Teaching First-Year Writers to Use Texts: Scholarly Readings in Writing-about-Writing in First-Year Comp

This issue of Reader premises the need for, the viability, and the importance of disciplinary reading instruction. If we take as given that reading is embedded in communities of practice, so that making meaning of texts requires readers to construct representations of a text with reference to the activity the text is a tool in mediating, then the question is begged: what role is there for reading in general-education courses whose function is not to enculturate students in a given community of practice, but to introduce students to a community they probably won't join so as to teach broadly transferable knowledge developed by that community for non-specialists?

Often gen-ed courses are indeed tasked with teaching general critical reading skills such as analysis and synthesis, particularly if the courses are "skills" or communication-based, such as first-year writing. But by premising the importance of reading instruction situated in specific communities of practice, we challenge the possibility of simple instruction in such general skills. To name categories of cognitive operations simply begs the question, what kind ^analysis, synthesis, or evaluation is it that we intend to teach - the kind used in literary criticism, in political science, in chemistry, in music? The theory and research that demonstrate the necessity of disciplinary writing instruction undermine the likelihood of effective general instruction in these "skills." So from this perspective, too, the question persists: what place is there for reading instruction in general-education courses such as firstyear writing?

In this article, I suggest that one answer is using gen-ed first-year writing courses to set the stage for effective reading instruction in later disciplinary courses by helping students fundamentally reconceive the nature of reading as they encounter it in university settings. Taught from a particular approach, first-year writing courses can provide situatedness in a scholarly community of practice while honoring the gened ethic of teaching about a discipline to "outsiders" rather than enculturating "insiders." Specifically, the approach to first-year writing that I suggest which uses a disciplinary encounter to teach transferable knowledge about reading, is a relatively new and increasingly popular pedagogy called writing-about-writing.

In writing-about-writing courses, students study and perform disciplinary research in the field of Writing Studies (or Rhetoric & Composition) in order to build transferable knowledge about and experience...