Paul
Dias, Feedman, Medway, and Pare looked at very professional programs, ones
that typically included internships: social workers, architects,
management studies programs with workplace sites that included architectual
offices, the Bank of Canada, and a major, urban children's hospital. These
are really the kinds of areas where you would expect a maximal connection
between school and work. They do report that interns and new workers (and
more senior workers) struggled with writing, sometimes represented as
issues of not writing well.
However, what their analysis really focuses on is the marked differences
between writing, interacting and thinking at school and writing,
interacting and thinking in workplaces. Differences in motives/goals for
writing, in ideologies about writing, in genres of writing (with different
genres and many more genress), in processes (particularly with extended
rounds of collaborative response and revision of some kinds of texts), and
at the most basic level in ways that writing is embedded in practice and
ways that writing is, therefore, learned. One of the key problems they
identified was newcomers not recognizing that they needed to (re)learn
writing, not seeing how such learning would happen, not recognizing who
would guide them, and so on.
The overall sense was that employers and supervisors (or more senior
people) weren't really happy with the "skills" the students brought, but I
don't remember much of the "they can't write" complaints that I've
certainly heard in other settings (including in content-oriented
disciplines within the University). Their overall argument was that
workplaces just didn't attend to literacy learning, that it simply happened
(however rockily) in the process of doing the work. I'm not sure how, in
this sense, their research would align with the community college-industry
interactions you experienced.
Cheryl Geisler's Academic Literacy and the Nature of Expertise (Erlbaum,
1994) has an interesting historical account of the ways that professional
expertise, certification, and rhetorical practices have co-developed over
the last 120 years or so. Focusing more on academic disciplines (one kind
of workplace) and closely related professions (like economics, medicine,
scientific research), she identifies much of high school and early college
education as relatively arhetorical, designed to create clientele for
professional experts rather than to introduce students into the actual
(rhetorical) practices professionals engage in.
>Paul,
>
>I was quite interested by the following point you made.
>
>"I think their [Dias, Freedman, Medway, and Pare] research program is quite
>fascinating and includes a lot of
>rich stories, but it does repeatedly represent writing in school as
>explicit, clear, evaluated, motivated by student learning, and
>individualistic and writing in the workplace as tacit, messy, unevaluated,
>motivated by practical production, and collaborative. "
>
>While working with the vocational educational programs in community colleges
>I interacted with representatives of various industries. In looking for a
>better instructional program/occupational opportunity fit, our research
>always indicated that reading and writing skills were a sin qua non of
>employee qualifications. At one time I imagine possession of a high school
>diploma or some college, as shown on the job application, had a higher
>probability of guaranteeing this than in the recent past. I'm wondering
>whether the research on writing in the workplace that you mentioned took
>this into account. Were the workers they studied just "writing sloppy"
>although they could do it better (as in the case of the non-aristotelian
>short cut, make do categories) or is it simply that they didn't know how to
>write any other way?
>
Paul Prior
p-prior@uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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