Previous studies of initiatives in Writing to Learn and Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines, while showing gains in knowledge retention and improvement in general writing skills, have not yet investigated the more fundamental issue of how writing supports development of domain-specific forms of thinking. Written samples were gathered from prospective teachers engaged in a year-long program of classroom observation and participation designed to advance their understanding of student success and failure. Ethnographic and quantitative methods provided evidence that their (...) written accounts indicated an increased understanding that was aligned with the goals of the program. (shrink)

Previous studies of initiatives in Writing to Learn and Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines, while showing gains in knowledge retention and improvement in general writing skills, have not yet investigated the more fundamental issue of how writing supports development of domain-specific forms of thinking. Written samples were gathered from prospective teachers engaged in a year-long program of classroom observation and participation designed to advance their understanding of student success and failure. Ethnographic and quantitative methods provided evidence that their (...) written accounts indicated an increased understanding that was aligned with the goals of the program. (shrink)

More recent advancements in digital technologies have significantly alleviated the dissemination of new scientific ideas as well as the storing, searching and retrieval of large amounts of published research findings. While not denying the benefits of this novel ‘economy of memory,’ this paper endeavors to shed light on the ways in which the use of digital technologies may be linked to a distortion of the system of formal publications that facilitates the effective dissemination and collaborative building of scientific knowledge. Through (...) combining three different strands of discussion that are often left separate – those pertaining to the cognitive effects of new technological memory systems, those pertaining to citation and publishing practices, and those regarding the effects of formalizing modes of research governance – it is also shown that this distortion is not merely a consequence of technological developments alone. Rather, such a distortion is inseparable from and potentially aggravated by the spreading of increasingly dysfunctional, formalizing research governance mechanisms. It is argued that these mechanisms run the risk of fostering the proliferation of knowledge practices that are characterized by an increasing degree of superficiality as well as the strategic publication of research that is of a decreasing degree of originality. If left unaddressed, this may pose a serious threat to the efficiency and effectiveness of the formal record of scientific knowledge as a tool for the dissemination of original research. By extension, this may in the long run seriously undermine the capacity of the publicly funded research system more generally. (shrink)

Of the different uses of discourse analysis, one of the more significant is the way it can be used to introduce students to the culture and literary practices of the disciplines. This article describes how one type of analysis - Halliday’s transitivity - has been used in an academic advising context to assist students struggling to write effectively in a range of discipline areas: history, visual art and sociology. Analysis of this kind, it is argued, has the potential not only (...) to clarify to students the immediate requirements of the academic tasks they have to complete, but also to help them understand some of the broader epistemological issues that may be at stake. (shrink)

The ArgumentContemporary natural sciences succeed remarkably well in ensuring a relatively continuous transmission of their cognitively relevant traditions and in creating a widely shared background consensus among their practitioners – hermeneutical ends seemingly achieved without hermeneutical awareness or explicitly acquired hermeneutical skills.It is a historically specific – emerging only in the nineteenth century – cultural organization of the Author-Text-Reader relation which endows them with such an ease of hermeneutical achievements: an institutionally fixed form of textual and intertextual practices, normatively posited (...) ways of adequate reception and criticism, etc. The same organization also explains a number of their often-discussed epistemic and cultural characteristics: their depersonalized objectivity, the social closure of their discourse and their reduced cultural significance, the shallow historical depth of their activated traditions, etc.The cognitive structure and the social function of contemporary natural sciences are intimately interwoven with a set of sui generis cultural relations that are partially fixed in the textual characteristics of their literary objectivations. A comparative hermeneutical analysis of natural sciences as a specifically constituted and institutionalized cultural genre or discourse-type brings into relief those contingent cultural conditions and relations to which some of their fundamental epistemological characteristics are bound, or at least with which they are historically closely associated. (shrink)

This article reviews the recent work of Alan G. Gross , with prominent notice, as well, of works by Leah Ceccarelli, Celeste Condit, and Jeanne Fahnestock, among others, in order to sketch out developments in the rhetoric of science.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------.

Toulmin (2001) sostiene que la invención de las disciplinas,un cambio iniciado en el siglo XVII, involucró factores tantointelectuales como institucionales. Intelectualmente, el uso dela geometría cartesiana como modelo de conocimiento proveyólos fundamentos; institucionalmente, la división del trabajo enprofesiones y disciplinas hizo el resto. Sin embargo, este cambiose produjo lentamente y sólo alcanzó su apogeo durante el sigloXX, con la conformación de lo que Snow (2012) reconoce comolas dos culturas: las Humanidades y las Ciencias Naturales.Focalizando esta distinción, proponemos reflexionar sobre laargumentación (...) escrita en dos disciplinas (Letras y Biología)desde la perspectiva toulminiana. Al respecto, consideramosque los argumentos y los modos de escribirlos están tanprofundamente ligados a las disciplinas que resulta esencialsaber y reconocer cómo operan estos procesos a fin de entenderla lógica de dichos campos. En efecto, las particularidades decada disciplina están siempre presentes a la hora de escribir yde argumentar por escrito. Todo texto pertenece, por lo menos,a un género y a una disciplina; como tal, emplea movimientosretóricos particulares que varían de comunidad en comunidady de un tipo de discurso a otro. Este trabajo, retoma lapropuesta de Toulmin (2003, 2001) y busca dar cuenta de lasespecificidades de la argumentación escrita en dos carrerasuniversitarias argentinas (Letras y Biología). Así, después dehaber efectuado un trabajo de campo que comprendió, duranteun semestre, observación participante de clases, entrevistasa docentes y alumnos y recolección de documentos áulicos(exámenes escritos y trabajos prácticos), distinguimos cuatrorasgos que caracterizan la argumentación en los ámbitosdisciplinares de las Humanidades y de las Ciencias Naturales:(1) los grados de formalidad; (2) los grados de precisión; (3) losmodos de resolución; y (4) las metas de la argumentación. Estoscuatro rasgos permiten complejizar los elementos estables delesquema toulminiano y pensar sus usos, sus aplicaciones y susalcances en las disciplinas. (shrink)