664 Blog 2: Assignments "Inventing the University"

Bartholomae, David. “Writing Assignments: Where Writing Begins.” Fforum Fall (1982): 35-46. Rpt. in Writing on the Margins: Essays on Composition and Teaching. Ed. David Bartholomae. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005. 177-91. Print.

This article appears three years before David Bartholomae’s seminal “Inventing the University,” but here, too, he claims that students “invent the university”—they attempt to approximate academic and disciplinary language and knowledge—when they write (177). The job of instructors, then, is to provide students with meaningful and challenging ways into the discourse of the university through carefully crafted and scaffolded assignments.

Bartholomae emphasizes two assignment principles (though others work their way in through these discussions). The first principle is indoctrination. For an assignment to indoctrinate students in academic and/or disciplinary discourse, it must build on their abilities to enter into such discourses, to “lead students through successive approximations” of them (179). Attention to this principle helps instructors move beyond providing disciplinary content. He notes students receive ample content in the university, but too rarely do they learn how to think and communicate as a practitioner in a particular discourse. Through indoctrination, students learn to engage with a subject as an active participant instead of as an outsider briefly peeking in on a subject as a theme for a particular assignment.

The second principle Bartholomae discusses at length here is interference. This term has positive connotations here as it emphasizes disrupting students’ typical perceptions. He claims students tend to approach the writing process as a linear activity, as a sort of a formula. The language instructors use in constructing their assignments can exacerbate this problem since this language often carries different meanings in different disciplinary contexts. The directive to “argue” in a political science course assignment likely carries different implications than it does in an English course. As a result, students tend to retreat to closed and easily defended theses rather than wrestling with the uncertainties of a subject. Instead of closing off subjects, Bartholomae claims that academic writers recognize and engage with the open and situated nature of discourse and knowledge. To help students better understand this, instructors need to make sure that their assignments help students recognize and be comfortable with this as well. Ultimately, Bartholomae claims that only a sequence of assignments that focus on the same topic, allow the instructor to push against students’ conceptions, and otherwise “interfere” with students’ typical ways of writing and thinking will allow students to explore a subject as a subject, to situate themselves in the subject’s discourse, and to have the room to explore the subject.

I tend to agree with Bartholomae’s position that at least part of our duty as writing instructors is to help students find greater academic and professional—even civic and personal—success by providing them the tools needed to effectively and efficiently understand and navigate discourse communities. The scaffolded approach to assignment development he advocates here positions assignments as part of an ongoing investigation into academic discourses (though one could certainly imagine this applying to other types of discourses as well) that link course assignments with the work students will be doing elsewhere and encourage students to see themselves as participants in that discourse.