The question of authenticity: Teaching writing in a first-year college history of science class

The purpose of this research was to examine both what it means to teach wri ting and what it means to write in a first-year university course in the hi story of science. More specifically, I investigated what students learned a bout writing when the focus was mainly on subject matter and only secondari ly on writing and rhetoric. A number of converging methods of research were used to address this issue: audiotaping classroom discourse and taking fie ld notes, interviewing students and collecting vetrospective protocols abou t their responses to a writing assignment, and analyzing students' texts. T he analyses indicated that classroom discourse focused primarily on framing concepts that brought into focus different and conflicting conceptions of the scientific method and the ways authorship in history is colored by writ ers' subjectivity and perspective taking. Although students' interpretation s of the writing assignment were not very detailed, the texts they wrote re vealed some understanding of how to use comparisons as a tool for analysis in writing history the importance of attending to context in examining a gi ven historical phenomenon, and the extent to which writing history is both interpretive and rherorical. Yet neither the focal students nor the other s tudents participating in this study responded uniformly to the assignment. The data raise the question of whether disciplinary courses in writing prov ide an authentic alternative to the space general writing skills courser cu rrently occupy: particularly if such classes exist as sites where students are introduced to critical thinking and argumentative writing in college.