Academic Communities/Disciplinary Conventions (Paperback)

~ (Author), Michael F. Petracca (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

ACADEMIC COMMUNITIES/DISCIPLINARY CONVENTIONS is a reader that revolutionizes writing across the curriculum texts by arranging readings around topics rather than disciplines. Each of the text's chapters is organized around a shared topic, such as Gender and Sexuality or Capital Economies, then divided into Science, Social Science, and Humanities section that address the chapter's topic from the discipline's perspective. Additionally, the text contains an array of assignments—all with clear contexts set up for the students.

With over 55 readings, the text represents a wide variety of disciplines, and offers more cutting-edge topics including ethnic studies, evolutionary psychology, and social ecology.

Among its features are:

• Readings that range from journalistic essays featured in popular periodicals to scientific reports and other pieces written for academics and specialists.
• Apparatus accompanying the readings which include critical reading, class discussion, and directed freewrite questions.
• An introduction that outlines a model writing process, and introduces students to important issues of purpose and audience.
• An MLA/APA documentation section.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PREFACE

In everyday conversation, we call this text AC/DC rather than Academic Communities/Disciplinary Conventions. We like AC/DC because it's shorter and more sprightly, easy for students, professors, and ourselves to articulate out loud. We also like it because, as an acronym, AC/DC straddles the three major academic domains—the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities—around which we've grouped the readings and writing assignments for this text. Within scientific fields such as physics and engineering, AC/DC refers to electrical current that either continually reverses direction, with the change in direction being expressed in hertz, or cycles persecond (Alternating Current), or electrical current that flows in one direction (Direct Current). In the humanities, AC/DC is known to all popular music critics as a "heavy metal" band that was formed in 1974, produced sixteen albums, and influenced a number of other popular musical performers, such as Bonnie Raitt and the band Collective Soul. Finally, AC/DC is an old slang term that certain members of our culture use (sometimes in a derogatory fashion and sometimes not, depending on who is using it and how it is being used) to describe bisexuals: individuals who feel and/or who act out a sexual or romantic attraction directed toward members of more than one sex; of course, human sexuality and its conceptions by members of particular cultures fall within the purview of the social sciences.

We undertook to write this text because the University of California at Santa Barbara's Writing Program, where we teach, organizes its curriculum around a writing-in-the-disciplines approach: the fundamental notion that composition students benefit from writing in a variety of disciplinary contexts, so that skills learned in our courses will readily translate to the rest of their university education and beyond. Following this approach, one of our entry-level composition courses exposes students to readings from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, giving them practice in writing within each of those disciplinary areas. In teaching this course, we found ourselves assembling photocopied readers based on certain broad themes—identity and consciousness, gender and sexuality, capital economies, and the environment—and this textbook evolved gradually from that ongoing course preparation process. We believe that by organizing the material in this way—that is, around broad content areas that are themselves actually an aggregation of many rich and lively subcategories—we enact the kind of interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary conversations that are at the heart of university research and writing.

We've taken great care in choosing topics and readings that will be interesting to students. Our experience with the growing readership of popular-cu4ture-based texts, for example, confirms in our minds that students will be most engaged in the writing process when they're having fun with the material at hand. For that reason, AC/DC contains topics and readings that are both academically rigorous and accessible and engaging for students. Likewise, the sequence of activities we've built into each topical chapter's units—preparation for critical reading, textual examination, close reading questions, class discussion and freewriting prompts—is designed to maintain a high degree of student interest. Thus, while AC/DC involves students in serious academic approaches, it makes sure they find connections between the activities/materials and their own lives as bright twenty-somethings. Toward this end, while obviously paying homage to traditional disciplines such as psychology, sociology, literary studies, and biochemistry, we've also included relatively new and exciting fields such as evolutionary psychology, computer science, genetics, ethnic studies, lesbian and gay studies, and cultural studies.

Our students have responded very positively to the nascent, photocopied versions of this text, and we're confident that students will respond with even greater enthusiasm to AC/DC, with its more extensive list of readings, its further refinements of apparatus . . . and with its glossier pages and sturdier bindings!

We would like to thank the following reviewers: James Allen, College of DuPage; Todd Taylor, University of North Carolina; Tim Morris, University of Texas-Arlington; Sarah McLaughlin, Marie Cahil Devry Institute of Technology-Phoenix; Helen R. Andretta, York College-The City University of New York; Dr. Carol Kivo, Pepperdine University; Allene Cooper, Arizona State University; Margaret Colarelli, Northwood University; Joe Law, Wright State University; and Mary Ann Rudy, Chadron State College.

Bonnie Beedles
Michael Petracca

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Product Details

• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall (December 31, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130401692
• ISBN-13: 978-0130401694
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #137,907 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)