Engaging Ideas. John C. Bean

encourage teachers to help students learn the discourse community conventions of new academic literacies. They recommend asking students to reflect on their prior, nonacademic literacies and to think about the ways they may need to reposition themselves culturally to succeed in academic discourse communities.

Conclusion: Thinking Rhetorically as a Transferable Skill

      As students move from course to course through a curriculum or from writing project to writing project in their professional lives, they must develop usefully portable skills that transfer from setting to setting. The most powerful of these skills is the ability to think rhetorically—to size up a writing situation in terms of audience, purpose, genre, and discourse community—and then to make appropriate composing decisions based on this analysis. As we explain further in chapter 4, teachers can help students develop these skills by including a rhetorical context in their writing assignments. Particularly, chapter 4 offers strategies for drawing on discourse communities to develop assignment sequences and for making discourse community writing contexts explicit to students.

PART TWO Designing Problem - Based Writing Assignments