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Thieme, Katja

This paper began as part of a panel at the conference of the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing (CASDW) in 2017 at Ryerson University. In the proposal for this panel, Heidi Darroch quoted Margaret Marshall’s critical discussion of the informal structure of teaching circles. According to Marshall, these teaching circles had important functions for disciplinary mentoring and training of out-of-field instructors of writing courses. She notes that among the participants of these teaching circles not all “want to know more about composition and rhetoric scholarship”; some may instead wish to “learn something concrete that they think will enhance their teaching—like using technology more effectively—but they may have no interest in learning the underlying research or theoretical perspectives that might inform those practices” (Marshall, 2008, p. 428). Heidi’s prompt for that panel helped me think more systematically about the tension between the surface and depth in mentoring writing instructors, the important roles that metalanguage plays in mediating that tension, and the indignities of contract employment that in many ways prevent writing instruction in Canada from becoming the deep and thoroughly researched practice that it could be.

Text

2024-11-20

Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89683

Thieme, K. (2019). Surface and Depth : Metalanguage and Professional Development in Canadian Writing Studies. Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, 29, 148–159.

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