Disciplinary Routes: Negotiating Academic Identity in Graduate-Level Writing

Abstract

Over the past half century, writing scholars and applied linguists have examined students’ socialization into the discourses and practices of academia, highlighting the importance of writing in this regard. Specifically, scholars have considered how students try to reconcile their interests and their evolving identities with classroom and disciplinary writing expectations (Casanave, 2002), a process that is mediated by institutional or program requirements, interactions with instructors and classmates, course artifacts, and internalized notions of what it means to be a successful student or academic (Prior, 1998; see also Anderson, 2017). This work has increasingly recognized writing as a socially embedded activity and highlighted students’ own perspectives on their learning. However, two distinct aspects of graduate-level writing have remained underexplored: (1) writing in interdisciplinary programs, which require students to become fluent in multiple research traditions, and (2) the role of classroom-based writing, including newer genres and low-stakes tasks, in advancing students’ learning and self-perceptions. I respond to these gaps by sharing an ethnographically-oriented (Paltridge, Starfield, & Tardy, 2016) study of nine multilingual doctoral students in interdisciplinary programs at “Southwestern University,” a large public research university in the U.S. Southwest. At the time of the study, the participants were in the process of completing their coursework, for which they produced a range of writing assignments, including discussion posts, reading responses, ethnographic descriptions, multimodal presentations, literature reviews, and research proposals. Using class observations, literacy and talk-around-text interviews (Lillis, 2008), and textual analysis, I examine how the students presented themselves in their writing over a period of two semesters, focusing on their disciplinary affinities and research interests. This way, I aim to capture graduate-level writing as a “lived-through experience” (Chiseri-Strater, 1991, p. xxi) that is shaped by “a complex array of social, personal, historical, cultural, and linguistic factors” (Casanave, 2002, p. 146). My analysis draws on theories of genre, (inter)disciplinarity, multilingualism, and writer identity or voice. The findings of this study suggest that classroom-based writing plays a more important part in “disciplinary becoming” (Curry, 2016; Dressen-Hammouda, 2008) than is often assumed, as it provides students with opportunities to adopt various subject positions and thus negotiate their sense of self as aspiring scholars or professionals. In addition, I show how digital and multimodal genres structure the learning process by facilitating various forms of peer socialization which doctoral students orient to their classmates as mutual apprentices. My analysis further indicates that classroom-based writing may help students find their way in unfamiliar disciplines and research traditions and help them formulate identities as interdisciplinary scholars. Apart from giving nuanced insight into the connections between writer identity, genre knowledge, and disciplinary learning, I offer suggestions for practitioners to improve writing instruction and support.