Examining Expertise in the Disciplines: Using Genre Theory to Research How Students Are Asked to Perform Expertise

My research examines how educators ask their students to demonstrate expertise, stance, and citation format in their senior capstone projects. Using genre theory as a guiding lens, I analyze the typical academic genres students are asked to imitate to perform expertise in their chosen discipline. Specifically, I use Michael Carter’s and Mary Soliday’s theoretical frameworks of “genre as social action,” which conceives genre as a fluid concept that changes along with cultural, institutional, and textual norms. My study focuses on the rhetoric used in various disciplines’ capstone syllabi. My goal is see how all disciplines use writing to prove knowledge and to think through what similarities and differences exist in how we talk about writing in the disciplines. My conclusion is that using genre theory to look at writing in multiple disciplines provides a productive framework for helping students better understand academic writing