Charles Bazerman

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Charles Bazerman
Charles Bazerman.jpg
Born (1945-06-30) June 30, 1945 (age 78)
New York, United States
Alma materB.A. Cornell University, Ph.D. Brandeis University
Spouse Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Awards2018 James R. Squire Award from the National Council of Teachers of English; 2020 Conference on College Composition and Communication Exemplar Award.
Scientific career
Fields Genre studies, rhetoric of science, development of writing abilities
Institutions University of California, Santa Barbara
Doctoral advisor J.V. Cunningham

Charles Bazerman (born 1945) is an American educator and scholar. He was born and raised in New York. He has contributed significantly to the establishment of writing as a research field, as evidenced by the collection of essays written by international scholars in Writing as A Human Activity: Implications and Applications of the Work of Charles Bazerman. [1] Best known for his work on genre studies and the rhetoric of science, he is a Professor of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also served as Chair of the Program in Education for eight years. [2] He served as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, delivering the 2009 CCCC Chair's Address, "The Wonders of Writing," in San Francisco, California. [3] [4] He is the author of over 18 books, including Shaping Written Knowledge, Constructing Experiences, The Languages of Edison’s Light, A Theory of Literate Action, and a Rhetoric of Literate Action. He also edited over 20 volumes, including Textual Dynamics of the Profession, Writing Selves/Writing Societies, What Writing Does and How it Does It, as well as the Handbook of Research on Writing and the two series Rhetoric, Knowledge and Society and Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition. He also wrote textbooks supporting the integration of reading and writing that have appeared in over 30 editions and versions including The informed writer: Using sources in the disciplines, The Informed Reader, and the English Skills Handbook.

Contents

Academic career

Bazerman did his undergraduate work at Cornell University (B.A. 1967), and earned a Ph.D. in English and American Literature at Brandeis University in 1971. In 2016 the Argentinian National Universities of Cordoba, Entre Ríos, Río Cuarto, and Villa María granted him a Doctor Honoris Causa. He has taught at Baruch College, City University of New York from 1972 to 1990, becoming a full professor in 1985. He was professor of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 1990 to 1994. In 1994 he joined the English faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and in 1997 he became a Professor of Education in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also served as chair of the program in education from 2000 to 2006. He has also taught at Cornell University, the National University of Singapore, Universidade Federale de Pernambuco, University of the Lorraine (France), Masaryk University (Czech Republic), China University of Geosciences (Beijing), University of Porto (Portugal),and PS93K elementary school in Brooklyn. His work has been translated into Portuguese, Italian, French, Spanish, and Chinese.

His work has won numerous awards, including two lifetime achievement awards, the 2018 James R. Squire Award from the National Council of Teachers of English and the 2020 Conference on College Composition and Communication Exemplar Award.

Writing across the curriculum and disciplinary writing

Bazerman, as an early advocate of  Writing across the curriculum (WAC), sought to establish a research basis to understand a movement within contemporary composition studies that concerns itself with writing in classes outside of composition, literature, and other English courses. His 1981 analysis of research papers in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities identified differences in the way they represented the material studied, established a relationship with the disciplinary audiences, presented the author, and used the disciplinary literature. [5] In consequent publications, he studied such topics as the changing genres of disciplinary research articles, [6] the development of reference and citation practices [7] [8] and the use of evidence in student learning [9] and professional domains. [10] With his students, he wrote a reference guide to Writing Across the Curriculum, which integrated studies of writing in different disciplines together with educational practices and programs. [11]

Genre and activity theory

Drawing on his various historical and empirical studies and the work of colleagues, Bazerman developed theories about genre and how they participated in and helped form activity systems, initially in his book Shaping Written Knowledge. He later elaborated theoretical ideas in several chapters on genre systems, [12] [13] typification and originality, [14] [15] concepts in activity, [16] and the social origins of genres in letter writing. [17] He fostered work of other scholars on activity through co-editing a number of volumes with David Russell. [18] [19] [20] His two volumes of Literate Action provided a comprehensive view of his rhetorical theory and interdisciplinary sources. [21] [22]

To further investigate how consequential social actions engage multiple activity and genre systems in interaction, he examined how Thomas Edison and his colleagues needed to communicatively engage with multiple journalistic, financial, technical, legal, cultural, and corporate spheres in the course of inventing and producing central light and power. [23] In a series of articles he also applied this reasoning to understand the rise of environmental knowledge, public and governmental engagement with the environment, and the politics of climate change legislation. [24] [25] [26] [27] [28]

Relation of Sociocultural factors to cognition and lifespan development of writing

While his work has centrally focused on the historical and social situatedness of writing, he has sought to understand how those sociocultural factors set the conditions for psychology processes, development of writing abilities and intellectual development. [29] [30] [31] Through the study of historical examples, he has examined how the growing understanding of the communicative world of such innovative thinkers as Joseph Priestley and Adam Smith went hand in hand with their changing ways of writing. [32] [33] He consequently studied how writing and reading practices influenced growth of thinking in students. [34] [35]

The question of the development of individual writers within their social circumstances and their changing understanding of their communicative need and social circumstances resulted in a series of inquiries into the lifespan development of writing and the methodological difficulties of such a project; [36] [37] and his participation in collaborative groups to engage that inquiry. [38] [39] [40]

Leadership roles

Bazerman is a founding organizer of the Research Network Forum, [41] a forum for early career scholars and graduate students that has been held annually since 1987 at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the Consortium of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition, and the Rhetoricians for Peace. In 2011, Bazerman became the Inaugural Chair of the International Society of the Advancement of Writing Research, which holds conferences on writing research around the world. [42]

Bibliography

Primary works

Edited collections

Related Research Articles

Genre is any style or form of communication in any mode with socially-agreed-upon conventions developed over time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other forms of art or entertainment, based on some set of stylistic criteria Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions. Stand-alone texts, works, or pieces of communication may have individual styles, but genres are amalgams of these texts based on agreed-upon or socially inferred conventions. Some genres may have rigid, strictly adhered-to guidelines, while others may show great flexibility.

Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text, either through deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche or parody, or by interconnections between similar or related works perceived by an audience or reader of the text. These references are sometimes made deliberately and depend on a reader's prior knowledge and understanding of the referent, but the effect of intertextuality is not always intentional and is sometimes inadvertent. Often associated with strategies employed by writers working in imaginative registers, intertextuality may now be understood as intrinsic to any text.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Genre studies</span> Branch of general critical theory

Genre studies is an academic subject which studies genre theory as a branch of general critical theory in several different fields, including art, literature, linguistics, rhetoric and composition studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic writing</span> Writing resulting from academic work

Academic writing or scholarly writing refers primarily to nonfiction writing that is produced as part of academic work in accordance with the standards of a particular academic subject or discipline, including:

The Conference on College Composition and Communication is a national professional association of college and university writing instructors in the United States. The CCCC formed in 1949 as an organization within the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). CCCC is the largest organization dedicated to writing research, theory, and teaching worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rhetoric of science</span>

Rhetoric of science is a body of scholarly literature exploring the notion that the practice of science is a rhetorical activity. It emerged after a number of similarly oriented topics of research and discussion during the late 20th century, including the sociology of scientific knowledge, history of science, and philosophy of science, but it is practiced most typically by rhetoricians in academic departments of English, speech, and communication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Composition studies</span>

Composition studies is the professional field of writing, research, and instruction, focusing especially on writing at the college level in the United States.

Linda Flower is a composition theorist. She is best known for her emphasis on cognitive rhetoric, but has more recently published in the field of service learning. Flower currently serves Carnegie Mellon University as a professor of rhetoric.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Contrastive rhetoric</span> Study of how common languages are used among different cultures

Contrastive rhetoric is the study of how a person's first language and his or her culture influence writing in a second language or how a common language is used among different cultures. The term was first coined by the American applied linguist Robert Kaplan in 1966 to denote eclecticism and subsequent growth of collective knowledge in certain languages. It was widely expanded from 1996 to today by Finnish-born, US-based applied linguist Ulla Connor, among others. Since its inception the area of study has had a significant impact on the exploration of intercultural discourse structures that extend beyond the target language's native forms of discourse organization. The field brought attention to cultural and associated linguistic habits in expression of English language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">First-year composition</span> Introductory core curriculum writing course in US colleges and universities

First-year composition is an introductory core curriculum writing course in US colleges and universities. This course focuses on improving students' abilities to write in a university setting and introduces students to writing practices in the disciplines and professions. These courses are traditionally required of incoming students, thus the previous name, "Freshman Composition." Scholars working within the field of composition studies often have teaching first-year composition (FYC) courses as the practical focus of their scholarly work.

Feminist theory in composition studies examines how gender, language, and cultural studies affect the teaching and practice of writing. It challenges the traditional assumptions and methods of composition studies and proposes alternative approaches that are informed by feminist perspectives. Feminist theory in composition studies covers a range of topics, such as the history and development of women’s writing, the role of gender in rhetorical situations, the representation and identity of writers, and the pedagogical implications of feminist theory for writing instruction. Feminist theory in composition studies also explores how writing can be used as a tool for empowerment, resistance, and social change. Feminist theory in composition studies emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a response to the male-dominated field of composition and rhetoric. It has been influenced by various feminist movements and disciplines, such as second-wave feminism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, and queer theory. Feminist theory in composition studies has contributed to the revision of traditional rhetorical concepts, the recognition of diverse voices and genres, the promotion of collaborative and ethical communication, and the integration of personal and political issues in writing.

Writing across the curriculum (WAC) is a movement within contemporary composition studies that concerns itself with writing in classes beyond composition, literature, and other English courses. According to a comprehensive survey performed in 2006–2007, approximately half of American institutes of higher learning have something that can be identified as a WAC program. In 2010, Thaiss and Porter defined WAC as "a program or initiative used to 'assist teachers across disciplines in using student writing as an instructional tool in their teaching'". WAC, then, is a programmatic effort to introduce multiple instructional uses of writing beyond assessment. WAC has also been part of the student-centered pedagogies movement seeking to replace teaching via one-way transmission of knowledge from teacher to student with more interactive strategies that enable students to interact with and participate in creating knowledge in the classroom.

Efforts to teach writing in the United States at a national scale using methods other than direct teacher–student tutorial were first implemented in the 19th century. The positive association between students' development of the ability to use writing to refine and synthesize their thinking and their performance in other disciplines is well-documented.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theories of rhetoric and composition pedagogy</span>

Theories of rhetoric and composition pedagogy encompass a wide range of interdisciplinary fields centered on the instruction of writing. Noteworthy to the discipline is the influence of classical Ancient Greece and its treatment of rhetoric as a persuasive tool. Derived from the Greek work for public speaking, rhetoric's original concern dealt primarily with the spoken word. In the treatise Rhetoric, Aristotle identifies five Canons of the field of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Since its inception in the spoken word, theories of rhetoric and composition have focused primarily on writing

LSU Communication across the Curriculum is a program at Louisiana State University (LSU) that works to improve the communications skills of students. This includes writing, public speaking, visual and technological communication skills. The program is a successor to the Writing across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines programs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kathleen Blake Yancey</span>

Kathleen Blake Yancey is the Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English at Florida State University in the rhetoric and composition program. Her research interests include composition studies, writing knowledge, creative non-fiction, and writing assessment.

The WAC Clearinghouse publishes peer-reviewed, open-access journals and books, as well as other professional resources for teachers and instructional materials for students. Writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) refers to a formal programmatic approach within contemporary secondary and higher education composition studies that promotes the importance of writing in classes outside of composition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asao B. Inoue</span> Japanese American academic

Asao B. Inoue is a Japanese American academic writer and professor of rhetoric and composition in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University whose research and teaching focus on anti-racist writing assessment. In 2019, Inoue was elected the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Chair. He delivered the keynote presentation for the 2019 CCCC Annual Convention, entitled "How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other, Or What Do We Do About White Language Supremacy?" Inoue is the recipient of multiple disciplinary and institutional academic awards, including the 2017 CCCC Outstanding Book Award, the 2017 Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) Best Book Award, and the 2012 Provost's Award for Teaching Excellence at California State University, Fresno.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cheryl E. Ball</span> American educator and scholar (born 1948)

Cheryl Ball is an academic and scholar in rhetoric, composition, and publishing studies, and Director of the Digital Publishing Collaborative at Wayne State University. In the areas of scholarly and digital publishing, Ball is the executive director for the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and the Editor-in-Chief for the Library Publishing Curriculum. Ball also serves as co-editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, an open access, online journal dedicated to multimodal academic publishing, which she has edited since 2006. Ball's awards include Best Article on Pedagogy or Curriculum in Technical or Science Communication from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the Computers and Composition Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Service to the Field, and the Technology Innovator Award presented by the CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication (7Cs). Her book, The New Work of Composing was the winner of the 2012 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. Her contributions to academic research span the areas of digital publishing, new media scholarship, and multimodal writing pedagogy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carolyn Miller</span> American academic

Carolyn Rae Miller is SAS Institute Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Technical Communication Emerita at North Carolina State University. In 2006 she won the Rigo Award for Lifetime Achievement in Communication Design from the ACM-SIGDOC and in 2016 the Cheryl Geisler Award for Outstanding Mentor, the Rhetoric Society of America. She is a Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (1995) and of the Rhetoric Society of America (2010). Her “groundbreaking and influential article” on “Genre as Social Action” is foundational for Rhetorical Genre Studies. Three of her articles have been identified as essential works in Technical Communication.

References

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  5. C. Bazerman (1981). What written knowledge does: Three examples of academic discourse. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 11(3), 361-88.  Reprinted in Landmark Essays in Writing Across the Curriculum, ed. Bazerman and Russell. Hermagoras Press, 1994; in Norton Book of Composition Studies, ed. Susan Miller. Norton 2009; In Ethnographic Discourse. Ed. Paul Atkinson and Sara Delamont. SAGE Publications, London, 2008.
  6. Bazerman, Charles. (2000). Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. The WAC Clearinghouse. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/landmarks/bazerman-shaping/ (Originally published in 1988 by University of Wisconsin Press)
  7. C. Bazerman (1991). How natural philosophers can cooperate: The rhetorical technology of coordinated research in Joseph Priestley's History and Present State of Electricity. In C. Bazerman & J. Paradis (Eds.), Textual dynamics of the professions (pp. 13-44). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.  
  8. C. Bazerman (1993). Intertextual self-fashioning: Gould and Lewontin's representations of the literature. In R. Selzer (Ed.), Understanding scientific prose (pp. 20-41). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
  9. C. Bazerman (2019). Inscribing the world into knowledge: Data and evidence in disciplinary academic writing. In C. Bazerman, B. Gonzalez, et al. (Eds.), Conocer la escritura: investigación más allá de las fronteras; Knowing writing: Writing research across borders, (pp. 279-294). Bogota: Universidad Javeriana.
  10. C. Bazerman (2009). How does science come to speak in the courts? Citations, intertexts, expert witnesses, consequential facts and reasoning. Law and Contemporary Problems, 72(1), 91-120.  
  11. Bazerman, Charles, Joseph, Little, Lisa, Bethel, Teri, Chavkin, Danielle, Fouquette, & Janet, Garufis. (2005). Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum. Parlor Press; The WAC Clearinghouse. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/referenceguides/bazerman-wac/Parlor Press LLC, 2005.
  12. C. Bazerman (1994). Systems of genre and the enactment of social intentions. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 79-101). Taylor & Francis
  13. C. Bazerman (1994). Sketches towards a rhetorical theory of literacy. Constructing Experience (pp. 7-XX). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
  14. C. Bazerman (1999). Singular utterances: Realizing local activities through typified forms in typified circumstances. In A. Trosberg (Ed.), Analysing the discourses of professional genres (pp. 25-40). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  15. C. Bazerman (2010). Paying the rent: Languaging particularity and novelty. Revista Brasileira de Lingüistica Applicada, 10(2), 459-469.
  16. C. Bazerman (2012). Writing with concepts: Communal, internalized, and externalized. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 19(3), 259-272.  
  17. C. Bazerman (2000). Letters and the social grounding of differentiated genres. In D. Barton & N. Hall (Eds.), Letter writing as a social practice (pp. 15-30). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  18. C. Bazerman & D. Russell (Eds.) (2003). Writing selves, writing societies. WAC Clearinghouse & MCA.
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  21. C. Bazerman (2013). A Theory of literate action. Literate Action, volume 2. Parlor Press and WAC Clearinghouse. Translated into Portuguese: Teoria da ação letrada.  Sao Paulo: Parabola, 2015.
  22. C. Bazerman (2013). A rhetoric of literate action. Literate action, volume 1. Parlor Press and WAC Clearinghouse. Translated into Portuguese: Retórica da ação letrada.  Sao Paulo: Parabola, 2015.
  23. C. Bazerman (1999). The languages of Edison’s light. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
  24. C. Bazerman (2001). Nuclear information: One rhetorical moment in the construction of the information age. Written Communication, 18(3), 259-295.
  25. C. Bazerman, J. Little & T. Chavkin (2003). The production of information for genred activity spaces. Written Communication, 20(4), 455-477.
  26. C. Bazerman & R. De los Santos (2005). Measuring incommensurability: Are toxicology and ecotoxicology blind to what the other sees? In R. Harris (Ed.), Rhetoric and Incommensurability (pp. 424-463). Parlor Press.
  27. C. Bazerman (2021). Scientific knowledge, public knowledge, and public policy: How genres form and disrupt knowledge for acting about anthropogenic climate change. In S. Auken & C. Sunesen (Eds.), Genre in the climate debate (pp. 34-50). Warsaw, Poland: De Gruyter Open Poland. doi : 10.1515/9788395720499-004
  28. C. Bazerman & J. Kuntzman (2021). How the US Congress knows and evades knowing about anthropogenic climate change: The record created in committee hearings, 2004–2016. In S. Auken & C. Sunesen (Eds.), Genre in the climate debate (pp. 51-84). Warsaw, Poland: De Gruyter Open Poland. doi : 10.1515/9788395720499-005
  29. C. Bazerman (2009). Genre and cognitive development. In C. Bazerman, A. Bonini, D. Figueiredo (Eds.). Genre in a changing world. Parlor Press and WAC Clearinghouse.
  30. C. Bazerman (2012). Writing, cognition, and affect from the perspective of sociohistorical studies. In V. Berninger (Ed.), Past, present, and future contributions cognitive writing research to cognitive psychology (pp. 89-104). New York: Psychology Press
  31. C. Bazerman (2017). The psychology of writing situated within social action: An empirical and theoretical program. In P. Portanova, M. Rifenburg, & D. Roen (Eds.), Contemporary perspectives on cognition. WAC Clearinghouse.
  32. C. Bazerman (1991). How natural philosophers can cooperate: The rhetorical technology of coordinated research in Joseph Priestley's History and Present State of Electricity. In C. Bazerman & J. Paradis (Eds.), Textual dynamics of the professions (pp. 13-44). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
  33. C. Bazerman (1993). Money talks: The rhetorical project of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. In W. Henderson, T. Dudley-Evans & R. Backhouse (Eds.), Economics and language (pp. 173-199). New York: Routledge.
  34. C. Bazerman, K. Simon, P. Ewing, & P. Pieng (2013). Domain-specific cognitive development through writing tasks in a teacher education program. Pragmatics & Cognition, 21(3), 530-551.
  35. C. Bazerman, K. Simon, & P. Pieng (2014).   Writing about reading to advance thinking: A study in situated cognitive development. In P. Boscolo & P. Klein (Eds.), Writing as a learning activity (pp. 249-276). Leiden: Brill
  36. C. Bazerman (2013). Comprendiendo de un viaje que dura toda la vida: la evolución de la escritura. Understanding the lifelong journey of writing development. Revista Infancia y Aprendizaje/Journal for the Study of Education and Development, 36(4), 421-441.  
  37. C. Bazerman (2020a). The puzzle of conducting research on lifespan development of writing. In K. Blewett, C. Donahue, & C. Monroe (Eds.), The expanding universe of writing studies: Higher education writing research (pp. 403-416). Peter Lang.
  38. C. Bazerman, A. Applebee, D. Brandt, V. Berninger, S. Graham, P. Matsuda, S. Murphy, D. Rowe, M. Schleppegrell (2017). Taking the long view on writing development. Research in the Teaching of English, 51(3), 51-60.
  39. C. Bazerman, A. Applebee, V. Berninger, D. Brandt, S. Graham, J. V. Jeffery, P. Kei Matsuda, S. Murphy, D. W. Rowe, M. Schleppegrell, & K. C. Wilcox (2018). Lifespan development of writing abilities. Urbana IL: NCTE Press.
  40. C. Bazerman (2020b). Preface. In R. J. Dippre & T. Phillips (Eds.), Approaches to Lifespan Writing Research: Generating an Actionable Coherence (pp. xxi-xxiii). WAC Clearinghouse.
  41. Gorelick, Risa. (2017). “The Missing Piece: Where is the Labor-Related Research at the Research Network Forum?” In Randall McClure, Dayna V. Goldstein and Michael A. Pemberton (eds.) The State(ment) and Future of Work in Composition. Parlor Press. pp. 115-125.
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