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JOURNAL OF

BUSINESS AND TECHNICAL

COMMUNICATION

Vol. 11 No. 2 April 1997

ANN M. BEAKESLEE

The recent attention that education scholars have paid to the roles of activity and context in learning holds promise for researchers studying scientific and professional communication. Increasingly, these scholars have been concerned with how students in advanced academic and professional settings acquire disciplinary skills for reading and writing in those settings (see Anson and Forsberg; Berkenkotter and Huckin 117-63; Berkenkotter, Huckin, and Ackerman, "Conventions," "Social"; Freedman; Freedman and Adam; Freedman, Adam, and Smart; Freedman and Medway; Haas; Herrington; Mackinnon; McCarthy; Russell, "Rethinking"; Winsor).

Author's Note: I thank Robert Swendsen, Djamal Bouzida, and Shankar Kumar for their participation in this study. I also thank Dorothy Winsor, Sibylle Gruber, David Wallace, and the anonymous reviewers for their close readings of, and very useful feedback on, drafts of this article.

Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol. 11 No. 2 April 1997 125-169 @ 1997 Sage Publications, Inc.

More recently, some of these scholars have started to use situated learning theories to explain how students move from writing in the guided and protective atmosphere of traditional education to taking greater responsibility for producing and disseminating knowledge in their fields (Berkenkotter and Huckin 117-44; Freedman and Adam; Russell, "Activity," "Rethinking"; Winsor 19-43).

A basic tenet of situated learning, or activity, theories is that students acquire new skills and knowledge by engaging in the activities typically performed in a field under the guidance of more experienced practitioners. Educational researchers John Brown, Allan Collins, and Paul Duguid call such activity- and interaction-based experiences cognitive apprenticeships. Activity, they say, is not separate from, or ancillary to, learning but rather is integral to it (32). Also integral are the contexts in which newcomers undertake tasks and the guidance and support provided in those contexts:

Students are expected to learn how to solve problems that arise in the

context of carrying out complex tasks and to extend and make use of

their textbook knowledge by undertaking significant projects guided

by an expert in the field. (Collins, Brown, and Newman 460)

Knowledge, according to these scholars, is a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used. Activity theory thus attempts to synthesize social and cognitive components of learning, seeing these as two sides of the same coin instead of as dichotomous or mutually exclusive perspectives (Russell, "Rethinking"). In short, such theory recognizes that cognition always takes place as part of a situation and that situations always include people engaging in cognition.

In such conceptions of learning, cognition and context also become intertwined with issues of authority. In other words, the interactions between experienced practitioners and newcomers in academic or professional settings, like those between masters and apprentices in traditional apprenticing relationships, tend to be hierarchical, with knowledge and authority conceded to the experienced practitioner. The goal of such relationships, according to situated learning theorists, is to transmit the knowledge and authority to newcomers. When this goal is achieved, newcomers begin exhibiting autonomy and exerting influence as they engage in the activities of the domain and gradually gain experience with their newly acquired skills. Newcomers thus move from the periphery of a domain to its center through increasing engagement with the domain's activities (Lave and Wenger 29).

In The Rhetoric of Science, Alan Gross describes how this transmission of authority occurs in science:

At the root of authority within science is the relationship of master to disciple. To become a scientist is to work under men and women who are already scientists; to become a scientific authority is to submit for an extended period to existing authorities. These authorities embody in their work whatever of past thought and practice is deemed worthwhile, at the same time, they are exemplars of current thought and practice. (13-14)

Gross says that by these means "research traditions are founded, and the methodological and epistemological norms that determine the legitimacy of arguments are passed on as tacit knowledge" (14). Conceivably, another component of this tacit knowledge and authority that scientists purportedly transmit through such relationships is the rhetorical knowledge and authority newcomers need to publicly present their work. Greg Myers argues that one important aspect of that knowledge is an understanding of the tensions that occur in scientific discourse between convention and innovation. Scientists, Myers says, must reproduce the literature of the field in their texts while at the same time challenging its assumptions (67), which requires credibility and authority within one's field. Further, authors must know how to negotiate this tension between convention and innovation, not only in the claims that they make in their writing but also in the form and tone of their work, which convey assumptions about the persona for, as well as the authority of, their research (80). Presumably, if we accept apprentice like models of learning in science, the knowledge and authority needed in such circumstances, like the methodological and epistemological norms that Gross alludes to, are transmitted to newcomers through their involvement in disciplinary writing activities and through their interactions with experienced scientists as they engage in those activities.

Although such assumptions lead us to believe that mentoring by experienced practitioners in a scientific discipline is important for newcomers trying to learn the discipline's rhetoric, we still need microlevel analyses of how such processes work in science, and in other advanced academic contexts, and of what makes them more or less effective. Such analyses can help us to understand better how newcomers to scientific or professional domains acquire the authority they need to be conventional and to gain acceptance in their communities while they struggle to establish their own authority by making original contributions to their fields. With the goal of contributing such an

analysis, I performed an extended case study of a mentoring relationship in physics, focusing, in particular, on the mentor's and student's interactions around the task of writing a journal article. In physics, advanced graduate students are often asked by their advisers to write initial drafts of journal articles. Their engagement in such activities and their interactions with their advisers during these tasks serve as important, but as yet little understood, occasions for students' professional and rhetorical development.

My findings from this study suggest that, although scientific mentoring relationships are clearly a means for transmitting rhetorical knowledge in science, the situated learning that occurs through these relationships may be limited or constrained by several factors. Some of these factors include:

.

the location and distribution of authority in practitioner/newcomer relationships, which may inhibit both the transmission of that authority and the learning that is supposed to occur through these relationships.

These factors can also interfere with newcomers discerning the new learning strategies that are necessary in situated learning (Freedman and Adam 424). In my study I show how each of these factors inhibited the learning and confidence of a graduate student as he engaged for the first time in the important disciplinary task of writing a journal article. This study not only sheds light on how writing and learning to write in advanced academic or professional settings are socially situated activities; it also suggests practical insights regarding these activities that have applications for university programs in writing in the disciplines and for the advice we give to our colleagues who find themselves mentoring and transmitting rhetorical knowledge to their students.

METHODOLOGY

In this section I describe the setting in which I carried out my study, the activities in which the physicists were engaged during the study,

the three participants, and the ways in which I collected and analyzed my data.

Setting

This study is one part of a larger qualitative study concerned with how social life and practice in science are perpetuated and reproduced. In the tradition of scholars like Aviva Freedman and Christine Adam, and Dorothy Winsor, who use activity theory to examine newcomers' socialization through interactions with practitioners and through exposure to the writing and genres of a domain (Freedman and Adam 399; Winsor 19-20), I likewise use this theory to examine one important means through which the reproduction of scientific social life and practice occurs–the transmission of disciplinary knowledge and authority to newcomers through their engagement in the activities of the domain with their mentors. I conducted this study between January 1991 and January 1992 at a small private research university with an approximate enrollment of 6,500 students, one third of whom are graduate students. I examined the rhetorical practices of three physicists–a professor, a postdoctoral fellow, and a graduate student–as they wrote two journal articles and a conference paper reporting their interdisciplinary work on molecular simulation. In this article I focus on how the graduate student in the group learned to write and publish scientific articles by composing and revising drafts of an article with his adviser. I show how the student's acquisition of this rhetorical knowledge was both aided and constrained by the situated learning process that attended his engagement in this authentic disciplinary task and his adviser's support of that engagement.

Situation

The physicists in my study are specialists in condensed matter theory who were concerned with developing efficient methods for conducting computer simulations of biological molecules. During my study they wrote an article in which they argue that their approach to performing simulations, based on a methodology called Dynamically Optimized Monte Carlo (DOMC), is more efficient than the molecular dynamics method biologists and chemists were using. The physicists thus wrote the DOMC article for biologists and chemists with the intention of publishing it in one of the journals in these scientists' fields; however, the physicists eventually published the article in

Physical Review D, a primary forum in condensed matter physics, because of criticisms they received from a biologist and chemist who read a draft of the article prior to its submission (Bouzida, Kumar, and Swendsen, "Efficient"; see also Blakeslee, "Inventing," "Readers").

Participants

The main participants in the aspect of my study reported here include Robert Swendsen, the professor; Shankar Kumar, a postdoctoral fellow; and Djamal Bouzida, Swendsen's then graduate student.' Swendsen completed his PhD in physics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. For the next two years he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cologne in Germany. He then spent two years at a research institute in Germany, three years at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, and five years at the IBM research lab in Zurich. He accepted his current university position in 1984. His primary responsibilities in this position are research and teaching.

When I began my study of Swendsen's and Bouzida's interactions surrounding their writing the DOMC article, Swendsen already had published more than 80 articles–mostly collaborations, like this one, with one or two graduate students (usually his advisees) and post-docs. At that time, Swendsen also had experience advising three other doctoral students as well as serving on several thesis committees. To obtain students' perspectives on Swendsen's advising and teaching abilities, I spoke with several graduate students in his department. All of these students characterized Swendsen as a competent and dedicated teacher and a concerned adviser. Three of the students said that they eventually planned to ask Swendsen to advise them.

Kumar was completing a postdoctoral position in the biology department at a neighboring university. He was 31 and a predecessor of Bouzida's in the physics department: He completed his PhD in 1990. Although Swendsen was not Kumar's adviser, he had served as a member of his thesis committee, and Kumar had worked with Swendsen on the DOMC project. This work also resulted in Kumar's first publications (the DOMC article and an article addressing multiple histograms). Kumar was a nonnative speaker, but he could write and speak fluent English2: He had been educated in English-speaking schools in India, and he had lived in the United States for eight years.

Bouzida was 29 and nearing the end of six years of graduate study, the last three of which had been supervised by Swendsen. Previously, Bouzida had worked on a project with a professor in electrical engineering peering; however, he left this project after three years when his fellowship funding ran out. At the time of my study, Bouzida also was writing his thesis and looking for a postdoctoral position at another university (he ~ eventually obtained one in a biomedical engineering department at a large state-supported university in the Northeast). Bouzida was also a nonnative speaker (he had been raised and educated in Algeria, and his native language was French); however, he also spoke and wrote fluent English, which he had learned at a young age.

Data

To develop a composite portrait of the interactions that occurred between Swendsen and Bouzida as they coauthored the DOMC article, I relied on three primary, complementary sources of data– observations of group draft review meetings, analyses of drafts, and interviews (see appendix for a summary of the data I collected). Because I was interested primarily in the interactions that occurred as Bouzida wrote and Swendsen responded to his drafts of the article, I used their meetings, which occurred once or twice each week and lasted up to two hours, as my primary source of data on these interactions. During the study, I observed and tape-recorded 13 of these meetings in which Swendsen reviewed, paragraph by paragraph, Bouzida's drafts of the DOMC article. (I observed approximately 30 hours of meetings, and my notes on these meetings total 249 double-spaced pages. I used the tapes as backup to these notes.) At each of these meetings, Swendsen led the discussions, and Bouzida took notes on, and sought clarification of, Swendsen's feedback. In some meetings, Swendsen focused on particular sections in the drafts, such as the introduction or method section, whereas in others he addressed the entire article. In response to their discussions, Bouzida always produced new full-text drafts for subsequent meetings.

To capture Swendsen's responses to the text and Bouzida's reactions to his feedback, I assumed the role of observer at all of these meetings (however, the physicists occasionally requested that I participate, usually by responding to their questions about style and usage). Although the physicists at first seemed conscious of my presence, I found no evidence over the yearlong length of my study suggesting that it affected or altered either their behavior or the character of their discussions: My observations at no point during the study suggested that the physicists behaved or responded any differently than they would have had I not been observing them. Further, in all of the meetings I sat unobtrusively off to the side, so my presence did not appear to interfere with, or distract, their interactions. In addition, I found no discrepancies in Swendsen's behavior or actions when I compared my observations of him from this study with those from a previous study (Blakeslee, "Rhetorical"). In short, my presence e as the physicists engaged in these tasks did not appear to make them any more conscious of rhetorical issues than they might have been normally, except, perhaps, in their responses to particular questions I posed in my interviews with them outside of the review meetings.

In addition to observing their meetings, I also analyzed each of the drafts Bouzida produced to examine his responses to Swendsen's feedback when he revised the drafts and to trace Bouzida's progress and difficulties with the drafts. I did this by comparing current and previous drafts so that I could document all of the changes Bouzida made from one draft to the next and by cross-referencing my meeting and interview notes to determine when and why Bouzida made or failed to make certain changes.3 With these analyses, I could examine and understand better the occasions in which Bouzida accepted and acted on Swendsen's suggestions from the meetings, in which he had difficulty understanding or implementing Swendsen's feedback, and in which he disagreed with, and/or disregarded, the feedback. I analyzed 22 drafts in all–an unusually high number, according to Swendsen, who said that the number of drafts resulted primarily from their unfamiliarity with their interdisciplinary audience. Swendsen said that the process of drafting this article took much longer than usual, and he attributed that delay to the difficulties the physicists had understanding and addressing for the first time an interdisciplinary audience composed of chemists, biologists, and physicists. My observations of the process supported this claim, as did my observations of their work on a second journal article and on a conference paper (see Blakeslee, "Inventing," "Readers").

Besides attending the group meetings and analyzing all of the drafts the physicists produced, I also conducted a number of informal interviews with the participants (lasting up to one hour) in which I asked them to discuss changes they had made to the text, to comment on their exchanges in the meetings, or both. In particular, I interviewed Bouzida to understand better why he made or failed to make the various changes Swendsen requested. I also used these interviews to determine what factors his actions or nonactions resulted from, such as his agreeing with Swendsen's suggestions or his belief that a change

was unnecessary. I interviewed Swendsen to solicit his responses to Bouzida's actions. For all of these interviews, I used my prepared questions mainly as starting points, preferring to let my subjects lead the discussions. I intervened in these discussions only as necessary to promt elaboration. When the project was completed, I had conducted eight interviews with Bouzida, resulting in 38 double-spaced pages of notes; and 12interviews withSwendsen,resultingin49pages of notes.

In addition to interviewing the participants, I conducted informal interviews with two physicists outside of the group, once every two tu three weeks, to seek elaboration of issues raised by my study and tu verity my interpretations.4 One of these physicists was an experimentalist in condensed matter physics who had worked on problems similar to those with which the physicists were engaged. This physicist also was on Bouzida's thesis committee, so he was familiar with the group's work and their interactions. The other physicist I interviewed was from a different field–experimental high energy physics. I his physicist was unfamiliar with Swendsen and Bouzida's work (he conducts his own work at the Cern particle accelerator in Switzerland in collaboration with more than 200 physicists), so I interviewed him and four others who were also from different specializations, to determine if what I was seeing occurs in other areas of physics.

FINDINGS

In reporting the findings from my study of the physicists' interactions as Bouzida composed the DOMC text, I first address how newcomers' familiarity and comfort with their existing skills and strategies–their reliance on residual practices–can stand in the way of their recognizing and trying out new approaches and new ways of learning. I illustrate this constraint by describing how Bouzida initially approached and engaged in the unfamiliar task of writing a journal article, documenting both his efforts and his difficulties as he moved from the familiarity and comfort of his previous education to this new and much less defined area of professional practice.

Next I examine the support Swendsen provided to assist Bouzida, demonstrating how the indirectness and implicitness of this support, and of the situated learning process more generally, posed difficulties for Bouzida as well as constrained his ability to grasp the conceptual complexity of composing. I address these issues by scrutinizing

Swendsen's support, especially during the early part of the drafting process, and Bouzida's responses to that support, including the problems he had understanding and applying Swendsen's feedback when he revised the early drafts. I show how the indirectness of Swendsen's response, and his failure to articulate his aims for Bouzida's rhetorical learning, contributed to Bouzida's problems, as did the differing approaches and concerns of the two physicists as they composed the drafts. I also examine Bouzida's tendency to ignore Swendsen's feedback when he found it confusing.

Finally, I conclude my discussion of my findings by addressing how the location and distribution of authority in Swendsen's and Bouzida's relationship posed additional constraints to Bouzida's learning and to his acquisition of the authority and ethos he needed to contribute knowledge to his field (or, in Myers's terms, to negotiate the tension "between assertions of originality and participation in an established structure of knowledge" [80]). I examine, in particular, Swendsen's appropriation and reformulation of one of the DOMC drafts and the consequences of this appropriation for Bouzida. I also examine other ways in which authority in mentoring relationships may constrain the situated learning process.

According to situated learning theorists, apprenticing, or mentoring, relationships call students to greater participation in a domain by having them engage in the domain's activities with more experienced practitioners (Brown, Collins, and Duguid 32-34; Collins, Brown, and Newman 453, 456, 460; Rogoff 61). Such engagement purportedly teaches students to perform the domain's activities: Learning thus occurs through doing. However, situated learning theories do not address how newcomers to a setting begin to engage in disciplinary tasks with which they may have little or no previous experience–for example, the graduate student, like Bouzida, who must write a scientific journal article for the first time. In this instance, the student must move from the structured and familiar approaches to learning that characterized his previous education, with its emphasis on the mastery of existing knowledge, to taking greater responsibility for producing and disseminating new knowledge, a much different and more onerous task. Conceivably, newcomers initially may

lack the knowledge and skills necessary to undertake such tasks, or they may be forced to rely on their existing skills and knowledge, which may be insufficient or inappropriate for the tasks.

In this subsection I focus on Bouzida's efforts and difficulties composing the first draft of the DOMC article, because the problems in this draft became focal points for Swendsen's response to it as well as to several of the subsequent drafts. I show, in particular, how Bouzida, lacking support and guidance as he initially undertook this unfamiliar composing task, relied on his previous experiences and strategies.

Before working with Swendsen, Bouzida's experience engaging in disciplinary writing tasks was limited to preparing technical progress reports for his previous research project in electrical engineering. Therefore, when Swendsen asked him to compose the DOMC article, Bouzida faced, for the first time, the task of writing a scientific article. Comments from other physicists I interviewed suggest that such situations are fairly common in physics. Each of these physicists said that they have asked students to write initial drafts of journal articles so that their students could learn, firsthand, the conventions and purposes of the genre (Keister; Kraemer; Lazarus; Schumacher). Swendsen once addressed this learning saying, "It's important for the same reason it's important in English–he's going to have to do it. . . Papers are the primary vehicle through which you communicate your work" (personal interview, 3/8/91). The practices of these physicists in regard to teaching the rhetorical conventions of scientific articles also seem to be consistent with recent theories of genre. According to these theories, genres are marked less by recurring organizational patterns than by recurring purposes, such as the construction and dissemination of knowledge (Bazerman 79, 82, 99-100; Berkenkotter and Huckin 2-25; Miller 151,155,157-59,163,165; Swales 43-58). Therefore, newcomers to a domain should be able to learn genres by encountering the purposes and conventions of the genres firsthand as well as by engaging in the social context of the domain, because genres are embedded in that context. Winsor espouses a similar view, arguing that students learn genres through exposure to texts and to the genre knowledge they embody (19). She also ad

dresses the need for developing better understandings of how context affects rhetorical action (42).

One of the physicists I interviewed, Robert Kraemer, addressed this context in physics, describing how graduate students in the field often experience it. Graduate students in physics, Kraemer said, usually fit themselves into an existing research program under the guidance of their advisers. They then contribute something original to the research by moving it in new directions, and they write their theses and initial publications based on their work on these projects. The process described by Kraemer is similar to that experienced by Bouzida, whose thesis and initial publications reported his application of the Monte Carlo simulation methods to biological molecules, work that was initiated and directed by Swendsen but carried out primarily by Bouzida.

When Bouzida composed the first DOMC draft, his approach to the task was characterized by a reliance primarily on two strategies using a previous conference paper he, Swendsen, and Kumar had written as a model for the draft and grounding his writing in the technical aspects of his work. Because of his reliance on the latter strategy, in particular, Bouzida's initial draft of the article chronicled almost every aspect of the physicists' work but failed to position that work as part of an argument about the field's knowledge of simulations. The initial draft also superficially resembled a polished, final article–it had a title, an abstract, an introduction, two method sections, and a fi i ni ished - looking results section. In appearance it resembled the eventual final version of the conference paper, which was published in a proceedings (Bouzida, Kumar, and Swendsen, "Almost").

When he composed this initial draft of the article, Bouzida struggled most with determining what information to include in the text and how to arrange that information. He lacked experience, in general, with the rhetorical requirements of journal articles and with selecting information that would convince auditors of the merits of his work. In short, because of his inexperience, Bouzida struggled with simply determining what information would interest his readers, let alone being able to make an original contribution to the field. In an interview after he composed the initial draft, Bouzida said that his audience, composed mostly of biologists and chemists, knew very little about Dynamically Optimized Monte Carlo and, therefore, needed a very detailed account of the methods the physicists were using to conduct the simulations. Because of these beliefs, Bouzida presented in the initial draft a detailed narrative of the work the physicists had performed as well as technical explications of the methods they had used and of their results.

In keeping with his concerns with thoroughly explicating the physicists' methods, Bouzida included two sections on method in the initial draft. These sections, titled "Description of the Method" and "Efficiency of Simulation Methods," contained several mathematical equations showing how the DOMC method calculates the properties of biological systems. The method sections also contained detailed descriptions of the standard Monte Carlo method from which the DOMC method was derived, as well as of molecular dynamics, the simulation method traditionally used by biologists and chemists. Bonzida also described in these sections how the physicists had used the DOMC method to simulate the behaviors of two specific kinds of biological molecules–a simple, one-dimensional molecule, and more complicated, three-dimensional molecules. In his explication of this information, Bouzida first addressed the physicists' application of the method to the complicated, three-dimensional systems before addressing their application of it to the simpler, one-dimensional system, which would be understood more easily by those who were unfamiliar with the method. (Swendsen's dissatisfaction with this arrangement and Bouzida's difficulty understanding and responding to that dissatisfaction in later drafts are addressed in a subsequent section.)

I had three remaining parts of the initial draft were the introduction, dicussion, and conclusion. The introduction resembled that of the conference paper that Bouzida had used as a model. It also corresponded to how some scholars define introductions for research articles: as encapsulated problem-solution texts in which authors must continuously address and define the intellectual context of the discipline (Swales 138; Swales and Najjar 178-79; Zappen 130-31). In the DOMC text, Bouzida addressed this context in the same way the physicists had addressed it in the conference paper, by positioning their work against other simulation work in biology, chemistry, and physics, and by addressing how their own approach to conducting simulations moves beyond this previous work. The two other sections in the initial draft–the discussion and conclusion–were incomplete. Bouzida left the conclusion blank and then wrote one paragraph for the discussion, which he concluded with an ellipsis to signal a need for further development. He also said in an interview that he hoped Swendsen and Kumar would write the discussion section because, as coauthors, they should contribute something to the article: "I hope Swendsen and Kumar write the discussion. I can't write everything;.

Thier names are on it too _.... I'm going to write some of this, but there might be things they want to say." It may be no accident that Bouzida shied away from these two sections of the article, because they typically contain more elaborations of the article's arguments and contributions than the other sections of a journal article.

Situated learning theorists contend that newcomers learn how to participate in a domain through direct engagement in the domain's activities. However, these theorists do not address how newcomers' skills and knowledge from their previous experiences and from the other domains in which they also participate may impact, or even impede, their learning. In Bouzida's case, moving away from these skills and knowledge, and acquiring the new skills he now needed to contribute knowledge to his disciplinary domain, proved difficult. Thus Bouzida's approach to composing the first DOMC draft and the outcome of that approach–a very detailed, finished-looking text that failed to position the physicists' work as part of an argument against the field's knowledge–suggest an important finding of this study for our understanding of situated learning: that residual practices carried over from students' previous experience and training may become important strategies, and even obstacles, as students encounter new ways of thinking and acting in their domains. Bouzida's response to the new and unfamiliar task of composing the DOMC article, for example, reflected his greater familiarity with the technical aspects of his work than with the rhetorical skills he needed to present that work effectively to other scientists. His response also reflected his greater familiarity with documents, such as progress reports (which he had written for his previous adviser), that emphasize detailed explications of technical procedures over arguments about research methods and findings. Swendsen once said that such responses are common among graduate students because students must first master the technical aspects of their work before learning the rhetorical strategies that are needed to present that work to other scientists. Students usually wr ite most easily, he said, about those aspects of their work on which they have spent most of their time. However, some of this information may be of little or no interest to the readers of journal articles.

Bouzida's approach to composing the initial DOMC draft can also be compared with an approach to writing that Carl Bereiter and

Marlene Scardamalia call "knowledge telling" (7-10). Writers who compose according to this approach, these scholars say, use the topic (in this case the Dynamically Optimized Monte Carlo method), the schema for the discourse (here the genre of the scientific journal article), and the text produced thus far (in this case the earlier conference paper) as cues for content retrieval (7). Writers who take such an approach, they say, also view texts as repositories for factual information (9); therefore, they spend considerable time attending to the wording of the text and to its surface features–something that Bouzida did throughout the drafting process and that was evident in his superficially polished, finished-looking drafts as well as in his persistent concerns with the stylistic and mechanical aspects of the text (additional evidence of these concerns is presented later). Consonant with these difficulties, Deborah Brandt has cautioned that novices, lacking experience and support when they perform new tasks, may end up employing unsystematic processes fraught with unproductive formulas that they impose on all writing (46).

Bonzida's approach to composing the initial DOMC text, although characterized at times by such unproductive processes, does not appear to be unique. In fact, his difficulties discerning what information to put in the text and how to present that information bear similarities to the difficulties Chris Anson and Lee Forsberg identified with students who were writing for the first time in professional settings (208). These scholars found that as students make the transition from the well-defined tasks of traditional schooling to the new and less-prescribed tasks associated with membership in professional communities, the skills and strategies with which they are most familiar, and which previously led them to successful outcomes, may be challenged. Also challenged are the approaches to learning to w hich they have likely grown accustomed, an issue also addressed by Frecdman and Adam in their analyses of the discourse written by students in classrooms and in professional settings. According to Freedman and Adam in the necessity of learning new genres in professional fields, as well as new ways to learn those genres, tends to pose problems for students, who expect the modes for learning the new genres to be the same as they were in their schooling (418, 424). However, the learning patterns that are prevalent in different domains may or may not transfer (419). It is not surprising, then, that students experience difficulties with the new ways of acting that are required of them. The familiar strategies and approaches with which they have grown comfortable are challenged in these situations, and students

are often not adequately prepared to handle these challenges. In addition, the indirectness and implicitness of the situated learning process may further exacerbate their uncertainties and difficulties.

Although they are often unfamiliar with the tasks required of them, newcomers in mentoring relationships seldom are left entirely on their own to perform those tasks. Situated learning theorists use the notion of scaffolding to describe how experienced practitioners in a settling support newcomers as they begin to engage in the domain's activities. In their discussion of cognitive apprenticeships, for example, Brown, Collins, and Duguid say, "Apprenticeship and coaching in a domain begin by providing modeling in situ and scaffolding for students to get started in an authentic activity" (39). Collins, Brown, and Newman define scaffolding as "the support, in the form of reminders and help, that the apprentice requires to approximate the execution of the entire composite of skills" (456). Scaffolding, then, is support, provided as needed, to help newcomers perform unfamiliar tasks. What is required for scaffolding to be effective, they say, "is accurate diagnosis of the student's current skill level or difficulty and the availability of an intermediate step at the appropriate level of difficulty in carrying out the target activity" (482). This requirement bears similarities to Lev Vygotsky's notion of the zone of proximal development, where the distance between a child's actual developmental level and that child's level of potential development is determined through problem solving activity under the guidance of an adult or in collaboration with more capable peers (see Brown and Palincsar 409-10). Further, Vygotsky and scholars after him have stressed that as the distance between the actual and potential developmental levels decreases, scaffolding can be reduced. Thus the goal £or the learner in such situations is autonomy in performing the modeled tasks. According to Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, who use the notion of "legitimate peripheral participation" to describe such processes, newcomers begin their involvement in a domain at its periphery and then proceed inward toward more complete participation as they engage in the activities of the domain (29). Lave and Wenger also account for the gradual reduction of support as newcomers begin to exhibit autonomy in their uses of modeled skills (95,111).

Theories of scaffolding and situated cognition offer insight into the support that mentors may offer students as they engage for the first time in disciplinary tasks. When the physicists I interviewed talked about having students write initial drafts of journal articles, they pointed out that they frequently intervene in, and support, their students' efforts (Keister; Kraemer; Lazarus; Schumacher). Swendsen offered such support to Bouzida by responding both in writing and orally to each of the drafts Bouzida produced. (Freedman and Adam address the pedagogical value of a similar kind of response in workplace settings, noting that the most important occasion for learning in such settings is often the editorial, or "document cycling," process by which supervisors help staff members to restructure, to focus, and to clarify their writing [4171.) I will examine, up close, a sampling of the support Swendsen offered Bouzida during this editorial process, focusing attention, in particular, on the face-to-face exchanges between Swendsen and Bouzida in the review meetings that surrounded the initial and other early DOMC drafts.5 In these exchanges, Swendsen primarily addressed substantive concerns with the arrangement of information in the drafts and with the amount of technical detail they contained.

My observations of Bouzida's and Swendsen's interactions, along with my interviews with other physicists, suggest that the indirect and implicit manner in which advisers often support their students may pose difficulties for them, especially as they struggle to grasp the conceptual complexities entailed in composing discipline-specific genres. This finding is consistent with Freedman and Adam's findings regarding the difficulties newcomers often experience when they begin encountering such genres in the workplace. Freedman and Adam draw on Lave and Wenger's notion of legitimate peripheral participation to define a new notion–"attenuated authentic participation"–which describes the often tacit and implicit character of learning in such circumstances: "The workplace operates as a community of practice whose tasks are focused on material or discursive outcomes and in which participants are often unaware of the learning that occurs" (410). In Bouzida's case, as in the cases of the interns that Freedman and Adam studied, this implicitness posed difficulties as

he sought to understand and to apply the support Swendsen provided and as he struggled to grasp the conceptual complexity of composing.6

When Swendsen commented on Bouzida's drafts, he usually indicated his concerns only with very general and indirect comments in the text (e.g., names to indicate a need for citations, phrases or abbreviations to indicate information he wanted Bouzida to include, and brackets to signal a need for moving or elaborating information). He seldom gave Bouzida any explicit instructions for addressing these concerns in his revisions. In fact, without the additional elaboration Swendsen usually provided in the review meetings, Bouzida probably could not have interpreted or addressed Swendsen's written concerns at all. Even with the elaboration, Bouzida usually had difficulties understanding what Swendsen wanted him to do in the drafts and making the requested revisions. Swendsen's indirectness, however, was deliberate. He responded in this manner, he said, so that Bouzida could gain experience addressing and responding to the problems in the text on his own.

Although Swendsen articulated to me in interviews his intentions in responding indirectly to Bouzida, as well as his concerns with Bouzida's learning rhetorical skills, he did not articulate these concerns to Bouzida. Therefore, Bouzida was completely unaware of Swendsen's intentions to teach him rhetorical skills for publishing. As he composed and revised the DOMC drafts, he seemed to view these tasks, and his responsibilities in performing them, as natural outcomes of his collaboration with Swendsen. He believed that it was logical for him to help Swendsen because the two of them had worked on the project together. Further, their dynamic during this part of the project was similar to their previous dynamic, in which Bouzida conducted simulations and performed much of the technical work on the project while Swendsen commented on and directed his efforts. Bouzida perceived Swendsen's feedback, therefore, not as professional or rhetorical instruction but as input from someone who was more experienced and who understood the requirements of the task better than he did. These perceptions seemed to be especially important factors in the difficulties Bouzida experienced as he tried to understand and respond to this feedback.

Ironically, Swendsen's own experiences with learning such tasks as a student were not unlike Bouzida's. Like Bouzida, Swendsen was also unaware of his adviser's intentions in regard to his professional and rhetorical learning. He described to me his own experience at this stage:

My thesis adviser was a very good and clear writer. He's a good model. On the other hand, I'm not sure how much I learned or was aware of at the time. I wrote very slowly at the time, and it was–still is–very painful. I guess he did the same thing I'm doing now. He'd point out the impact things would have and what I could assume or not assume. It took quite awhile to get through–it's been 20 years.... We didn't spend an awful lot of time writing things together, which is a shame because he writes very well. (Swendsen, personal interview, 3/8/91)

Swendsen's adviser apparently used an approach similar to the one Swendsen used to transmit rhetorical skills to his students; however, Swendsen did not become aware of this approach until much later in his career. In fact, his reflections during my study may have been what prompted Swendsen to recall and associate his adviser's efforts with professional and rhetorical instruction. Even with this awarencss, however, Swendsen still did not make his approach for supporting Bouzida's learning any more explicit. Instead, his intentions remained unarticulated throughout the research and writing processes. In giving Bouzida responsibility for interpreting and acting on his concerns without articulating his intentions in doing so, Swendsen may have assumed greater perceptiveness and understanding on Bouzida's part than Bouzida yet possessed. He also may have expected too much too soon of Bouzida, who was leaving behind his familiar and comfortable practices for new and largely unfamiliar ways of acting. Even though Swendsen supported him in these actions, Bouzida had little previous experience responding to such support. Consequently, he had trouble embracing and understanding Swendsen's feedback, which he needed to do to revise the DOMC drafts successfully. His progress toward this end was impeded, then, both by the imperceptibility of the learning process and by his inexperience. Bouzida was not yet ready, and had not yet been prepared adequately, for the rhetorical demands that writing a journal article in such circumstances would exact. Some of the difficulties he had as a result of his inadequate preparation and the implicit nature of Swendsen's response are addressed in the following subsection.

When Swendsen reviewed and wrote comments on the first DOMC draft, he focused his attention primarily on the structure and detail of the information contained in the draft. For example, to indicate his

concerns with the arrangement of information on the application of their method to one- and three-dimensional biological systems, Swendsen wrote, "1D first" and "first solve the problem for an SHO." When he elaborated on these concerns in the review meeting, Swendsen explained to Bouzida that their readers would find the current arrangement confusing because it presented the more difficult information first:

That needs to be put first. We need to present an argument that somebody not really familiar with Monte Carlo can understand . . . so they can get the idea. They can then see the similarity, the resemblance [between the uses of Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics]. Next say, "We're going to first do this with a simple harmonic oscillator." Get at strategy. What are we trying to do? We're going to develop a method for a simple harmonic oscillator with an unknown coupling constant.... Do that first. (Draft 1 review meeting, 3/5/91)

In the following response, and in other responses to the initial draft, Swendsen tried to convey to Bouzida the need to construct an argument for the article that would be succinct, tightly focused, and persuasive:

We don't want to make a presentation here to somebody who knows how the method works.... We're making an argument to people who don't know how the method works and who don't necessarily want to use it or want to read this.... What we have to do is we have to explain the logic of our thinking.... We need the sections broken up so people can follow it and a very hard-hitting abstract and introduction. (Draft 1 review meeting, 3/5/91)

In those excerpts, Swendsen relates his concerns with the flow of the text specifically to his concerns with the needs and interests of their readers. In contrast to Bouzida, Swendsen recognizes the need to construct an argument for those readers rather than to present just a detailed account of the tasks the physicists had undertaken.

Thus, whereas Bouzida was concerned with explicating the physicists' work so that their auditors in biology and chemistry, who were unfamiliar with the work, would understand it better, Swendsen was more concerned with positioning that work as part of an argument about their simulation methods. Biologists and chemists, he said, would find little reason to read the article or even to understand the methods unless they were persuaded to do so. Swendsen summarized his concerns in an interview after this first review meeting:

Blakeslee/ LEARNING

What I was most concerned with today was the structure of the paper so people could read the paper and see what was valuable in it.... We need to present an argument that somebody not really familiar with Monte Carlo can understand, so they can get the idea.... I by no means gave him a neat prescription. (personal interview, 3/8/91)

Swendsen's concerns with not prescribing revisions for Bouzida are consistent with the beliefs of many situated learning theorists, who eschew prescription and more intentional pedagogies for firsthand engagement in activities, such as the writing of scientific journal articles. Jean Lave, for example, says that the everyday activity that occurs in such situations is a more powerful source of socialization than intentional pedagogy (14). In a similar vein Collins, Brown, and Newman explain that the emphasis in apprenticing relationships should be on observation, coaching, and successive approximation, not didactic teaching (454). The comments of one physicist I inter viewed even suggest that not being prescriptive can help students be more creative:

The product might be better if students are left on their own–more originality, things that are clever, [and] certain better ways of doing things.... These things happen, so you don't want to turn off the creativity the person has in them. If you give them a prescription that's what you'll get back. You don't want to stifle them. (Kraemer)

Prescriptive or cookbook approaches, he added, militate against such creativity. The flipside of these concerns, of course, is that such indirect support often seems insufficient to newcomers who have no previous experience engaging in the tasks they are asked to perform. That this was the case for Bouzida was apparent in his responses to Swendsen's feedback.

The general lack of prescription in most of Swendsen's feedback, especially in response to substantive concerns with the initial draft– although deliberate on Swendsen's part–posed problems for Bouzida when he began to revise the text. Bouzida experienced difficulties primarily in determining what information to include in the article and how to arrange and present the information. His difficulties were especially apparent in his revisions and in Swendsen's responses to

those revisions, which continued to focus on many of the same issues. For example, in the second draft, Bouzida continued to have difficulty selecting information and arranging it in what Swendsen considered to be a logical and coherent manner. Bouzida even acknowledged these difficulties in my interview with him following the initial review meeting:

Swendsen says I need lots of work in here. There are lots of things I discuss in one subsection, but I need to rearrange things. The problem is that this paper has everything, but I need to rearrange things.... In other words, I have to expand the introduction and explain all these things. There are a lot of things that I've put in other subsections that I can condense and put in the introduction.... One thing is how to get this order, get these sections. You have to have this flow. It's like you have all these pieces and you need to glue them together. You need the order. That's what I'm having trouble with at this point. (personal interview, 3/7/91)

Also, in response to Swendsen's concerns with the detail in the initial draft and with presenting information appropriate for their auditors, Bouzida said,

The other thing is results. We have a lot of results, so it's a question of which ones we want to show.... When I say what kind of results, I mean what kind of figures–like all these tables I have to get rid of. Now I have to decide what to put instead. I'll base my decision on results on which ones actually show that one method is better than another–I think. The other thing is what parameters people [biologists and chemists] are interested in. I'm a physicist, so I don't know. It depends on the journal. So this part, it might change–it depends on. . . (personal interview, 3/7/91)

Bouzida's comments about basing his decision of what results to include on which of those results demonstrate the superiority of their methods seem to suggest a concern with constructing an argument. However, his qualification, "I think," and the other concerns he raises in this excerpt also exhibit his uncertainties about how to accomplish that.

When he reviewed Bouzida's revision of the initial draft, Swendsen continued to express his concerns with the detail contained in the text and with the structure of the information being presented. He focused most of his attention, as he had previously, on the section of the article that addressed the application of their method to three-dimensional systems. Bouzida had moved this section further back in the text, but

Blakeslee /

it was still positioned prominently in the article. Bouzida had also failed to eliminate in this section the detail that Swendsen had said was unnecessary. In response to this detail, Swendsen recommended subordinating the section–especially the equations it contained–to an appendix:

Swendsen: I'm not sure where the three-dimensional method should go.

We might put it in an appendix.

Bouzida: I think it's very important.

Swendsen: It's extremely important, but it interrupts the logic of the paper.

Bonzida: Appendix?

Swendsen: You don't like that idea?

the paper, but.... That's algebra [Swendsen again articulates a concern with the amount of detail in the text]....

Bonzida: I think we should say that....

Swendsen: It's a matter of the logic of the paper and how it reads.

Bouzida: Those [other] equations–I think those should go out....

Bonzida: One can write this and put that in the appendix.

Bouzida: So, are we just going to talk about 3-d in an appendix?

In this exchange Swendsen emphasizes, as he had in response to the initial draft, the need to structure information logically and to present in the article only the information that their readers would find useful. Bouzida, on the other hand, exerting more authorial control than he had previously, argues that the information in this section is, in fact, of interest to their readers and should remain in the primary text. Bouzida's reluctance to make the revision and his concern with subordinating the information were also evident later in the meeting when he questioned what would be left of the section:

Bonzida: Okay, you said all this goes in the appendix?

Bouzida expresses his dismay here that only two short paragraphs from the original section would remain in the body of the text. As a newcomer to the discipline, Bouzida conceivably had difficulty accepting that some information, which was interesting and novel to him, might not be interesting or novel to his auditors.

Bouzida's concern with the amount of information that would be left in the text after he relegated the information to the appendix suggests another important finding of this study in regard to situated learning: Because of newcomers' unfamiliarity with the tasks they are asked to perform and the indirect and implicit nature of the feedback they receive, newcomers may fail to grasp the conceptual complexity of the very tasks on which their learning is being based. In this instance, Bouzida had difficulty grasping the conceptual complexity of the process for composing a scientific journal article. Several factors seemed to contribute to this difficulty. For example, Bouzida was much more concerned than Swendsen, through all stages of the drafting process, with issues such as the length of the text, its physical attributes (e.g., headings and subbeadings), style, and mechanical correctness. As a result of these concerns, Bouzida often was reluctant to make substantive changes in the text because he feared that they would disrupt its flow and appearance. Swendsen, on the other hand, was concerned almost exclusively with more substantive changes, especially during the early drafting stages when he was trying to strengthen the arguments in, and to improve the structure of, the text.

The differing rhetorical concerns of the two physicists were often evident in their exchanges during the review meetings. Whereas Swendsen focused attention primarily on conceptual and structural concerns in the meetings, Bouzida frequently tried to redirect his attention to local, stylistic concerns, as illustrated in this exchange:

Blakesle i, I ,

Bouzida: l don't know, l think I created too many subtitles.

Bouzida: You're saying that goes first and without the subtitle?

Bonzida: Is it going to be like a subsection?

Although Swendsen addresses Bouzida's concerns with subtitles in this interaction, he also steers the discussion back toward the content of the draft. Swendsen's general lack of attention to such local issues often frustrated Bouzida. In addition, such discrepancies in concerns also made the physicists' dynamic seem less than optimal at times.

In large part, Swendsen's and Bouzida's differing concerns in composing the DOMC article seemed to be related to their different approaches to composing. Swendsen's approach to composing was guided by concerns with setting goals and with making plans to achieve those goals. Throughout the DOMC project, Swendsen exhibited a continued sensitivity both to his audiences and to his purposes for writing. He once described his approach as follows:

When I understand something, l always write it down neatly.... So I

have a lot of these things written or at least an idea of the arguments

when I write.... I write the pieces and fit them together. I don't worry

about phrasings, details, transitions.... I don't worry about how A

flows into B–you might have B before A in the final version.... I guess

the order with which you attack things might be personal preference. I

don't know anybody who starts at the beginning, writes the abstract

and introduction. I think almost everyone has a highly recursive pro

cess. (personal interview, 3/8/91)

Swendsen's decisions about what information to present and how to present that information seemed to be based on his evolving sense of purpose and audience as the research and the composing processes unfolded–Bereiter and Scardamalia's "two-way interaction between continuously developing knowledge and a continuously developing text" (12).

In contrast to Swendsen's recursive and generative composing process, Bouzida's process seemed to be grounded in much different concerns, with an emphasis on the content generation and writing that characterize Bereiter and Scardamalia's knowledge-telling approach, as discussed earlier. Bouzida told me that

one thing that's very important when you write is outlining. You need an outline.... There's a method called divide and conquer. You w ant to make your problem a sequence of problems and work on each one separately.... That's why in papers you have sections and subsections. You just concentrate on particular ones then.... I find that much easier. I think everyone does that.... Like with this draft I just concentrated on the methods and I didn't touch the applications section. (personal interview, 3/18/91)

Whereas Swendsen tended to be sensitive to the contingencies inherent in all textual production, Bouzida seemed much more concerned throughout the process with seeking precision and predictability When these were lacking, he often responded by ignoring the problems Swendsen identified in the text.

When Bouzida did not understand Swendsen's feedback, he typically ignored or overlooked Swendsen's concerns altogether. Martin Nystrand and Deborah Brandt explain such actions on the part of novices, noting that when faced with technically demanding revisions, inexperienced writers may abandon or simplify their plans (221). Also, new and unfamiliar demands can create a cognitive load that prompts writers to conserve energy to accommodate the new demands. These demands, they say, can even result in the writer backsliding in regard to previous skills (226). Thus what sometimes seemed to Swendsen to be insufficient effort on Bouzida's part may well have been the best effort he had to give under the circumstances, particularly given the demands and requirements of the task. The following exchange illustrates this response:

Swendsen: Oh, you took that out.

Bonzida: Yeah, I thought you wanted specific numbers.

Bouzida: So I should delete this sentence? . . .

Bonzida: That's the last sentence....

ln this case, BL,uzida had inserted numbers in the text in response to Swendsen's feedback on a previous draft. However, he had also deleted statements explaining the numbers that were already in the text Instead of elaborating on this information, which Swendsen had asked him to do to clarify for their readers the importance of the numbers, Bouzida replacel i it with a brief summarizing statement.

It appeared in this situation that Bouzida failed to elaborate on the information because he was uncertain of what to say. Bouzida also exhibited, and even acknowledged, this response on other similar occasions when Swendsen asked him to add material to, or to rewrite sections of, the text. The feedback he was receiving from Swendsen appeared to be insufficient for instructing Bouzida on how to make these sorts of changes. One implication of this finding is that such support may likewise be insufficient for addressing other rhetorical requirements entailed in composing journal articles (i.e., the tension Myers describes between acknowledging the accepted knowledge of the field while at the same time challenging its assumptions and constructing compelling and innovative arguments [80]). In this case, the situated learning process was leaving it up to Bouzida to determine how to accomplish these changes.

The various exchanges that I have presented were selected because they illustrate the difficulties Bouzida often had responding to Swendsen's feedback, some of the apparent reasons for those difficulties, and the tensions that sometimes occurred between Swendsen and Bouzida as they addressed the drafts in the review meetings. As mentioned previously, Swendsen believed that Bouzida's difficulties determining what information to place in the text and structuring and presenting the information were the result of his grounding in, and greater

familiarity with, the technical aspects of his work. Swendsen also acknowledged on several occasions that such difficulties are common among graduate students. However, despite his expressed understanding of the reasons for Bouzida's difficulties, Swendsen still failed to address these difficulties more explicitly. He also became frustrated with Bouzida's apparent inability to address his concerns, especially those on the structure and focus of the information being presented in the text. Swendsen's actions as a result of this frustration demonstrate in one instance a third factor that may constrain or inhibit the situated learning process: the distribution and uses of authority in practitioner / newcomer relationships.

Asserting Authorial Control: Swendsen's

In response to Bouzida's continuing difficulties addressing his feedback, Swendsen eventually became frustrated with the lack of progress in the drafts, responding at one point in a manner much different from his previous responses. In particular, instead of reading and commenting on draft 4 of the paper, as he had previously, Swendsen undertook his own revisions without any input from Bouzida. These actions resulted in a significantly different version of the article. In explaining these actions to me, Swendsen said that he was frustrated that the problems with the drafts were not being resolved more quickly. He also acknowledged, however, his continued concern with providing sufficient opportunity for Bouzida to engage in the task, a concern consistent with situated learning:

I'm trying to get Bouzida to do as much as possible, or I probably would have done that sooner.... I did it because I felt it was necessary right there. And I think it would have taken longer if I hadn't. Writing a paper with multiple authors generally does take longer. Bouzida is still having trouble looking at the whole paper. I guess that wasn't happening. It takes time. Here the things he was worried about in this last draft were totally inappropriate. (personal interview, 5/21/91)

Swendsen further explained to me that the changes he made to this draft were aimed at establishing a stronger focus for the article as well as at redirecting the revision process to make it more productive: "The thing I was concerned with was the order of, and structure of, the argument and how it proceeded.... I was basically trying to pull out and clarify or elaborate ideas in parts" (personal interview, 5/21/91).

Bouzida's responses to Swendsen's actions were mixed. On the one hand, he expressed concern with the extent to which Swendsen had shortened the article, an outcome of Swendsen's dissatisfaction with the amount of detail it contained as well as with Swendsen's apparent disregard of mechanical problems. The latter, in particular, bothered Bouzida as throughout the process he was concerned with, and tended to get bogged down in, producing polished, finished-looking texts. Bouzida also tended to address mechanical problems in the text with much greater resolve and frequency than Swendsen because he usually found such problems easier to address–and much more rewarding psychologically in regard to his perceptions of his progress with the revisions. On the other hand, Bouzida also expressed his relief that Swendsen finally was giving him the more direct and explicit feedback he had been seeking and requesting all along in the process. Seeming satisfied as well with the outcome of Swendsen's .lCt ions, especially in regard to the article's structure, Bouzida told me, "I think we have the structure of the paper completely, and that's important" (Bouzida, personal interview, 5/3/91).

Swendsen's actions in appropriating Bouzida's draft, and Bouzida s mixed responses to those actions, raise additional questions about the advising and learning that supposedly occur in relationships like these. In this instance, the problem with the process was not one of inadequate feedback but the opposite: the potential overcorrection of the student's text by tat adviser. Given Bouzida's difficulties and lack of experience with the genre of the scientific journal article, however, any lesser action on Swendsen's part may have been unproductive. In other words, Swendsen's intervention may have helped Bouzida to reconceptualize the revision process in a more productive way. But too much support and overcorrection can be inhibiting, as Kraemer suggested when he said that prescriptive approaches to response can stifle students' creativity. Also, in this case, Swendsen's action deprived Bonzida temporarily of the very activity on which his learning was being based. Had he been given additional time to work on the early drafts, perhaps Bouzida eventually would have resolved the problems he was having with the text. Or perhaps Swendsen could have assisted Bouzida through less intrusive means–such as by working more collaboratively with Bouzida as Bouzida made revisions to the text and by articulating more explicitly the structure and focus he had in mind for the text. Bouzida's mixed responses to Swendsen's actions suggest that those actions were not without con

sequences for Bouzida's learning. They also suggest the fine line that may exist in such circumstances between guidance and appropriation. Swendsen's actions also suggest another important factor that may influence students' learning in mentoring relationships: the extent to which the mentor is willing to relinquish the task that is being undertaken. In other words, mentors must let go of tasks sufficiently to give students adequate experience performing them. In science, the extent to which a mentor is willing or able to do this may depend on the nature of the task–scientists may be reluctant to relinquish completely their authority and ownership of journal articles because of the importance of the articles for their work and for their reputations. In these situations, understandably, scientists may hesitate to give students complete or even sufficient responsibility for the task to support their learning. In fact, all of the physicists I interviewed in my research said that they intervene in their students' writing, not only to help their students but also to ensure the successful completion and quality of the outcome. For example, Kraemer attributed scientists' intervention in, and control of, such processes primarily to their concerns with what is at stake in them: "With journal articles much more is at stake [than with theses] due to the competitive nature of big science." Kraemer said that for these reasons graduate students are seldom left entirely on their own to write journal articles. Instead, advisers step in and act as editors, assuming primary responsibility for the work:

It's different writing a paper. In a paper you're dealing with a completely different philosophy. You have an experimental result you need to get out now, and you're competing with others. You can't ask the student to carry the load here. You may have them write a rough draft or an outline, but then you intervene and you work together. You assume the job of editor under those conditions because you have the knowledge. Nobody would ever want to be fair here because theres big grant money, time deadlines, and experimental restilts involvtL1 Here students learn something different–how they'll have to sit d Only n themselves someday to do this in order to beat the competition.

Kraemer's comments suggest that although scientists may still be concerned with students' learning in such situations, they are also concerned with protecting their reputations. Although these concerns need not be mutually exclusive, they may prevent a scientist from relinquishing enough responsibility and authority for a task for a student to have sufficient experience undertaking it. If expertise can best be attained through engagement in the activities of a domain, such restrictions may also constrain students' learning.

As the previous scenario suggests, the location of authority in scientific mentoring relationships and how that authority is used by those possessing it are important factors in such relationships, as are factors such as the nature of the activities being engaged in and their consequences for practitioners in the domain. The latter were clearly factors in Bouzida's and Swendsen's relationship. By retaining control of the article, and by acting as an editor and gatekeeper for it, Swendsen constrained Bouzida from acting autonomously and from exercising his authority over the revision process. As a result of Swendsen's control, Bouzida seldom challenged Swendsen's authority or the actions he took in revising the text. Instead, in most of the review meetings Swendsen led and dominated the exchanges. Thus Bouzida was placed in a subordinate position in relation to his adviser. In addition, Bouzida's difficulties with the tasks he was asked to perform seemed to further diminish his voice and authority. His experiences with the process, then, impeded more than fostered his acquisition of autonomy and authority as well as his ability to exhibit those traits in his writing and learning.

One important implication of my findings in these areas is that we can and should not assume that mentors always act in the best interests of their students or that they always know what is best for them. For example, another potential problem I identified with these processes is that mentors may lack the ability, the competence, or even the awareness necessary to, effectively convey needed skills to their students. In science, for example, practitioners seldom receive explicit instruction in writing or, ot greatest importance here, in the teaching of writing. In other words, despite the important role suchinstruction appears to play in students' learning, scientists usually are not told exylicitly how to carry out such instruction. David Lazarus, past editor-in-chief of Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, the field's iTIOSt prestigious American journals, said of physicists' training in these matters: "They don't get enough training in this. It'd be nice, but I don't know where they'd get it." Lacking explicit training in how to instruct students, then, mentors may not know what is best for them. They may proceed instead through an intuitive sense of what is appropriate rather than through a preformulated or proven sense of how best to foster students' development. Thus the assumption that .nentors have the skills they need to provide the support and feedback

that are necessary for transmitting knowledge and authority in these situations may be misguided. Mentors may themselves be ineffective writers, or they may lack confidence in their rhetorical skills and/or in their ability to transmit those skills to their students. Conceivably, they may even be unaware of the necessity of doing so, although all of the physicists with whom I spoke during my study did articulate this awareness. What becomes potentially problematic, however, is the manner in which they may go about these processes and the ways in which students respond to them.

Because of their own inexperience, students may also be unable to discern if they are being moved in the right direction or guided productively by their mentors. Lacking this experience, along with the authority and confidence that attend it, students may be forced to depend on, and to defer to, their mentors' authority rather than acquiring that authority themselves. Hence newcomers may not have much of a voice in their learning or may not be able, or even know how, to exercise enough authority to fully engage in, or to challenge, the activities being undertaken. Even though they may be perfectly competent intellectually, students may thus be placed in disadvantaged and nonauthoritative positions that constrain their acquisition of the disciplinary authority and autonomy that such relationships purportedly transmit.

Sally Jacoby and Patrick Gonzales, in their study of the practices of a scientific research group, suggest that students do not necessarily remain in such disadvantaged or subordinated positions during the learning process. These scholars argue, instead, that the expertise and authority that occur in apprenticing relationships are fluid notions and, as such, that they are worked out as the interactions unfold–the dynamic development of Self and Other throughout the interactive process (149). Their findings suggest that descriptions of expertise and authority in such relationships need to account for their constitution and reconstitution through interaction (151, 174). Expertise and

authority need to be portrayed as dynamic rather than as static phenomena. However, even when such portrayals are taken ins.. account, the fact remains that the directionality and distribution of authority most often favor the experienced practitioners or mentors. For example, in this study the directionality of authority in Swendsen's and Bouzida's relationship tended to be hierarchical most of the time. Certainly a sense of shared agency, and even ownership, may have been developed through ongoing interactions; however, that development did not seem to occur quickly enough to support Bouzida's engagement in the domain's practices or to allow him to embrace and fully understand those practices.

One final issue regarding the authority that is both transmitted and submitted to in these relationships relates to Gross's comment that "these authorities embody in their work whatever of past thought and practice is deemed worthwhile; at the same time, they are exemplars of current thought and practice" (13-14). This comment, which suggests that such authority is unproblematic and good, raises two important questions. First, is that which is deemed worthwhile in science at the same time always good? Also, given that the transmission of scientific authority reproduces and reifies scientific practice, should we not question the desirability of this reproduction, along with the purported goodness of the authority being transmitted? This latter question seems particularly important, especially given the personal, societal, and global implications of science and the influence of science policy and practice on our everyday lives.

IMPROVING SITUATED LEARNING IN

MENTORING RELATIONSHIPS: INSIGHTS FOR

MENTORS AND FOR SCHOLARS OF SCIENTIFIC

AND PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION

Situated learning theories offer useful insight into how learning can be supported and transacted through interactions between students and their mentors in advanced academic settings. However, the situated learning that occurs in scientific mentoring relationships may be limited by several factors, such as the ones explored throughout this article, which those who are interested in the acquisition of rhetorical knowledge in academic and professional domains would do well to address. In reporting the findings from my study of a relationship between . an advisor and his graduate student in physics, I have tried to articulate and address these constraints, focusing in particular on how newcomers' familiarity and comfort with existing skills and approaches may make them reluctant to try new approaches, on how the implicitness of situated learning may pose difficulties for newcomers and may constrain the degree to which mentors can convey and newcomers can grasp the conceptual complexity of composing, and on how the location and distribution of authority in mentor-student

relationships may constrain or inhibit learning and the transmission of authority. In conclusion I present several recommendations for mentors, which grew out of the findings from my study, that would minimize or eliminate the difficulties students may experience as a result of these constraints:

1. Provide greater support and direction to help students undertake and

perform new tasks.

2. Identify and work more with students' existing knowledge and strate

gies.

3. Make more explicit the aims and goals of the situated learning process.

4. Give students greater autonomy, authority, and say in carrying out

tasks.

5. Provide other, perhaps earlier, opportunities for students to gain expo

sure to, and experience with, tasks.

6. Reflect more critically on the location and distribution of authority in

mentor-student relationships.

The first of my recommendations is for mentors to provide additional support and direction to help students get started with, and undertake, new disciplinary activities. Students who are engaging for the first time in disciplinary tasks, like Bouzida, may have little or no experience performing those tasks. As a result, they may end up relying on old and familiar but unproductive strategies (Brands 46). Such strategies may impede rather than advance students' learning efforts, especially if they go unacknowledged or unrecognized by their mentors. The likelihood of the latter leads to my second recommendation, that mentors identify and work more with students' existing knowledge and strategies and that they not expect students to abandon or automatically replace those strategies. In other words, mentors need to acknowledge and work more with the residual practices that get carried over from students' previous experiences and training, particularly those carried over from their experiences with traditional schooling. Weaning students more slowly from those practices may facilitate students' transitions as they make their way from their familiar and predictable educational settings to the less familiar and often less structured settings of professional practice. Thus, rather than completely setting aside their old, comfortable strategies, students can continue to rely on those strategies while gradually replacing them with new and perhaps more productive ones given the tasks they must now perform. Students can thus see more easily how their previous ways of approaching tasks articulate with the new ways being presented to them.

My third, and perhaps most controversial, recommendation is to make more explicit for students the aims and goals of the situated learning process. Underlying this recommendation is a belief that we must articulate the aims and goals of such processes more explicitly but that we must not sacrifice the role and importance of firsthand exposure to, and experience with, disciplinary tasks. However, the question of just how explicit or tacit the various aspects of such learning should remain is a contested one. Central to this debate is the issue of the tacitness of the knowledge being transmitted. Russell Hunt, for example, argues that language competence lies in the realm of tacit knowledge, and therefore it is "the sort of knowledge we acquire best in an apprenticeship situation by 'dwelling in' the activity involved. The more conscious many kinds of knowledge become, the less effectively they can be utilized" (91). Hunt's concerns call into question the merits of making such processes more explicit: His views suggest that a more explicit pedagogy would disrupt the development that otherwise occurs naturally as interactions and activities unfold in natural settings. Another factor that complicates codifying or making such learning more explicit is the contingency of professional settings. The sociocultural settings in which such learning occurs are by no means uniform. In other words, even within the same domain different settings and/or tasks may produce very different circumstances in regard to learning, not to mention the variations that may occur because of the different individuals undertaking the tasks (cf. Brandt 117; Perkins and Salomon 19-20, 22-23; Salomon and Perkins; Spiro et al.). Codification in such situations would thus be impossible.

Brandt also problematizes making the tacit knowledge of disciplines into explicit propositions (120). She argues that such knowledge accumulates through participation and through social relationships; therefore, the emphasis should be placed on talk and action in appropriate social settings, not on propositional knowledge (109-20). Further, in describing what made the shift from craft apprenticeship in the nineteenth century regrettable, she says that it was at this point that the centrality of oral, face-to-face interaction in transmitting knowledge gave way to codifying knowledge in written texts. Knowledge thus became propositional, anonymous, and decontextualized;

and the contextual, communal, and practical features of learning fell away (116). Such features, she argues, are ones that we should instead strive to uphold: "To observe readers and writers in action is to appreciate that literate knowledge is a knowledge embodied in doing, a knowledge in which what is made is not separated from the making of it" (117).

Empirical evidence is also available to support these authors' claims for tacit approaches to learning. In her study of an undergraduate biology student, for example, Christina Haas found that her subject, Eliza, learned the most about the rhetorical uses of language while working in a laboratory setting with a graduate student mentor. Haas's finding supports my own argument that the process of acquiring knowledge in a domain is not developmental but rather grows from interaction and engagement in domain-specific activities. Thus education entails becoming an insider through experience that supports learning (77).

It also is my view here, however, that such processes need not be invisible to students. In other words, learning by doing does not necessitate that students be unaware of the learning process or that the goals and objectives that underlie their activity be invisible. Instead, I believe that we can articulate and make the goals for students' learning in these situations more explicit while at the same time keeping the role of activity primary. Students' learning can remain situated and embedded in activity while at the same time being more perceptible.

If students are made more aware of their learning in situations such as these, they can also be given greater authority and say in their efforts, thus making more achievable the goal of having students gradually attain increasing autonomy. Making this goal achievable also necessitates that mentors be willing to relinquish tasks sufficiently so that newcomers can undertake them without the disruption of competing interests. Because the nature of the tasks being undertaken may preclude or discourage mentors from letting go of them completely, as seen earlier, students may also need to be given other exposure or opportunities to engage in the tasks, perhaps even earlier in their training. Collins, Brown, and Newman, for example, have argued that the frequent absence of experience and expert modeling to help newcomers engage in unfamiliar tasks suggests that newcomers need more exposure to those tasks and that practitioners need to devise better methods for conveying salient aspects of their practice (455). My findings support these views.

Finally, to give students greater authority in carrying out tasks and to move them to greater autonomy, mentors must also be aware of, and critically reflect on, the location of their authority in these relationships and how that authority is distributed or transmitted. Because the authority in such relationships usually favors mentors, that authority must be decentered and redistributed so that students can benefit more fully from their engagement in the domain's activities. In addition, the assumed goodness of the authority being transmitted in these situations must be scrutinized by both mentors and their students. Neither can or should assume that this authority is always good, that it is always beneficial, or that the reproduction and reification of scientific practice is always desirable.

In sum, sites of situated learning, such as mentoring relationships in advanced academic settings, provide unique opportunities for examining both the merits and the constraints of such learning. As the findings from this study suggest, many questions must still be addressed to improve our understanding of such learning and of the situations that may occasion it. Addressing these questions will also lead us to additional practical insights for improving such approaches to learning. Engagement in the activities of a domain provides important experience that moves students into fuller participation in the domain. However, students must receive adequate support while at the same time being given sufficient authority in their engagement in these tasks. Anything less may hinder students' learning and impede their transition from the structure and directness of their traditional schooling to their new and usually less structured realms of professional and disciplinary practice.

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to Physical Review D.] on on

3. To facilitate the comparison of changes and the cross-referencing of relevant commentary, I used a program called Prep Editor (Chandhok et al.) (now called CommonSpace [Chandhok et al.]). This program allowed me to construct and link five columns in which I placed, side by side, changes and rhetorical moves in the text, along with related comments from the meetings and from my interviews with the participants. The five columns I created included (a) "text," in which I placed the content of each paragraph in each section of the draft; (b) "changes made (text)," in which I documented all of the changes Bouzida made in the current draft (for comparison I recorded both the revisions and the previous versions of the text); (c) "comments (changes made)," in which I placed all comments the physicists had written on the previous draft and had made in their discussions as well as notes from interviews that related to the changes made in the text (I clearly labeled the source of each comment); (d) "suggested changes (text)," in which I placed all comments that Swendsen wrote in the current version of the text during the review meetings; and (e) "comments (suggested changes)," in which I placed all comments concerning the changes that the physicists made in the meetings or during my interviews with them (I clearly labeled the source of each comment). I completed these analyses for each draft of the article and had a total of 256 pages of horizontally printed, five-column analyses.

. "Readers and Authors: Fictionalized Constructs or Dynamic Collaborations?" Technical Communication Quarterly 2 (1993): 23-35.

. "Efficient Monte Carlo Methods for the Computer Simulation of Biological Molecules." Physical Review D 45 (1992): 894-901.