Petger Schaberg
While the field of Rhetoric & Composition has demonstrated a robust scholarly commitment to the implementation of pedagogies that harness a learner’s motivations and insights (Elbow and Belanoff, 1999), Writing & Rhetoric instructors can benefit from curricular insight generated in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL). SOTL researchers have made significant strides in understanding the paradox of the teacher/learner relationship, as evident in areas of inquiry as varied as Reading Compliance (Burchfield & Sappington 2000); Integrated Scholarship (Hubball and Clarke 2010); Design-Based Learning (Nelson 1984; Nelson & Sundt 1994; Ablin 2015); and Writing-to-Learn (Rivard 1994, Archer-Kuhn 2017). The present study set out to test Ablin’s contention that improved writing could result from organizing classrooms, “as places of problem design rather than the more traditional notion of problem solving” (Ablin, 2015). Two separate hypotheses were tested: 1) Would a pedagogical focus on “problem creation” throughout the semester improve student writing by “moving students from thinking about science as a collection of facts … toward a deeper understanding of concepts and scientific ways of thinking.” (Reynolds et. al. 2012) And, 2) Would these two distinct student populations: Chinese ESL learners at Jiaotong University in Xi’an China, and American first-language speakers at the University of Colorado show different or similar results? To test these questions, student writing data was collected in the summer and fall of 2016 from both Chinese ESL and American student populations. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis of these materials revealed that casting course assignments as Design Problems which students needed to construct, rather than merely respond to, did increase the likelihood that students in both Chinese and American populations learned to move beyond “conceiving science as a collection of facts, toward a deeper understanding of concepts and scientific ways of thinking.” This finding is important for the field of Rhetoric & Composition because it demonstrates how methodologies applied from different disciplines, SOTL in particular, can offer pedagogical support for instructors in both ESL classrooms and those focusing on Scientific Writing, Popular Science Communication, and the Rhetoric of Science. The results can also engage SOTL scholars though the comparative analysis of two very different writing cultures in China and the US, as well as the particular methodological focus on writing outcomes.
