Designing for �More�: Writing�s Knowledge and Epistemologically Inclusive Teaching

Writing professionals understand that the focus of our discipline—working with people to study writing—leads to conversations about teaching that extend well beyond writing per se. That’s because writing is “never just writing” (Adler-Kassner). Instead, it is two things: the representation of knowledge-making in specific contexts, what we might think of as writing as noun, and a process that can be used to explore those contexts and practices, what we might think of as writing as verb. This latter perspective is reflected in Sandra Tarabochia’s assertion that WAC/WID facilitators can and should act as “designers” with faculty colleagues outside of our discipline, understanding that we can facilitate “investigation[s] of the process of change as an experience of learning” (72). This investigation, Tarabochia asserts, involves collaborative activity that contributes to faculty members’ understandings of their own and others’ experiences with meaning-making within the specific context of their own disciplines, especially as they occur through writing. (72–73). This article reports on a study of faculty participants in a seminar that is grounded in this notion of writing’s professional knowledge. Labeled neither “WAC” nor “WID,” the seminar is based on the idea that writing is never just writing but is instead a product (writing as noun) and a process (writing as verb) integrally related to epistemologies and identities. These include disciplinary epistemologies and identities in which faculty participate by virtue of their membership in academic disciplines. They also include the epistemologies and identities that students bring to those disciplines, especially introductory courses designed to introduce them to those disciplines. The analysis here comes from research that investigates the question: is the seminar “working”? The term working is shorthand for enactments of writing’s professional knowledge: engaging faculty in the study of knowledge and