genre teaching

We'll have to do a bit of work to reconstruct how URI's CWP got into "genre" as a teaching approach. From what I have learned from Nedra, I think that Trimbur's textbook had something to do with it. Cultural studies perhaps even more.

Mike, as you've said, Linda's title for WRT 235 suggests a focus on expanded notion of electronic genres in terms of "writing environments." Yet, as you point out in your reference to Bauman (1999), many workers in our field have chosen to "see print forms as the default" in their exploration of electronic genres.

Pedagogically, too, this tendency seems to hold. In her report on teaching a "multimodal genre," C. Tardy (2005), for instance, deliberately minimizes the likely "environmental" impacts of PowerPoint software on the student writing processes she describes, choosing instead to emphasize the influence of rhetorical conventions associated with (print) science articles.

Nothing is necessarily wrong with her emphasis, of course. Even as she approaches the concept of multimodality, however, she describes the causes of writers' choices primarily with reference to a print genre and its contextual dynamics. Here, the choice of which cases are studied (Tardy: graduate and professional writers) certainly mitigates against any finding of "environmental" factors as the causes for writers' choices.

This is just one example, though. Are there any scholarly studies of teaching electronic genres in terms of "environment"? Any theory to help us make the link?

In her discussion of PP, Tardy cites E. Tufte, one of my favorites. He'll be useful, I imagine.

Reference:

Tardy, C. M. (2005). Expressions of disciplinarity and individuality in a multimodal genre. Computers and Composition, 22, 319-336.