Date Published: 2026
Context
English 201 Intermediate Composition, a cross-disciplinary writing requirement course; Writing Across the Curriculum; University of Wisconsin – Madison
Students are required to take a “communication-b” course at University of Wisconsin – Madison, and while many students fulfill this with a writing intensive course within their majors, some take it through a gen-ed option including ENGL 201, which is framed as a follow-up to the first-year writing course. I taught this course as a 5th year PhD Candidate.
As the course was meant to fulfill an upper-level writing requirement, I focused the course around students exploring their own disciplines’ writing. I paired this with an attention to linguistic justice and genre theory. There were three units. In unit one, students write some version of a personal statement to apply for an opportunity they were interested in and we discussed the need for voice and opportunities for code-meshing in this formal writing genre. We then moved to the second unit as described in the TLM I have used for this submission, where students explored what writing looked like in a career field they were interested in and what room there is for linguistic justice in that field. I taught the course twice, and tended to group students into an engineering group, a health professions group, a pre-law group, a business group, and a miscellaneous other sciences group. After this group project on naming disciplinary writing conventions, each student then wrote a paper in the style of their chosen discipline and did a genre analysis of how their final project fit within genre and discipline conventions and how it diverted from those conventions.
Reflection
Content wise, we had several readings and discussions early in the semester about linguistic justice and anchored our class discussions, projects, and peer feedback in those early discussions and readings, referring back to and building upon those discussions throughout the semester. We discussed the argument that Standard Academic English, or White Mainstream English, is the only acceptable form of written communication in professions and that’s why it is taught in universities, and how we were looking to debunk that a bit in this project. By asking about linguistic diversity already existing in these professions and public or broader audiences that professionals might write towards, these questions were able to scaffold the interviewees into thinking through opportunities for linguistic justice to make positive change in their fields. Some students had less from their individual interviews, but then by working with groups of similar fields, each group was able to come up with multiple things to share about linguistic justice across their interviews.
I also applied many inclusive teaching practices to this assignment that I do in many other projects in my classes: an opportunity for a multimodal project in the presentation, collaborative and community-based learning opportunities through group work and interviews, revision-based assessment towards goals they named as a group, and intentional group work agreement for this group project.
My classes greatly enjoyed this project and they were able to discover really interesting things, so we wrote about it one semester! You can find results of this project here: https://dept.writing.wisc.edu/blog/disciplinary-writing-interviews/.
