Introducing Students to Disciplinary Genres: The Role of the General Composition Course

Recent discussions of disciplinary writing have addressed the possibility that disciplinary genres cannot be taught. In particular, they have considered the proposition that if we understand disciplinary writing as a product of situated cognition, then it cannot be taught effectively by English faculty as part of a composition curriculum. David Russell, drawing on Vygotsky and Dewey, has argued this point forcefully: [Because writing is] a matter of learning to participate in some historically situated human activity that requires some kind(s) of writing, it cannot be leamed apart from the problems, the habits, the activities-the subject matter---of some group that found the need to write in that way to solve a problem or carry on its activities. (194) Russell recognizes that one logical consequence of this way of under-standing writing might be “to drop the abstraction (and perhaps the