Abstract
This chapter describes an ethnographic study of four women Chemists: three PhD students and one post-doc researcher, who participated in an ongoing series of extracurricular science communication writing workshops. As Tardy (Building genre knowledge. Parlor Press, 2009) argues, theories of genre learning should capture the interaction of individuals, tasks, and communities. With Tardy’s framework in mind, it investigates how participants learn to write new science communication genres while navigating their develo** senses of themselves as chemists. Findings illuminate ways participants’ knowledge and identities as chemists interact with conventions of science communication genres, driving several resistant innovations in their writing (Tardy, Beyond convention: Genre innovation in academic writing. University of Michigan Press ELT, 2016). These innovations are important to participants’ senses of effective writing about chemistry, especially insofar as participants reflect on the ways that science communications genres are related to and diverge from other mainstay disciplinary genres.
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Notes
- 1.
Because I cite fellows’ published writing, they agreed that pseudonyms were unnecessary. They also thought the suggestion was strange, since their own writing for the program talked about academics’ work and did not use pseudonyms, pointing to another disciplinary divide in the ways we thought about writing. I received Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval to use participants’ given names.
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McCarty, R. (2021). “Where Does the Science Go?”: An Ethnographic Study of Chemistry PhD Students Learning Science Communication Genres. In: Muresan, LM., Orna-Montesinos, C. (eds) Academic Literacy Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62877-2_8
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