For this week’s reading I will be blogging about
Aviva Freedman and Christine Adam’s Learning
to Write Professionally: “Situated Learning” and the Transition from University
to Professional Discourse.”
The authors are arguing that “[w]hen students move
from the university to the workplace, they not only need to learn new genres
but they also need to learn new ways to learn those genres” (311). Freedman and
Adam define genre as not just reoccurring style in a text, but also how genre
is also reinvented by social, cultural, ideological, and political influences
(311). They then make the move to dichotomizing the ways in which the
university and workplace teach and write.
Universities usually employ the guided participation
method. This is the more traditional view of learning where students are given
a set of issues to work on and are guided by a professor (mentor) who both
supports students’ learning and models how to go about fixing a problem. The
idea behind guided participation is that once the student has gained awareness
of a genre, then she’ll be able to reproduce as needed what was modeled in
class.
The authors then contrast guided participation with Lave
and Wenger’s “legitimate peripheral participation (LPP).” Unlike guided participation,
the focus of LPP isn’t so much based on learning, but rather apprenticing in
real life situations where material production is the concern (312).
How Freedman and Adam’s then assessed these types of
learning in the classroom versus the workplace was looking at undergraduates in
financial analyst course, and graduate students who were actively interning.
What they found was that the undergrads learned from
the professor modeling how to perform tasks, and then carried out their own strategies
based on what they had learned in class. The grad students in the workplace had
the same element of mentor-learner, and also the method of delivery (i.e. using
computers), but now the writing is very different from the university. Rather
than having a clearly defined rubric from which to work, the interns needed to
figure out what information to include in a document, in what order, and think
about for whom they were writing for, which got even trickier when they would
be pulled away from an assignment to go work on something completely different.
What I felt was the most particularly interesting
difference between university and workplace learning was the notion of “authentic”
writing. Students are given situations that are based on actual events and then
write about it, whereas the workplace is the
actual event. For example, an inter taking meeting notes and has to make sure
the information is accurate and easily understandable; if she fails to do this
then there is no rewrite: it can hurt her credibility (323).
The authors also make the distinction that in the
university, the professor has a more vested interest in students by way of the
grade. If students aren’t learning then the professor is failing. In the
workplace, however, there may be some evaluations based on work (almost like a
grade), but, according to Freedman and Adams, evals are few and far between.
Evaluations in the workplace also tend to look at the whole rather than its
parts, and that there’s “sparse use of praise and blame” that goes into the
eval.
Freedman and Adams conclude that there needs to be
more research done on both these types of learning and how they work within
their respective places, so then university student-to-workplace employee has
better use of different genres.
That is where I stop being nice with this article.
The authors may have done extensive research, but it seems to me that they only
picked out the places that supported their claim, rather than to actually give
something of import to technical writing teachers. They say nothing of how to
blur these lines; nothing of how students can
and do learn more than just how
to write in one genre of professional writing. It’s not like there’s a lot of
sonnet writing going into the kinds of writing the workplace does. To say
another way: workplace writing is pretty straightforward, and it seems like the
authors tried to complicate something that isn’t necessarily all that complicated!
I know because I’ve been there.
Freedman and Adams also neglect to go into detail
what happens when one is in the workplace, has a so-called mentor, but the
mentor is unwilling to pass on what she’s learned. I saw this happen a lot-
young blood comes into the office and the seasoned employee is intimidated,
thus resistant to helping the new employee. With regard to evaluations: evals are grades, and some companies do give evals quarterly. Often one is
not just evaluated based on the whole, but as an individual, unlike what
Freedman and Adams claim.
Overall, I felt this piece was written to show the
authors’ prowess, rather than giving anything substantial to the tech writing
teaching field. It did help me think about the implications of the Russell
article I read for last week, that if one only focuses on teaching text-based
prose, and doesn’t bring in some of the criticism and how to apply that to
texts then students, then they could potentially have trouble navigating the
workplace discourse.
Connections: The authors are working from the same
place Berkenkotter and Huckin are in that the genre of professional writing has
been myopic, and that this can hurt the creditability of the workplace writer.
Spinuzzi’s article is also calling for a broader view of the types of writing
that takes place in the classroom versus the workplace, which has been a
connecting thread so far in most of what we’ve been reading in this class. The
only difference is that Freedman and Adams did it less masterfully than some of
the other articles I have read.
Questions: If it’s true that there is dissonance
between the university and workplace writing, what do we do to better
facilitate the move of students being students to actually being workplace
producers of texts? Should we discuss
the political underbelly of the workplace? That is, when an incumbent resists
helping the novice? That sometimes workplaces only want their employees to be
only so literate to do their jobs, but not to think too much?
