Reinvented Thinking

Anne Beaufort

While reading Anne Beaufort’s first piece about college writing, she separates it into 5 different knowledge domains.

1. Subject Matter Knowledge
2. Writing Process Knowledge
3. Rhetorical Knowledge
4. Discourse Community Knowledge
5. Metacognitive Knowledge

Within each of these domains is a certain skill, or knowledge that an individual should learn in a college writing course. The case study results that Beaufort holds on a college student showed how teachers need to be teaching not just from a classroom standpoint and writing the basic 5 paragraph essays but also preparing them on how to write professional emails, letters, and much more. These things they will actually use in their lifetime, unlike a rhetorical analysis paper (unless going into that field). She emphasizes the need for teachers to teach about things that matter, like how to apply context to a real-world situation. The last thing I want to highlight from Beaufort is how she mentioned that writing is not only just about grammar and structure but about tying into a social and cultural approach. This actually reminded me of one of our classes a couple of weeks ago when this topic came up. I still feel like grammar is important because if you are writing something up to get a job or to someone higher up, for example, Congress, if they see silly typos or sentences that make no sense, they’ll sit there, laugh, and most likely disregard it. However, I do see the importance of not having grammar and structure be the main focus. Also, since I do teach Early Childhood in my eyes, it means a lot because it’s what I am looking for: words spelled correctly, and sentences that make sense. But, like I said I do acknowledge and agree with Beaufort’s points that grammar and structure should not be the main show.

Five Years Later…

5 years later, Beaufort points out some of the flaws from her proposal 5 years ago about curriculum and how we teach it. She reinforces the same fact from her last article that students are still struggling with transferring writing to different contexts. For example, going from high school and writing the 5 paragraph essays and then going into college and learning how to transfer the knowledge you learned from there and apply it to what you’re learning in college and trying to mesh the two “knowledges” together. In addition, she made a claim that teachers must use different strategies when teaching about these writing concepts and I believe that this goes for all ages. Having additional resources always helps others learn because not everyone is going to learn the same way.

One thing that Beaufort mentioned was actually again something that was brought up in class once which I found very interesting. She highlights how it would be beneficial if staff from other departments also taught writing skills within their classes that way it can be transparent with the curriculum expectations. This made me think about our discussion a few weeks back about how if a science professor claims that students don’t know how to write a traditional lab report they shouldn’t blame the writing professors because that is not within their expertise so it is the science professors fault for not teaching them the expectation (this was just an example). In addition to that, I never had to write a lab report in college so I may be wrong but, I’m sure a high school lab report looks much different than a college lab report.