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Discursive practices in graduate-level content courses: The case of environmental science

Recent discourse studies of disciplinary writing have focused mostly on published writing and writing produced by undergraduates. Not much is known about the writing experiences of graduate students in content courses. Studies of disciplinary writing have also tended not to focus on intradepartmental courses that the same students have to take. A study of writing courses from a department or school may be able to reveal variation in discourse norms even within a particular disciplinary community. This article reports a study of student writing in an interdisciplinary master's program in environmental science in the US and employs text analysis and teacher response. An analysis of sentence subjects (following MacDonald 1992, 1994) of papers from three courses - Wildlife Behavior, Conservation Biology, and Resource Policy - reveals that significantly different aspects of the environment are the focus in the three sets of papers. In Wildlife Behavior the preferred discursive practice is to foreground the negotiation of knowledge construction in the field. In substantial contrast, Resource Policy writing is concerned with the phenomenal world and with particular entities in this phenomenal world. In Conservation Biology both the phenomenal world and epistemic aspects of studying the environment are foregrounded.