also concludes that the next step in their institutional narrative is the recognition
of “writing as an area of advanced study” (p. 316, italics mine). Coming of age involves
the external recognition that writing instruction is a critical, intellectual endeavour that
requires a balance of praxis and self-reflexive theory. In our department at the
University of Winnipeg, for instance, we are introducing a first-year composition course
that is designed for our majors and introduces them to more complex topics than are
generally broached in our other first-year courses, which are designed for students in a
range of disciplines. This first-year academic writing course is effectively acknowledging
a pedigree and is claiming valuable disciplinary real estate for itself.
There are many movements like this afoot that suggest a maturation process.
While Clary-Lemon (2009) rightly notes “a fractured professional identity both aligned
and in tension with that of the United States,” and indicates that a “lack of a concrete
center for scholars to meet and exchange ideas has been worrisome until now,
particularly given Canada‟s huge landmass” (p. 97), she does insert that important
phrase until now. In Canada, this coming of age, it seems to me, lies in the potential of
synthesis amongst our “fractured” parts. Synthesis, in fact, is one of our strengths.
Tania Smith (2006) reports that “writing instruction in Canada has been changing rapidly
between 1995-2005, moving in the direction of inter-disciplinarity and toward the
development of professional writing and rhetoric programs housed in various
departments” (p. 320). Smith‟s department at the University of Calgary partnered with
Communications Studies in the faculty of Communication and Culture, the result being a
program that brings together written and oral communication, cultural studies, media
studies, and rhetoric (Brent, 2006; Smith, 2006). At the University of Waterloo, the
Department of English Language and Literature combines the study of literature,
rhetoric, and semiotics at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Students can pursue
an M.A. in Rhetoric and Communication Design or a Ph.D. that combines literary and
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non-literary analysis (a route I took myself in my Ph.D. from that institution). Here at the
University of Winnipeg, our major incorporates the expertise of instructors in Sociology
(to take one example) and those working in the local media.
Right now, those of us in my department thinking about a Master‟s degree in
Rhetoric, Writing, and Public Life have been talking with our colleagues in other
departments, particularly those in English. These discussions are in the early stages,
indeed. We are contemplating, for instance, whether it is more economically feasible to
nest a Rhetoric, Writing, and Public Life M.A. into an already-established Cultural
Studies M.A., rather than proposing a stand-alone graduate program. (The University of
Winnipeg does not offer Ph.D. programs.) In these deliberations, we are having to
define our terms and feel out our disciplinary borders: How do rhetoric and discourse
studies intersect with, yet depart from, cultural studies? What do we mean by discourse
analysis? Cultural studies? Communications? How might one of our undergraduate
courses, Rhetorics of Visual Representation, situate itself relative to Topics in Visual
Cultures, a graduate course currently offered through the department of English? Visual
studies in this Cultural Studies M.A. encompasses visual/curatorial arts, the study of
illustrations in children‟s books, examinations of the graphic novel. Where does visual
rhetoric fit? What meaningful shape might it take on in order to figure on the curricular
map? What is the implication of re-connecting with a department of English? Coming of
age, it seems, involves a nuanced understanding of intersection and difference.
The next stage in our coming-of-age process will be the development of visible
doctoral programs in rhetoric and writing studies, and further professionalization in our
fields. My colleagues and I see many students who ask about their educational options
after finishing their degree in rhetoric with us. Students leaving our department have
gone on to pursue post-graduate degrees in communication at various Canadian
universities (like Simon Fraser, York, and Concordia); have graduated from the School
of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University; have gone to the States to
pursue a graduate degree in writing studies (specifically, Arizona State University); and
have stayed at the University of Winnipeg to pursue the aforementioned M.A. in Cultural
Studies. I have watched students design wonderfully creative majors and post-graduate
theses across disciplines. Clearly, we have dedicated students who desire Ph.D.
programs and it would be gratifying—and in fact necessary for the professionalization of
the discipline—to develop vibrant, robust doctoral programs in rhetoric and writing
studies.
These programs are coming, if slowly. As mentioned above, those working in the
Office of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Alberta—Betsy Sargent, Heather
Graves, Roger Graves, and Lucie Moussu—are working on a strong proposal for a
Ph.D. in Writing Studies and Rhetoric.5 At this point, they have a prefix (WRS) for fifteen
approved undergraduate and graduate courses in the university calendar—and they
teach these courses—but they do not yet have an approved Ph.D. program. In Roger
Graves‟ words, their situation is not so much coming-of-age as “gestational.”6 There are
5
As Jennifer Clary-Lemon pointed out to me, The University of Alberta is also home to the “Writing about
Writing Network,” which brings together Canadian and American scholars who discuss first-year writing
curricula.
6
I would like to thank Roger Graves for his feedback about their proposed program.
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many channels that this Ph.D. proposal still needs to navigate: Office of Interdisciplinary
Studies, Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, Deans‟ Council,
General Faculties Council, and others. Many readers, I suspect, will identify with the
reality that we are operating in challenging economic times (at least this is a narrative
we frequently hear from administration). Funding can take time and requires determined
strategizing. The University of Alberta offers exciting graduate courses (“Composition
Theory” and “The History of Rhetoric” are two) and they have the support of other
faculties. Science, for instance, has been behind this writing studies initiative and has
welcomed “An Introduction to Writing in the Sciences” (WRS 103), a course open to
first-year students enrolled in Science 100.
Such is the pull of this initiative that four graduate students are working with the
Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research to design their own interdisciplinary Ph.D.s
in writing studies and another discipline (a discipline that already offers a Ph.D. and that
could therefore serve as their institutional home base: Secondary Education, Public
Health, Computer Science, and Comparative Literature are a few of the options for
these students, depending on their backgrounds and current interests.) These students
are also exploring possible ways to fund their graduate work on their own, through
grants, teaching, or research assistant positions. Certainly the presence of such
graduate students committed to advanced work in writing studies and rhetoric (and
actively pursuing that work as best they can given the options currently available) is
itself one of the best arguments for going forward with an official Writing Studies and
Rhetoric Ph.D. at the University of Alberta even in the face of uncertainties about
funding.
At the outset of this introduction, I mentioned David Stevens‟ (2010) article, “A
Scholarly Discipline Comes of Age,” which chronicles the history of health safety
research. His indicative verb (e.g. “a scholarly discipline comes of age”) implies that his
discipline—while still young—has pretty much arrived, has achieved fruition and
mainstream status. The -ing participle form, on the other hand, implies that the object
under discussion, while poised on the cusp of recognition and full-fledged inclusion at
the grown-ups‟ table, is still working things out. The participle version implies process,
movement, duration, ongoing development and liminality. (See Whalen 2004.)
Shamoon et al.‟s (2000) collection uses the term “always-emergent” when referring to
the history of Composition Studies in America (and it is considered an “emerging
discipline”). I would imagine many Anglo-Canadian scholars working in the areas of
rhetoric and composition identify with that participle form in coming of age and the idea
of the “always-emergent.” In different ways, so do the contributors to this special issue.
Coming of Age: The Voices in this Collection
The opening article of this issue, Felicitas Macgilchrist and Katrin Girgensohn‟s
“Humboldt Meets Bologna: Developments in Institutional Support in Germany,” explicitly
engages with the theme of coming of age, but as the authors explain, they examine the
coming of age of writing centres or writing supports rather than programs per se, since
Germany does not yet have the equivalent of what North Americans would understand
as a composition class or composition studies. They examine the tension between two
discourses in Germany, what they term the Humboldt discourse and the Bologna
discourse. The Humboldt ideology, which dates from 19th century, views education as a
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research-centred endeavour whose goal is to develop the overall moral and aesthetic
capabilities of the student and to encourage social harmony rather than serve a
utilitarian purpose. From this pedagogy emerged the Hausarbeit, a lengthy written
assignment that represents the culmination of a student‟s learning in the humanities and
social sciences. Macgilchrist and Girgensohn contend that the prevailing nineteenthcentury Humboldt attitude (which persists today) was that institutional writing supports
were unnecessary, as higher education was about teaching future scholars who, it was
felt, should already have writing competencies. In the late 1990s this Humboldt
discourse was challenged by an emerging trans-European one, the Bologna discourse,
which focuses on the mobility of students across European institutions (e.g. transfer
credits and quality assessment) and prioritizes “employability, transferable skills, and
broader social/professional competencies.” Where does the 6,000-12,000 word
Hausarbeit fit in this context of reform and structural tension? Germany may see the
end of the increasingly unpopular Hausarbeit. Macgilchrist and Girgensohn argue,
however, that instead of discarding the Hausarbeit, universities should push for
integrated institutional writing support. The authors examine how one might usefully
apply the goals of the Bologna discourse to the writing practices of the traditional
Hausarbeit and keep Humboldtian values alive.
Very often, we think of coming of age as a time of initiation, as a liminal and
confusing space between childhood and adulthood. Diana Wegner, in her paper,
“Transitional Writing and „Third Space‟ Learning: Professional Writing Students and the
Work Experience,” examines a different initiation and transition period: the experience
of a student technical writer learning to join the community of practice within an
organization. Wegner describes the Print Futures Professional Writing Program at
Douglas College in British Columbia, which offers a two-year, five-semester advanced
diploma. Part of the curriculum involves a work experience course “which requires 180
hours of writing-related work with an employer who has been recruited to provide a
work-site for a student.” Wegner‟s long-term study outlines the barriers work experience
students have reported facing (e.g. insufficient feedback from employers; invisibility;
lack of respect for at-home work) and their strategies for problem-solving. She centres
on the potential for “third-space” or “back region” learning—in this case a web forum
where students could share strategies, collaboratively problem-solve, read about the
experiences of former students, and communicate with the instructor for the course. A
strong community and engaged “back region are crucial,” she argues, for successful
transitional learning.
Jaqueline McLeod Rogers‟ essay, “Teaching Undergraduate Researchers to
Theorize and Practice Narrative Enquiry,” demonstrates that narrative inquiry as a
critical method is coming of age—and that undergraduate students can come of age as
thinkers by engaging with the epistemological potential of narrative theory. McLeod
Rogers explains how she balances storytelling and narrative theory in “Narrative
Thinking and Writing,” an upper-level undergraduate course she teaches at the
University of Winnipeg (and suggests how others might design such a course). One
idea that defines McLeod Rogers‟ view of narrative work is dynamism: how experiences
change with narrative telling, how tellers themselves change over time, and how
students learn through narrative inquiry that “the act of theorizing is a go-forward
process.” Her students become aware (through a variety of narratives and theoretical
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readings) that “story as a written result of inquiry is not produced or offered to readers
as a polished nugget of past experience or as a transcription of found, forever truth, but
as a personal representation of subject-object interaction.” McLeod Rogers offers
possible readings, assignments, and exercises, all of which encourage meta-criticism,
an awareness of non-hegemonic strategies of narrative, and student understanding of
postmodern subjectivities.
In the final contribution to this collection, Anthony Petruzzi, Director of Writing
Assessment at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, suggests that although we may
think we have come of an age (the postmodern age, that is), the era of modernity (i.e.
scientism) still has a hold on us in terms of writing assessment. In his piece,
“Convalescence from Modernity: Writing Assessment in the Epoch of Scientism,”
Petruzzi contends that writing assessment in North America is still plagued7 by explicit
and implicit desires for regulation, “objective measure,” “accountability,” and
“quantitative assessment.” Petruzzi traces the ideology and etiology of such discourses:
“first, education is considered a quantifiable enterprise that serves our capitalist
economy, and second, our assessment practices are based on a fear of subjective
evaluations.” Petruzzi characterizes public discourses of education as having a
factory/business or skills/information emphasis, a description that brings to mind
Macgilchrist and Girgensohn‟s discussion of the emerging Bologna discourse in Europe.
Petruzzi‟s research suggests that qualitative assessment need not centre on reliability,
for instance: consensus or agreement between evaluators need not be a requirement to
prove “objectivity” in grading. Rather, disagreement can be viewed as a necessary
feature of subjective engagement—especially if one is open to the “complexity and
uncertainty” that characterizes the postmodern disposition. This postmodern disposition,
Petruzzi concludes, does not mean discarding the benefits of scientific practice; it does,
however, mean that evaluators are open to the complexity of open-ended and
performance-based student assignments and alternative methods of assessment.
All of the essays here engage with the coming-of-age theme in some way: the
coming of age of writing supports in Germany, of transitional writers moving from
classroom to workplace, of narrative inquiry pedagogy, or of attitudes towards writing
assessment. This collection has been enriched, further, by two book reviews. Judy Z.
Segal reviews Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels‟ Selling Sickness: How the World’s
Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning us all into Patients (2005) and Ivan
Roksandic discusses the latest edition of the textbook Across the Disciplines: Academic
Reading and Writing (2010), edited by Jaqueline McLeod Rogers and Catherine Taylor.
By way of conclusion, I would like to say that this inaugural issue of the Canadian
Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing would not have come into being (let alone
come of age!) were it not for the hard work of the regular editors, Gloria Borrows and
Nadeane Trowse of the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. To them, to
my colleagues at the University of Winnipeg who spoke with me about this special
issue, to the contributors who responded so quickly and graciously to my requests, and
to the members of CASDW with whom I consulted on this initiative, my sincere thanks.
7
An appropriate word, perhaps, as Petruzzi uses the metaphor of convalescence.
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References
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Brooks, K. (2002). National culture and the first-year English curriculum: An historical
study of composition in Canadian universities. The American Review of
Canadian Studies, 32(4), 673-694.
Charland, M. (2003). The constitution of Rhetoric‟s tradition. Philosophy and Rhetoric
36.2, 119-134.
Clary-Lemon, J. (2009). Shifting traditions: Writing research in Canada. The American
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Graves, R., & Graves, H. (Eds.). (2006).Writing centres, writing seminars, writing
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Hubert, H., (1994). Harmonious perfection: The development of English studies in
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Turner, B., & Kearns, J. (2006). Into the future: A prairie writing program extends its
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Bio
Tracy Whalen teaches in the department of Rhetoric, Writing and Communications at
the University of Winnipeg. Her research focuses on “the moment” and how such is
communicated in language, gesture, and image. She has published articles about
narrative moments in women‟s fiction, studying intensity and style and considering the
politics of stylistic excess. This interest in significant moments fuels her published
research in the iconic photojournalistic image, particularly as it relates to Canadian
national identity. Her research continues to engage with significant oratorical moments
and key gestures in Canadian culture and how these encourage understandings of
citizenship in the public sphere.
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