Acquiring Expertise in Discipline-Specific Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Exercise in Learning to “Speak” Biology.

This article reports the results of a study with 70 senior undergraduate biological science majors enrolled in a required course on Writing and Speaking in the Biological Sciences. Students enrolled in this course were expected to develop oral scientific presentations of their research projects that exemplified the norms of speaking in the biological sciences. Rather than gathering information from experts or providing explicit instruction on the conventions and structure of this particular genre, we surveyed the students enrolled in this class about their self-perceived communication challenges. Students overwhelmingly identified general issues of organization and concerns about delivery as their primary challenges and communication workshops were developed to address these concerns. According to the reports of the biology faculty who evaluated these students’ presentations and grade data for the oral component of this course compared to previous sections of it, students demonstrated significant expertise in enacting a highly discipline-specific oral communication task. We attribute these students’ ability to successfully deploy such discipline-specific discourse to their own tacit knowledge of their field combined with instruction in both the disciplines of rhetoric and biology. I’m not a biologist. So when asked to develop communication workshops for biology majors on speaking in the biological sciences, I was unsure how to proceed. As director of the Communication Lab, I had a similar uncertainty with other recent requests to provide instruction for chemistry and engineering majors about speaking assignments in genres specific to their disciplines. In those instances I attempted to consult with the professors requesting these workshops about their students’ speaking abilities and the norms and conventions of the genre students were expected to enact. For this request, however, I wanted to experiment with a different approach. I decided to consult with an often-overlooked group—the “audience” of students being required to perform the communication task. In this case, the audience was 70 senior biology majors who were enrolled in multiple sections of a required course on Writing and Speaking in the Biological Sciences. Most practitioners of communicating in the disciplines programs rely on a top-down model—gathering information from experts about the norms, genres, and what counts as good communication in a particular field (Darling & Dannels, 2003; Dannels, 2002; Dannels, 2001) and then interacting with students only after decisions about their communication needs have already been made. Rather than relying upon these methods, we began this study by surveying senior biology majors about their self-perceived communication abilities and communication challenges, even though the oral requirement for this course was a highly discipline-specific scientific presentation. Consequently, because we relied upon the accounts of students rather than traditional experts and because we did not research the norms and conventions of speaking like Bayer, Curto, and Kriley 2 a biologist, this study represents a departure from the standard methods for exploring discipline-specific expertise and communicating in the disciplines. We chose to rely upon the self-reported communication abilities and challenges identified by our audience of senior biology majors as our starting point for three reasons. The first reason for relying on students’ accounts was in response to recent communication in the disciplines research suggesting that what “experts” may identify as critical communication skills for a particular discipline or situation may not adequately address students’ perceived communication needs and the communication challenges that they actually face. For example, in a study that sought to develop a teaming, writing, and speaking module for a capstone chemical engineering design course that included students from chemical engineering, computer science, industrial engineering, economics and food science, researchers found that their assumptions about what students needed to learn was incompatible with the students’ perceptions of their actual communication challenges (Dannels, Anson, Bullard, & Peretti, 2003). In this case, the kinds of oral communication expertise emphasized were determined by a group of specialists who attempted to give these students what they believed they would want and need. Since this did not comport with the students’ experiences, they were largely dissatisfied with the course content and emphasis. Frustrated with the process, they failed to understand the significance of the writing and speaking instruction in the context of their work and felt that the communication material emphasized did not address the communication challenges they actually encountered. The second reason that we conferred with students was to test the assumption that consulting with “experts” or identifying discipline-specific communication norms and conventions is a necessary preliminary step in instructing students who are attempting to acquire oral competence in their discipline. Like many other colleges and universities, our communicating across the curriculum program is relatively new with very little faculty release time to promote it. Since time constraints precluded us from conducting field observation, interviewing, or researching norms or conventions of discipline-specific discourse in advance of multiple requests for communication instruction from various departments, we were interested in experimenting with other methods for promoting students’ opportunities to acquire oral communication competence in their discipline.[1] Our research gave us a means to examine other approaches to developing communication curriculum for students trying to acquire and demonstrate oral competence in disciplinespecific discourse (Pratt, 2002). Finally, we were interested in students’ self-reports because we perceived these students as legitimated sources and, in fact, fledgling experts. As senior biology majors, these students had already acquired a level of expertise as biologists through ongoing study and exposure to the culture of their discipline and the specialized world view that enculturation entails (Kuhn, 1970). Through course work, texts, lectures, labs and internship experiences, and general interaction with biology faculty and biological science peers, these students had presumably learned a great deal about their discipline and its culture. For example, they were familiar with the kinds of questions that are important to biologists and how biologists construct them, what kind of phenomena one should pay attention to and what one should ignore (Hall, 1996), how to study and approach biological data (Toulmin, 1958) including knowledge about the “language game” and communicative tools of biologists (Wittgenstein, 1968). Throughout their experience of majoring in biology, these students had been exposed to multiple examples of discipline-specific discourse. We presumed that they brought that knowledge, though perhaps tacitly, to this course on writing and speaking in the biological sciences in which they were expected to produce written documents and oral presentations that exemplified the norms of writing and speaking in their discipline—a kind of knowledge they would soon be required to demonstrate in the “real world.” In this sense, our research brought together the expertise of communication and biology faculty as well as the emerging expertise we presumed our students had acquired. Acquiring Expertise in Discipline-Specific Discourse 3 Writing and Speaking in the Biological Sciences A course on Writing and Speaking in the Biological Sciences is required of all senior biology majors. Each section is a small class of 10—13 students taught by one of two biology instructors. During the entire semester, students research, write and talk about the primary scientific data on a particular biological “problem” or “controversy” that they have selected from a list of current biological issues. The following topics are illustrative of the questions students studied: “The direct mutagen effects of non-ionizing radiation associated with the use of cellular phones” or “Whether prion diseases propagate by conformational information or by transmission of genetic information.” As a part of selecting a topic, students are assigned the role of a professional biologist such as that of a researcher with the Food and Drug Administration or the National Institute of Health. In this role each “biologist” is to study the primary scientific data on the problem and make a professional recommendation about it to a particular audience such as a government funding agency or group of physicians. In their oral presentations students are required to present the primary scientific data surrounding the biological problem, use the primary scientific data as the evidence for supporting their resolution or recommendation, use scientific language appropriate to the field of biology, and use PowerPoint as a visual supplement.