The Use of Cognitive and Social Apprenticeship to Teach a Disciplinary Genre

Abstract

This study reports about a yearlong study of the initiation of novice grant writers to the activity system of National Institutes of Health grant applications. It investigates the use of cognitive apprenticeship within writing classrooms and that of social apprenticeship in laboratories, programs, departments, and universities, which introduced students to the genre system of National Institutes of Health grant proposals and helped them in moving from peripheral participation to more central participation. While cognitive apprenticeship employs devices such as modeling, scaffolding, coaching, and collaboration to enhance learning in formal settings, social apprenticeship requires socialization, interaction, and collaboration with experts, colleagues, and peers in informal settings to acquire disciplinary knowledge and experiences. The study suggests that writing instructors should acknowledge and incorporate resources in other activity systems in which students participate, i.e., their laboratories and home departments, and teach genre systems rather than specific genres to better facilitate students' enculturation to activity systems of disciplinary discourse communities.H ow can writing instructors help to better initiate postgraduate writers to new disciplinary discourse communities, for instance, advanced disciplinary writing, writing for publication, or grant writing, by incorporating existing resources inside and outside the writing classrooms? points out that disciplinary activities and discourses, or in his term, disciplinarity, are open, interactive systems shaped by history, institutional sites and practices, and sociocultural values and beliefs. Therefore, learning takes place not only in formal educational settings such as writing classrooms but also in informal settings, i.e., interacting with peers and experts, attending workshops and training sessions, and going to conferences. Haas (1994) examines an undergraduate biology student's "growth in rhetorical sophistication" in both reading and writing through instructional support and mentoring in a laboratory (p. 75). Winsor (1996) talks about the socialization of engineers through interaction with experienced engineers and exposure to professional discourses. Blakeslee (2001) investigates how physicists managed to speak to audiences from different scientific fields by interacting with their audiences in conferences, seeking personal feedback, and immersing themselves in discourses produced in those fields. Carter (1990) points out that a continuum exists in students' development of expertise and general and local knowledge and that cognitive apprenticeship offers the opportunity to focus on the "authentic activity of practitioners" and situated learning and collaboration (p. 283). Beaufort (2000) explores the social apprenticeship model existing in a workplace setting where newcomers were introduced to a hierarchy of writing tasks and changed their writing roles from newcomers to old newcomers to new oldtimers to, finally, oldtimers. Although she ind...

Dissertation grant proposals as “writing games”: An exploratory study of two L2 graduate students' experiences

“…Wenli's case illustrated her increased efforts to understand the resubmission genre systems and develop strategies for revision, echoing results observed in faculty's writing practices (Ding, 2008;Myers, 1990;Strickland, 2008). The resubmission process can create a high level of psychological pressure for novice players as they may be required to gather more data to improve their proposals and provide responses to reviewers' comments.…”

“…Some doctoral programs, especially those in the physical and biological disciplines, have even begun to recommend that students refer to and apply for grant proposals from major institutions, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This indicates that students in the U.S. are expected to practice writing grant proposals early and regularly even before they graduate (Ding, 2008;Strickland, 2008). This situation also applies to many students in the humanities and social sciences (Watts, 2006).…”

“…To date, only one study conducted by Ding (2008) has investigated how both L1 and L2 graduate students were initiated into the discourse community of NIH grants. Ding examined the ways in which cognitive and social apprenticeship operated in formal classrooms and informal settings to facilitate the enculturation of newcomers into NIH writing practices.…”

“…In this study, the two students seemed to spend a lot of time navigating their target genre systems and acquiring procedural knowledge. Emphasizing the complexity of genre systems, Ding (2008) suggests that writing instruction should focus on "genre systems rather than specific genres to better facilitate students' enculturation to activity systems of disciplinary discourse communities" (p. 7). This again indicates that the major challenges in learning the grant proposal writing game were the socio-political aspects of genre knowledge rather than the cognitive aspects.…”

“…To establish membership of a certain discourse community, one needs to acquire "ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing" (Gee, 1996, p. iii). As a result, learning takes place not only in formal academic settings, such as classrooms, but also in informal settings, such as interacting with experts and peers, going to conferences, and attending workshops (Ding, 2008). Exploring the enculturation process of educational students, Prior (1991) examined how first and second language (L1 and L2) students understood, negotiated, and undertook writing assignments in order to meet their professor's expectations in a graduate seminar.…”