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TRANSLATION AND TRANSFER: INTERDISCIPL INARY WRITING AND COMMUNICATION Denise COMER Thompson Writing Program, Duke University Durham, North Carolina, 27708, USA ABSTR ACT As institutions of higher learning make growing numbers of interdisciplinary faculty hires, establish ever more interdisciplinary units, develop interdisciplinary curricula, and pursue growth sectors such as global and online education, the ability to writ e effectively across disciplinary boundaries is becoming ever more vital, and ever more complex. The rapidly changing and expanding academic climate lends urgency for all students, faculty, staff, and administrators not only to learn how to communicate acr oss disciplines, but also to reflect meaningfully on why they might want to do so. Drawing on David Russell’s activity theory and other scholarship on writing transfer, this paper argues that scholars bear a responsibility to honor and propagate their own discipline’s discourse conventions even as they also must develop strategies for effective interdisciplinary communication through writing. 1 Keywords: Writing Transfer , Writing, Interdisciplinary Communication . 1. INT RO DUCT IO N “Most public intellectuals as well as experts in future studies would agree that the increasingly global society of the first half of the twenty -first century will be characterized by increasing connectivity, diversity, scale, and rapidity of change…. [S]mall events on one part of t he planet and in one sphere of human existence can now end up having large and relatively rapid effects on other parts of the planet and in other spheres of human existence. … Coping with this complexity will require a new way of understanding —one that doe s not rely on having only a single viewpoint. ” [1] One need not be involved in “future studies” or even “interdisciplinary studies” to find ways in which 1 This paper is derived from a keynote address, “Academic Writing for Inter -Disciplinary Communication,” that I delivered at the 2013 International Conference on Education and Information Systems, Technologies and Applications (July 9 -12, 2013; Orlando, Florida). I am grateful for the input of the audience at the address, as well as feedback on a subsequent draft from participants in the August 2013 Duke University Postdoctoral Summer Seminar in Teaching Writing. interdisciplinary communication already impacts the work of the academy. As postsecondary institution s make growing numbers of interdisciplinary faculty hires, establish more interdisciplinary units, develop interdisciplinary curricula, and pursue growth sectors such as global and online education, the ability to write effectively across disciplinary boun daries is becoming ever more vital, and ever more complex. The rapidly changing and expanding academic climate lends urgency for students, faculty, staff, and administrators not only to learn how to communicate across disciplines, but also to reflect meani ngfully on why it can be so challenging and what they stand to gain from doing so. Learning how to be effective at interdisciplinary communication is hard, in part because of the shifting conventions and expectations for writing across disciplines.

Disciplinary context shapes and reflects the kinds of questions academic writers ask, the values they embrace, and the knowledge they create through writing. Students have an especially difficult time navigating interdisciplinary terrain. Faculty do too. In this paper I will draw on David Russell’s activity theory to discuss challenges of, strategies for, and benefits of interdisciplinary communication through writing. The kind of epistemological shift in thinking and writing demanded by the rapidly shifting and highly connected realities of twenty -first century literacy and discourse requires what is known in the field of writing studies as writing transfer . Writing transfer , though, does not purport to elide disciplinary boundaries. On the contrary, being well versed at writing transfer asks that scholars recognize explicitly the disciplinary context within which they do produce knowledge as a way of then considering whether and how they may want to translate and apply those practices to other writing occasions, for o ther imagined and real audiences. My hope is that this paper will show how important it is to honor and maintain disciplinary modes of knowledge making, even as I also illustrate the dynamic and interconnected nature of academic writing and inspire faculty , staff, students, and others associated with academia to share knowledge, practices, approaches, and skil ls in interdisciplinary frames. Again, a dopting a habit of mind grounded on writing transfer and being willing to engage in interdisciplinary 106 SYSTEMICS, CYBERNETICS AND INFORMATICS VOLUME 11 - NUMBER 9 - YEAR 2013 ISSN: 1690-4524 conver sations does not demand that one relinquish disciplinary situatedness. This kind of approach, which values disciplinar y and interdisciplinary communication has the potential to have a spread of effect that can make room for increasing collaboration and cross -fertilization of ideas, embodying to an even greater degree the capacity of academia to engage more broadly in transfer by applying heterog eneous concepts and practices to new and different problems and possibilities. By cultivating their aw areness of disciplinary perspectives alongside the rewards of interdisciplinarity, scholars can more effectively learn to transfer their knowledge, practi ces, goals, identities, and ideas from one context to others . Engaging in interdisciplinar y communication, however, also has somewhat unexpected potential to further strengthen disciplinary awareness and enable scholars to simultaneously hone their acumen at disciplinary communication. 2. THE PARADOX OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY Interdisciplinarity seems, on the surface, easy to define.

When I use the term, I refer quite literally to moments when someone is communicating ideas to people outside of his or her immediate discipline. What undergirds interdisciplinary communication most prominently is the ability to think across paradigms, to reframe perspective in a way that is both within and outside of one’s inherited epistemology. Interdisciplinary communication involves, essentially, a new approach to thinking , grounded, paradoxically, on disciplinarity. Interdisciplinary communication can occur horizontally, where a scholar draws from and writes or communicates to scholars in other disciplines (this branches into what is termed Writing across the Curriculum (WAC)), or it can occur vertically, where one writes to people at different levels of an institution. But academic writing for int erdisciplinary communication occurs along other vectors as well, including national and international borders, and time. It also brushes up against other related nomenclatures, such as “public sc holarship,” whereby academics communicate with larger public audiences. Interdisciplinary communication can occur deliberately, or in unanticipated and unexpected ways. And all of these vectors are overlapping. But: even as I begin to define interdisciplinarity, I find myself facing a paradox. For, one of the prob lems inherent in conversations about interdisciplinarity is that the term by its very nature essentializes disciplines, insisting that we must somehow first agree on what we understand to be psychology, or mechanical engineering, or history for the purpose of then deciding how they can intersect. The paradox extends even farther as interdisciplinarity then often moves ultimate ly to disrupt the very disciplinary boundaries it initially created until notions of disciplines again recede into nebulous fogginess . Scholars in the late twentieth century must have felt anxiety over a burgeo ning disciplinary amorphism because it was in this era that people brought renewed energy to attempts to classify disciplines, defining and molding them, trying to contain them at the very juncture when they seemed on the brink of becoming indistinct. One of the most influential of these models for disciplinary classification is the Biglan model, introduced in 1973.

Biglan relies on binaries: hard ( engineering, chemistry) or soft (education, sociology); pure (mathematics, sociology) or applied (finance); life (biology) or nonlife (geology and computer science) [2] [3]. Other ways of arranging disciplines include codification, paradigm development, an d consensus . [4] Despite these real or imagined pressures to classify and differentiate disciplines, however, those who engage in knowledge production know on an instinctive level that disciplines are not discrete, singular entities, but that they inters ect and overlap. Dawn Youngblood, for instance, invokes John Donne to represent this interconnectivity , “No discipline is an island.” [5] In one of my own papers in progress I represent this interconnectivity by arguing that the concept of deep time, with cladograms and branching orders of cousinhood, is an apt metaphor for disciplines as it shows how they are interwoven and recursive. [6] Even if disciplines could be codified, one must also note that they are created and sustained by human beings , and are thereby inherently dynamic and have elements that are, more or less, largely idiosyncratic. H umans create knowledge, rethink approaches, change, and move disciplines forward (or sometimes backward). Moreover, academic writing within disciplines is shap ed by individual scholars’ dispositions, experiences, and approaches to learning, thinking, and writing. For that reason, disciplinary writing, by its nature, grows and changes as well. It is dynamic rather than static. Values, conventions, and expectati ons about writing shift not only between disciplines and people, but often within disciplines and across historical and cultural contexts as well. Janice Walker, a scholar of writing studies, uses citation to discuss just how variegated the landscape of citation in academic writing is: Strict attribution of sources has not always been necessary, and indeed in many cultures and contexts, it is still not (necessarily) required.

Ancient texts often did not follow any formal rules of attribution, since it was assumed that the audience would already be familiar with the body of scholarly work. I[n some cultures today] the words of others are used without attribution as a way of honoring those whose words [are] considered so important that they needed no attribu tion. [7] ISSN: 1690-4524 SYSTEMICS, CYBERNETICS AND INFORMATICS VOLUME 11 - NUMBER 9 - YEAR 2013 107 Walker, herself an expert in writing studies and a highly accomplished writer, ultimately exclaims: “I’m so confused!” The term interdisciplinary, then, paradoxically has the impossible task of trying to create discipli narity in order to dismant le it . Career -related data about disciplines reflect the interplay and tension between disciplinary rigidity and porousness. In the 2012 Report of the Job Information List of the Modern Language Association, readers can find over 20 subspecialties within English: writing studies, composition, rhetoric, different historical periods of literature, different theoretical approaches. [8] English Studies branches into linguistics, communication, creative writing, literature, feminism, post -colonial studies, com parative studies, and American studies. Scholars in English write more for highly specialized audiences and more public audiences. Scholars in English study virtually every period where humans have existed, across the globe, from antiquity to contemporary blogs. English Ph.D.s look at prose, sound, poetry, cartoons, music, journalism, or visual texts. Granted, English Studies is a discipline with comparatively less “consensus” than other disciplines. But even other disciplines with higher con sensus hav e s ubspecialties that transverse disciplinary boundaries. The history of science, environmental science, the history of technology, neuropsychology … In the same way as disciplines are, at heart, already interdisciplinary, so too is it fair to say that scholars already routinely communicate outside of the ivory tower.

Every discipline has more public forms of scholarship, be they op eds, pamphlets, webs ites, or monographs that are lucky enough to make it to the shelves of the local bookstore. Search engines like Google Scholar and databases like JStor, movements like M assive Open Online Courses (M OOCs ) make even the scholarship we might specifically crea te for other scholars be like ly to be read by members of larger communit ies and publics . Within institutions, many of us are likely also already accustomed to writing for people outside of our fields or at different levels, be it for tenure and promotion r eview, annual reports, grant proposals, or letters of recommendation. So all of this is to say that the good news is that , whether we know it or not, twenty -first century scholars are already accustomed to interdisciplinary communication. And, yet, eve n as we might pat ourselves on our backs for our prowess and vast experience with interdisciplinary communication, we also all know that interdisciplinary communication has challenges, and that, 20 subspecialties or not, scholars in English tend to write a nd thi nk differently than scholars in, for instance. Computer Science or Sociology . Moreover, this paper as it appears here, geared toward an interdisciplinary readership, sounds different than other versions of this paper I might produce for a textbook, o r to a business, or to peer faculty at a campus in India or Brazil. The truth is, there are differences among and between disciplines, vertically, horizontally, and across inter national and linguistic borders. T hese differences in approach, epistemology, a nd value make interdisciplinary communication vital, even though difficult.

The next section outlines more specifically the challenges involved in interdisciplinary communication. 3. MISFIRES, FAILURES, AND THE CHALLENGES OF INTERDISCIPLINARY COMMUNICATION Although I presented towards the outset of this paper the notion that interdi sciplinary communication offers an extra, supplemental opportunity for cultivating conversations across disciplines and frames, there are many ti mes where interdisciplinary communication is laden with an urgency and mandate. The value of interdisciplinary communication , whether voluntary or required, cannot and should not be underestimated. The following t wo anecdotes illustrate the importance of effective interdisciplinary communication and the potential consequences of failed attempts or misfires . The first was told to me by my friend Ed ward M. White, a national expert on curricular assessment through writing. A few years ago, 2 Ed had been wor king as an assessment consultant for an institution and was leading a group of faculty who were rating student essays to determine learning gains. One of the essays was a history thesis about Richard II written by a senior; it contained beautifully written prose, provided a well -structured argument, explicated evidence from a strong range of scholarly sources, and made a compelling argument about Richard II. Ed, from English, rated it a 6, the highest possible rating. Each essay was double blind scored, a nd the following day, when reviewing inter -rater scores , the team discovered that a professor of history had also rated that essay, yet he had rated it a 1, the least effective score on the rubric. Ed was astonished; how could that essay have possibly been a 1? The historian was also astounded that it could be anything but a 1: apparently, the student’s thesis was riddled with inaccuracies in evidence, most egregiously being that the student had identified Richard II as living in the 12 th century instea d of the 14 th century. Such an experience may seem to argue for the significance of disciplinary expertise , or it might seem to reflect merely an individual failure to either communicate across disciplines or to read across disciplines. However, what I 2 Specifics have been altered to protect the identity of the original participants. 108 SYSTEMICS, CYBERNETICS AND INFORMATICS VOLUME 11 - NUMBER 9 - YEAR 2013 ISSN: 1690-4524 would like to highlight about this anecdote is how deeply embedded disciplinary modes of reading and thinking are.

Even with the presence of a highly specific rubric that both readers, the English professor and the History professor, were using, disciplinar ity infused their approaches to the paper. Each faculty members’ training created a predisposition for him to look for and prioritize particular criteria for judging the essay, while neglecting other criteria. The anecdote also emphasizes the increased res ponsibilities that attend interdisciplinary communication. Writers in interdisciplinary contexts need not only be wary of misrepresented facts or evidence, but should also keep in mind that readers may not be aware of certain facts or assumptions. Interdis ciplinary communication demands making those assumptions explicit and visible. The second anecdote also emphasizes the increased responsibilities undergirding interdisciplinary communication, as well as the immense consequences that can attend poorly des igned interdisciplinary communication. In 1979, Challenger engineers sent a memo to their managers regarding their uncertainty with the O -rings. While there were many causes of the Challenger explosion, a breakdown in communication due to interdisciplina ry gaps is agreed by many to be among the most prominent causes. Engineers knew that the O -rings were not up to par for flight, and attempted to communicate this to management. However, based on shortcomings of interdisciplinary communication, management w as unable to understand how vital O -rings were, and how risky the planned flight would be. The memo never got passed to upper -division management. Paul Dombrowski captures the failure of this interdisciplinary communication: “Before the launch, NASA offici als construed information about O -ring charring in socially contingent ways … [and] differing methodological assumptions led them to different conclusions and recommendations.” [9] These anecdotes e mphasize that disciplines enable certain forms of knowledge while actively disabling us from other forms . David Russell’s activity theory, described in the following section, helps to further explain how and why disciplinary priorities, epistemology, and conventions are so rooted and engrained. 4. ACTIVITY THEORY AND INTERDISCIPLINARY COMMUNICATION David Russell’s influential work with activity theory offers a way of understanding from whence these interdisciplinary misfires emerge. Russell emphasizes that writing (along with other modes of communication) emerges from established and individualized n etworks of human interactions: Activity theory develops the metaphor of interlocki ng, dynamic systems or networks. An activity system is any ongoing, object -directed, historically -conditioned, dialectically -structured, tool -mediated human interaction: a family, a religious organization, an advocacy group, a political movement, a course of study, a school, a discipline, a research laboratory, a profession, and so on. These activity systems are mutually (re)constructed by participants using certain tools and not others (including discursive tools such as speech sounds and inscriptions). [10] Activity theory, then, suggests that each discipline —and each discipline’s approach to writing — has a highly contextualized and historically grounded set of practices, motives, and approaches. As you can see from the image, writing thus reflects, shapes, and is shaped by the particular network from which it emerges: Figure 1: From Russell, "Rethinking" Scholars can advance knowledge within their disciplines in part because, as activity theory demonstrates, they can build on the work of others and carry forward long -term conversations premised on shared knowledge and outcomes. Those interested in activi ty theory and writing transfer, such as Charles Bazerman, identify patterns across texts in order to define these activity systems within disciplines. [11] In so doing, we come to understand disciplines as what Michael Carter terms, “ways of knowing .” [12] James Porter defines these activity systems as discourse communities: “a local and temporary constraining system, defined by a body of texts (or more generally, practices) that are unified by a common focus. A discourse community is a textual system with stated and unstated conventions, a vital history, mechanisms for wielding power, institutional hierarchies, vested interests, and so on .” [13] Significantly, however, these discourse communities not only enable these features and attributes, but also disab le and stultify others, rendering the impact of activity theory a domain of both postive and negative polarity. The enablement and inhibition underscoring activity th eory and discourse communities not only help s us understand how knowledge is advanced and why interdisciplinary communication can be challenging, but also why writing, and more broadly academic inquiry, can be so challenging for undergraduates as they move between these activity systems without the m eta -awareness to recognize and participate in them. Louis Menand identifies the problem as ISSN: 1690-4524 SYSTEMICS, CYBERNETICS AND INFORMATICS VOLUME 11 - NUMBER 9 - YEAR 2013 109 an overall silo -ing in the academy, paradoxically during a time of increasing efforts toward interdisciplinarity across many institutions. [14] Gerald Graff, similar ly, decries what he terms “a disconnected series of courses” that students take during college. [15] Perhaps as with the mid - twentieth century efforts to reinstantiate disciplinary boundaries, some domains of the academy respond to increasing interdiscipli narity by increasing efforts at disciplinary division and retrenchment. Such a response is understandable, but presumes that interdisciplinarity, unchecked, will inevitably elide disciplinarity. Writing -studies scholars such as Carter suggest that facult y can be so immersed, perhaps willfully, in their particular discipline’s activity systems that they are incapable of noticing the situatedness of writing in their field, let alone helping students understand these contexts. Carter writes, ‘[B]ecause profe ssors typically learn to write in their disciplines not by any direct instruction but by a process of slow acculturation through various apprenticeship discourses, they are unable to see that writing itself is specific to the discipline .” [16] Perhaps be cause of an unwitting or overt resistance to interdisciplinarity —emerging from assumptions that interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity cannot coexist — moments of meta -awareness are often attended by complex, sometimes negative emotions. Rebecca Nowacek ter ms this “double binds”: “[T] hose uncomfortable and perhaps inevitable situations in which individuals experience contradictions within or between activity systems (e.g., between the motives and tools within a single activity system or between the motives o f two different activity systems) but cannot articulate any meta - awareness of those contradictions .” [17] 5. WRITING TRANSFER AS A STRATEGY FOR IMPROVING INTERDISCIPLINARY COMMUNICATION Scholars in writing studies who are interested in moving toward interdisciplinary communication seek to work against these kinds of challenges by cultivating deeper understandings about how teachers, students, writers of all kinds, can become better at wri ting transfer. Research into transfer has a long history, reaching back at least as far as Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the fourth century BCE [18]. Contemporary research about transfer often builds on and invokes Russell’s discussions of activity theory. Much of it focuses on how faculty can help students learn to be better at transfer. From Anne Beaufort, for instance, we learn that competing values in discourse communities can stymie students’ abilities to effectively enact writing transfer. [19] Elizabeth Wa rdle emphasizes the importance of reflection and meta -awareness for writing transfer. [20] Even more recent work by Dana Lynn Driscoll and Jennifer Wells draws on psychology to examine “ the role of learners’ dispositions” in transfer. [21] One of the most groundbreaking approaches to transfer of late is by Rebecca Nowacek. She has resituated binary conceptions of transfer (such as low -road (unconscious) or high -road (deliberate); positive or negative) to unpack a more matrixed approach: “four avenues of co nnection, four resources that individuals employ as they draw connections among various contexts: knowledge, ways of knowing, identity, and goals” [22] Nowacek foregrounds the agency involved with transfer among these four domains to emphasize that students are not merely conduits moving from context to context, but are instead “agents of integration” who actively reconstruct knowledge and practices as they enact transfer. If undergraduates can be agents of transfer, so too can faculty. Nor does this need to happen only in explicitly interdisciplinary contexts. F ostering a culture that embraces interdisciplinarity does not by necessity render disciplinarity oblique. For twelve years now, I have been part of a multidisciplinary faculty in Duke Univ ersity’s Thompson Writing Program (the TWP). In the TWP, we hire faculty with doctorates across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities to teach writing. The faculty in the TWP design theme -based writing courses based on their disciplinary expertise. We term our program “multidisciplinary,” rather than interdisciplinary, as a way of honoring the disciplinary perspectives each faculty member carries. Still, we also foster interdisciplinary conversations within and between these disciplinary frames. The program is founded on the premise that cross - disciplinary conversations about first -year writing improve the teaching of writing and help first -year students learn how to more effectively navigate the wide and varying landscape of academic writing. But we also have a stake in fostering these interdisciplinary exchanges among our faculty, believing that writing transfer can enable scholars to more effectively transfer knowledge, ideas, and practices to other contexts, thereby increasing their growth as wr iters, thinkers, and global citizens. This process of foregrounding interdisciplinary communication through writing begins in our Postdoctoral Summer Seminar in the Teaching of Writing where we spend three intensive weeks fostering interdisciplinary commu nication among our faculty. As a way of encouraging such insights, our teaching seminar for new first -year writing faculty, which I co -teach with my colleague Marcia Rego, mirrors a writing class as it offers one of the most foundational moments for establ ishing collaboration and relationships. Two activities in particular have been especially valuable for encouraging interdisciplinary communication and writing transfer : “Translating Scholarship ” and “Disciplining Writing. ”3 “Disciplining Writing ” asks par ticipants to locate and share 3 I discuss these two activities in another paper -in-progress of mine as well . [23] 110 SYSTEMICS, CYBERNETICS AND INFORMATICS VOLUME 11 - NUMBER 9 - YEAR 2013 ISSN: 1690-4524 writing from their disciplines. The text is not designed to “represent” a discipline, but to raise questions or illustrate moves of argument and writing that can introduce others to that discipline. Based on these texts, we ha ve conversations about intersections and departures of writing, thinking, and knowing across disciplines.

“Translating scholarship” asks participants to introduce colleagues to their scholarship, much like what a job candidate might do when speaking with a dministrators at a prospective campus. Activities such as these highlight the ways in which interdisciplinary communication is possible even as disciplinary perspectives retain some measure of individuation. As disciplinary experts, our disciplinary norms are often not visible to us. They become visible, though, through interdisciplinary conversations such as these. 6. CONCLUSIONS Becoming better at interdisciplinary communication through writing, becoming better at writing transfer, requires nuanced thinking: Identifying patterns about writing that span disciplines and time and boundaries, as well as unique features of writing within each context. It also requires reflecting on your own approaches and values to writing. Academic writing is hard, eve n for those of us who are purportedly experts at it. Our students deserve the chance to actively interrogate the ways in which academic inquiry, writing values, expectations, and conventions are shaped by and reflected in the writing that exists within dis ciplines. Faculty will no doubt learn from these exchanges as well . In my own experience, reading and discussing scholarship from such disciplines as history, psychology, anthropology, and biology has immeasurably enhanced the ways in which I speak about academic writing with students and faculty, and the ways in which I write.

Having this wider perspective enables scholars to more effectively be “ambassadors” for their disciplines [24]. The evidence of these potential gains in thinking becomes clear thr ough such organizations as “Edge,” which poses an annual question to scholars in numerous disciplines. [25] The idea is that we can learn more by considering a question from varying disciplinary perspectives. But even if particular scholars are uninterested in translating their ideas to interdisciplinary settings, it is worth considering that interdisciplinarity can not only coexist with disciplinarity, but actually strengthen and embolden it. I nterdisciplinari ty helps us understand our own disciplines, and helps us understand ourselves as discipline -d. The act of considering interdisciplinarity makes ones own discipline more transparent. My goal for this paper is to make visible not only what writing skills or practices can be transferred across disciplinary boundaries, but how writers can more effectively learn to transfer their knowledge, practices, goals, identities, and ideas from one context to others.

Interdisc iplinary communication involves, essentially, a new approach to thinking. Gaining acumen in transfer —an essential and complex habit of mind — will enable you to strengthen your abilities in all sorts of domains (not only writing), so you can transfer knowled ge and learning more generally and prepare yourself for the demands and opportunities of the twenty -first century world to which Newell refers. 7. REFERENCES [1] Newell, William H. “The Role of Interdisciplinary Studies in Liberal Arts .” LiberalArtsOnline 7.1 (2007). Web. 11 Mar. 2013. [2] Biglan, Anthony. "The Characteristics of Subject Matter in Different Academic Areas." Journal of Applied Psychology 58 (1973):195 –203. [3] Schommer -Aikins, Marlene, Orpha K. Duell, and Sue Barker. 352. "Epistemological beliefs across domains using Biglan's classification of academic disciplines." Research in Higher Education 44.3 (2003): 347 -366. [4] “Academic Disciplines - Disciplines and the Structure of Higher Education, Discipline Classification S ystems, Discipline Differences .” stateuniversity.com Education Encyclopedia. 2013. Web. 20 June 2013. [5] Youngblood, Dawn. "Multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and bridging disciplines: A matter of process." Journal of Research Practice 3.2 (2007) [6] Comer, Denise. “This Erstwhile Unreadable Text”: Deep Time, Multidisciplinarity, and First -Year Writing Faculty Teaching Mentoring and Support.” June 2013. MS . [7] Walker, Janice R. "Everything Changes, or Why MLA Isn’t (Always) Right." 258. In Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing 2. Ed Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. WAC clearinghouse. Parlor Press. 2011 . 257 -269. Web. 15 Jan. 2013. [8] Modern Language Association. “Percentage of Ads Published in the English JIL , 2000 –01 to 2011 –12, by Field Specialization Index Term.” Table. Report on the MLA Job Information List 2011 -12. MLA. MLA, 25 Sept. 2012. Web. 1 July 2013. [9] Dombrowski, Paul M. "Challenger and the social contingency of meaning: Two lessons for the tech nical communication classroom." Technical Communication Quarterly 1.3 (1992): 73 -86. [10 ] Russell, David. “Rethinking Genre in School and Society: An Activity Theory Analysis.” iastate.edu . Iowa State University. Web. 13 March 2013. [11 ] Bazerman , Charles, et. al. “What Schools of Education Can Offer the Teaching of Writing.” In Culture Shock and ISSN: 1690-4524 SYSTEMICS, CYBERNETICS AND INFORMATICS VOLUME 11 - NUMBER 9 - YEAR 2013 111 the Practice of Profession. Training the Next Wave in Rhetoric & Composition . Ed. Virginia Anderson and Susan Romano. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2006. 309 -323. Print. [12 ] Carter, Michael. “Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines.” College Composition and Communication 58.3 (2007): 385 -418. Jstor. Web. 13 Dec 2012. [13 ] Porter, James E. "Intertextuality and the discourse community." Rhetoric Review 5.1 (1986): 34 -47. [14 ] Menand, Louis. The marketplace of ideas: Reform and resistance in the American University (Issues of Our Time) . New York: Norton, 2010. [15 ] Graff, Gerald. Clueless in academe: How schooling obscures the life of the mind . Yale U P, 2004. [16] Carter, Michael. “Ways of Knowing , Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines.” College Composition and Communication 58.3 (2007): 385 -418. Jstor. Web. 13 Dec 2012. 385. [17 ] Nowacek , Rebecca S. “Why Is Being Interdisciplinary So Very Hard to Do?” College Composition and Communication 60.3 (2009): 493 –516. Print. 507. [18] Nowacek, Rebecca S. “Why Is Being Interdisciplinary So Very Hard to Do?” College Composition and Communication 60.3 (2009): 493 –516. Print. [19] Beaufort, Anne. "Learning the Trade A Social Apprenticeship Model for Gaining Writing Expertise." Written Communication 17.2 (2000): 185 -223. [20] Wardle, Elizabeth. "Understanding transfer from FYC: Preliminary results of a longitudinal study." WPA: Writing Program Administration 31.1 -2 (2007): 65 -85. [21] Driscoll, Dana Lynn, and Jennifer Wells. "Beyond Knowledge and Skills: Writing Transfer and th e Role of Student Dispositions." Composition Forum . Vol. 26. 2012. composition forum .com . A ssociation of Teachers of Advanced Composition . Web. 11 April 2013 . [22] Nowacek, Rebecca S. “Why Is Being Interdisciplinary So Very Hard to Do?” College Composition and Communication 60.3 (2009): 493 –516. Print. 20 -21. [23] Comer, Denise. “This Erstwhile Unreadable Text”: Deep Time, Multidisciplinarity, and First -Year Writing Faculty Teaching Mentoring and Support.” June 2013. MS . [24] Anderson,Virginia, and Susan Romano, eds. Culture Shock and the Practice of Profession. Training the Next Wave in Rhetoric & Composition . Ed. Virginia Anderson and Susan Romano. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2006. Print. [25] Brockman, John, ed. Edge . Edge Foundation. 2013. We b. 5 July 2013. 112 SYSTEMICS, CYBERNETICS AND INFORMATICS VOLUME 11 - NUMBER 9 - YEAR 2013 ISSN: 1690-4524