Composition Forum 49, Summer 2022
http://compositionforum.com/issue/49/

Multiple Forms of Representation: Using Maps to Triangulate Students’ Tacit Writing Knowledge

Íde O’Sullivan, D. Alexis Hart, Ashley J. Holmes, Anna V. Knutson, Yogesh Sinha, and Kathleen Blake Yancey

Abstract: This article draws on examples of student interviews incorporating multiple modalities to explore the writing lives of students as part of a larger project focusing on participants’ experiences of writing within and beyond the university. We explain this innovative, iterative research method combining multiple texts and maps, characterizing it as a kind of triangulation operating inside the frame of the interview. Through students’ triangulated multiple representations, the interviewer learns about, and from, students’ tacit knowledge of their experiences as it is made explicit through multiple modalities: visual as well as linguistic (oral and written). Our study suggests that engaging students in multiple modalities allows researchers to get a more comprehensive understanding of participants’ experiences. Moreover, as we demonstrate from our findings, students found that the mapping activity helped them understand their own writing and the relationships among their spheres of writing more fully. We argue for the value of engaging research participants in multiple modalities as a way of eliciting tacit knowledge through triangulating the data in the discourse-based interview.

Introduction

The discourse-based interview (DBI) is identified as an important means of helping researchers to explore the tacit knowledge of writers, stimulating interviewees to share tacit writing knowledge with the interviewer, while also helping writers to become more aware of how they themselves are developing as writers. Indeed, the “methodological power” of the DBI has been well documented in the introduction to this special issue. Since its introduction (Odell, Goswami, and Herrington), innovative methods for adapting the DBI have been studied. Working in this tradition, this article describes an expanded research approach engaging multiple forms of representation to uncover the participants’ tacit writing knowledge, notably an interview, sample texts shared by the interviewee, and pre- and post-interview maps created by each interviewee. In an effort to stimulate the participants to speak about their writing lives—in particular participants’ experiences of writing within and beyond the university—we extended the modalities employed to encompass not just the verbal and linguistic but also the visual.

Our international, multi-institutional research team at six institutions in three different countries (Ireland, Oman, and the US) designed our study to better understand students’ writing lives with a view toward considering the implications for universities. Specifically, we were interested in what upper-division undergraduate students learn about writing outside of the classroom in their writing-beyond-the-classroom experiences, as well as about the kinds of recurring relationships, or recursivity, they perceive among their non-academic and curricular writing experiences. To locate these experiences, we presented students with seven options, operationalized as spheres of writing, in which to situate their writing experiences: academic, co-curricular, internship, workplace, civic, self-motivated, and other spheres. Our research team predefined six of the spheres based on consideration of previous categorizations employed by researchers such as Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi, and Paula Rosinski, among others, but extended to include a broader range of categories that we felt would more fully capture the students’ writing lives within and beyond the university. The “other” category allowed students to identify any additional sphere(s) which may not have been captured in the six predefined categories we provided. Like contexts, spheres of writing refer to circumstances and occasions for writing, but whereas contexts are also specific to given texts, spheres are neither time-bound nor text-bound. Like rhetorical situations, spheres of writing include authors, audiences, occasions, and exigences; spheres, however, are not bound to a single instance or even recurring instances, but rather can host a diversity of rhetorical situations and actions (Yancey, Hart, Holmes, Knutson, O’Sullivan, and Sinha). Consequently, to learn more about their writing experiences within and beyond the university, we asked students, first in surveys (n=239) and then in more detailed follow-up interviews (n=24), (1) which of the seven spheres they compose in; (2) what, if any, relationships, or recursivities, they perceive between and across the spheres in which they compose; (3) how their understanding of writing developed as a result of these experiences; and (4) based on those experiences, what recommendations they might make to faculty and programs about how to best support college writers.

We identified visual methods as an important means to enhance the interview, combining both visual and linguistic modalities to enrich the DBI and explore students’ tacit writing knowledge in depth. Our study’s use of visual mapping builds on Brian McNely and Christa Teston’s observation that “visual methods can uncover tacit knowing and understanding among participants” (118). As McNely and Teston argue, “visual tactics are far more than merely illustrative; they serve as the overarching strategy as ways of detailed looking, as means for intersubjective understanding, and as moves toward more fully representing participant experience”—focusing, in our study, on participants’ experiences with writing in one or more of the seven spheres within and beyond the university (119). More specifically, the visual maps bookend the interview process, thus allowing the interviewee both to begin the interview with a map’s visual representation and to return to the map for purposes of revision at the interview’s conclusion. While both maps function as visual thinking-aloud spaces, the initial map allows the student to visually identify where they write and the relationships between and among these spheres of writing, while the final map allows the student to revisit and revise the initial representation as the interview concludes. This iterative method potentially provides multiple benefits, among them that (1) the interviewer gains insight into the ofttimes tacit writing knowledge of students about their writerly experiences, and (2) students also gain insight into themselves as writers and into the kinds of writing with which they engage and the relationships between these spheres of writing.

In this article, we focus primarily on the three-part interviews, which included, in sequence: (1) a mapping exercise; (2) a series of interview questions; and (3) a final mapping exercise wherein students re-visited their maps. Representative samples of texts shared by the interviewee in advance, along with the maps themselves, served to stimulate discussion and elicit reflection. We describe how our team expanded the DBI approach, most notably by combining visual and linguistic modalities to explore how participants share tacit writing knowledge. Following a description of the approach we adopted, we discuss the theoretical underpinning of the study and the contribution of our approach to the development of participants’ tacit writing knowledge and the understanding of their own writing. Before concluding with a consideration of the implications and important lessons learned in the enactment of this research, we present the opportunities, constraints and challenges associated with this approach.

Description of the Approach

Prior to conducting the three-part-interviews described above in spring 2020, we surveyed 239 students in fall 2019 and early spring 2020. The IRB-approved survey included:

• ten demographic questions;

• a multiple-choice question about how many courses with direct instruction in writing each respondent had completed;

• a multiple-choice question asking them to identify the spheres in which they write, from the list of seven explained above, including the option of identifying “other” spheres and naming any additional spheres not captured in the list we provided; and

• three open-ended questions asking them to describe (1) the similarities and (2) the differences between and across the writing they have done in different spheres, and (3) what they have learned about writing based on their experiences writing in these different spheres.

The survey responses were anonymous unless the respondent entered identifying information indicating their willingness to be contacted for a follow-up interview and/or to enter the survey raffle for a gift card, which was offered as an incentive to participate. We recruited survey participants through direct invitations to students at our respective institutions and in our own courses; emails to faculty teaching writing-intensive courses in the disciplines, directing senior thesis projects, and/or advising undergraduate research projects; emails to institutional and/or departmental internship coordinators; and outreach to writing center consultants, other students working in various offices on campus (e.g., admissions, civic engagement), and leaders of student organizations (e.g., student government, student newspaper, student literary magazine).

Once we had collected survey responses from each institution (n=239), we began to recruit students through email to interview; these emails included a note that interviewees would receive a (more monetarily substantial) gift card at the completion of the interview. All of the interviews (n=24) took place online after the COVID-19 pandemic closed campuses worldwide. As a research team, we attempted to recruit interviewees who, on the survey, indicated that they write in multiple spheres. We also made an effort to recruit participants from a range of demographics (races, gender identities, college majors, first-generation college students, non-native English speakers, etc.).

We conducted approximately 60-minute IRB-approved semi-structured, discourse-based interviews with 24 participants from the six participating institutions (Allegheny=5; Duquesne=4; Florida State=5; Georgia State=5; Sohar=3; Limerick=2). From the survey dataset, we made an effort to interview a representative sample of student writers in terms of institution, year of study, and the number of spheres in which they write. Representation across the years of study is balanced (Year 3, n=9; Year 4, n=13; Other, n=2). The interview respondents were predominantly female (n=21); two identified as male and one preferred not to say. Thirteen of the interview participants identified as White, six identified as Asian, one South Asian, three identified as bi-racial/multi-racial, while one participant selected two categories. The majority (n=18) indicated that they were in the 18-22 age category; six indicated that they were in the 23-30 age category. Sixteen participants lived on campus, while eight commuted as day students. Ten were first-generation college students, while 14 stated that at least one parent had completed a four-year university degree. Just three students indicated that they had attended another post-secondary institution prior to enrolling at their current school. All students, with the exception of one, were studying full-time, and all, except three students, were studying in their home country, with English identified as the predominant mother tongue (n=17).

While we received IRB approval to share the maps pseudonymously, we did not seek permission to share the writing samples as part of our research, but we did tell the students that we would refer to the samples during the interview. Prior to conducting the interviews, the research team created some sample maps and tested the mapping exercise protocol in person with student volunteers who were not formally interviewed; we shared some of these example maps during the research interviews with participants. These example maps served as models, but we did not ask the participants to explicitly imitate or follow the methods used on the examples.

At the beginning of each interview, after having discussed the three parts of the interview (an initial mapping exercise, a verbal interview with references to the writing samples, and a return to the initial map with an opportunity to revise) and receiving the interviewee’s verbal consent to participate, we prompted the student writers to begin the mapping activity to visually represent the spheres in which they write and the spheres’ relationships to each other. We also reminded the students of the spheres they had identified in their survey responses and for which they had submitted written samples. While drawing their initial maps, some students added spheres they had not previously identified in the survey and/or used different terms for the spheres than the seven we provided.

After each student completed drawing their initial map and emailing a photo of it to us, we asked them to explain how their map visually represented the relationship (of writing) between and among the spheres or how it represented comparisons of writing in one sphere to each of the other spheres. Having discussed the student’s visual representation of their writing, we turned to the samples of writing the student had submitted ahead of time and asked a series of questions about those artifacts, including whether the text represented the kind of writing they expected to do in that sphere, what they learned about writing in that sphere through the process of composing the text, and what they found satisfying and challenging about writing in that sphere. (See Appendix I to view the sample interview questions.) After asking the students to verbally reflect on each of these individual texts within the context of a specific sphere, we prompted them to talk about the relationships they saw between the writing they composed in the different spheres and how (if at all) their writing in one sphere informed their writing in one or more of the other spheres. We also specifically asked the students about how their classroom writing instruction influenced their writing in one or more of the other spheres (if at all). Finally, we asked the students if they had any recommendations about how writing is taught in college or what they might change about college writing instruction that would support students’ development as writers.

Once we completed the verbal portion of the interview, we invited the students to revisit their maps to add or change any details as a result of the interview conversation and to describe their rationale for making any changes. At this final stage of the interview, we found that participants did one of the following: (1) made written changes or additions to their drawn maps, and, in a few cases, re-drew their map entirely; (2) spoke verbally about the changes they would make to their originally-drawn map; or (3) stated verbally that they had no changes to make to their map. Participants who made written changes or re-drew their map were asked to take a picture and send via email this second version of their map to the researcher. Our research team used comparison of the pre- and post-maps, as well as verbal articulations of changes, as part of our analysis for the study, paying attention to the potential impact on writers’ tacit knowledge at the re-mapping stage after having engaged in the initial mapping and having completed the verbal interview process.

Visual and Mapping Methods: Implications for the Discourse-Based Interview

Developed by Lee Odell, Dixie Goswami, and Anne Herrington in their 1983 study of writers in non-academic settings, DBIs provide a means for exploring writers’ beliefs and perspectives about writing. Through verbal interviews grounded in texts, DBIs are intended to draw out writers’ tacit knowledge by prompting them to explore alternative writing choices, whether the writer would accept, alter, or delete those choices, and why or why not (Prior, Contextualizing Writing; Prior, Tracing Authoritative). Our study is rooted in a traditional DBI approach in that we used texts composed by student participants in their self-identified spheres of writing to prompt their observations and questions during the interview. More specifically, we used the participant-identified texts to ask students about their writing in various spheres and to provide explanations of and alternatives for ways they might categorize or represent their writing experiences, processes, and genres. Our methods thus sought to benefit from the value of DBI for eliciting participants’ tacit writing knowledge. However, our approach differed in its use of multiple modalities to tap into that knowledge, in particular by (1) engaging students in a pre-interview mapping experience in which they identified spheres, including in them processes, textual attributes, genres, and noted relationships—or recursivities—across them; and (2) engaging them in a post-interview remapping exercise in which they revisited their maps as a way of accepting or altering their original visualization of their spheres of writing. Our study’s inclusion of student participants’ initial mapping, interview discussion, and re-mapping honors and builds on the original goals of DBI, bringing together a multimodal mix of texts, interviews, and maps.

In this section, we highlight advances in the use of visual methods and mapping in DBIs to argue that mapping in combination with spoken interview responses—rather than employing only one approach or the other—offers an especially productive way of capturing students’ tacit writing knowledge.

The use of visual methods in qualitative research has grown significantly over the last few decades. Visual research methods can include production of visual data such as photographs, films, collages, drawings, maps, or diagrams for elicitation purposes (Johnson and Coleman). In our review of visual methods focused specifically on mapping, we found a number of studies across the disciplines that use concept mapping for data collection, data analysis, and/or data presentation (Conceição et al.). While our study did not specifically employ concept mapping, we first highlight some of the similarities we found in the utility of mapping in our discourse-based interviews and then advocate for the method of visual mapping in DBIs.

Our study’s use of mapping invited participants to generate their own maps before the discourse-based interview as a way of eliciting tacit knowledge. Bearing some similarity to the use of concept mapping as reported in a criminal justice study, our study’s visual maps served as “participant-generated constructions of experience,” in this case student experiences with writing in different spheres (Conceição et al. 5). These student-generated maps “served as a useful means of recall for individual participants to capture experiential context cues of past experiences and prompted recall in ways that traditional data collection might not” (Conceição et al. 5). Indeed, students’ use of mapping and re-mapping in our discourse-based interviews suggested that the interviews were useful in eliciting students’ tacit knowledge: students called on their drawings of spheres as visual records, enabling them to recall details about their genres of writing in specific spheres as well as the relationships between and among their spheres of writing.

Visual research methods (VRM) such as mapping “can be useful for gaining unique insight” because of the “interactional dynamic that is afforded” (Johnson and Coleman 260). Mapping invites participants to “represent information that is concrete or abstract,” to use “spatial arrangement and non-linear order,” and, in the case of our study, to use color, size, and arrows to indicate meaning and relationships (Johnson and Coleman 260). As Gillian Rose argues, VRM can be “especially effective in generating evidence that other methods ... cannot.” Because “almost all VRM involve talk between the researcher and the researched,” as in our discourse-based interviews with student-generated maps of their spheres of writing, “things are discussed in the talk about visual materials that don’t get discussed in talk-only interviews” (Rose 28). Indeed, Nicola Reimann and Ian Sadler have cautioned against “the sole use of interviews;” while Pamela Woolner and colleagues have advocated for the use of VRMs “to help correct the traditional over reliance on language” in research (Johnson and Coleman 260). The “exploratory, open-ended nature” of VRMs can “encourage a participant to reflect more deeply on the studied topic” (Striepe 520), which makes them especially useful for eliciting tacit knowledge in a discourse-based interview. We see our study’s use of VRM, in addition to the linguistic mode, as a productive modification to the traditional DBI approach.

The use of visualization as a modification to DBI methods has been previously used in writing studies by Paul Prior and Jody Shipka. During a discourse-based interview, Prior and Shipka asked students to draw two different pictures to represent their writing process, and they asked a series of follow-up interview questions that prompted elaboration, including “detailed descriptions of the scenes and resources of their writing” (185). Similar to our use of mapping in DBIs, though, Prior and Shipka highlight how the drawings were in part “a means to another end.... The combination of texts, talk, and drawings, of participants’ accounts and our perceptions, support[ed] a triangulated analysis of these writing processes” (185). We also found the maps and re-drawn maps, in combination with the example texts students shared from each of their spheres of writing, to serve as additional points of analysis. Yet, it was visual mapping combined with the verbal exchanges during the interview—students’ descriptions of their writing, spheres, and ways they represented them on the maps, as well as the interviewer’s talk about their perception of these choices—that tapped students’ tacit knowledge about how they understand the genres, purposes, and audiences for their writing.

Michelle Striepe also argues for the value of mapping combined with other approaches in semi-structured interviews: “the employment of visual methodology in conjunction with other methods, such as interviewing, can expand the way traditional methods are normally employed” (521). Referencing a 2007 study by Ann Elizabeth Pegg that utilized concept mapping, Striepe contends that the combination of mapping “as part of the interview process ... allowed the participants to expand or clarify their thoughts and allowed the participants time to add to or revise their maps” (523). Our research team had similar experiences with mapping and re-mapping during the discourse-based interview, as student participants referenced what they drew in the maps to expand and clarify their thoughts about their spheres of writing; and, at the end of the interview, many students cited the interview discussion as a source for revising their maps.

Within writing studies, our research design also aligns closely with the visual mapping methods Erin Workman discusses in her chapter Visualizing Writing Development. Importantly, Workman distinguishes her use of visual mapping methods from concept mapping or mind mapping, stating that her approach “foregrounds its use for seeing a writer’s conception of writing, a property allowing for quick identification of change from one map to the next” (214). Workman articulates the ways visual mapping differs from concept mapping popularized commonly in educational research. More open-ended, it does not have as many restrictions: “visual mapping offers participants a wider range of semiotic resources—including word, image, color, layout, proximity, and symbols—for depicting and connecting concepts in personally meaningful ways” (215). The findings from our use of visual mapping in combination with discourse-based interviews supports Workman’s claims about the value and great potential of such an approach: “visual maps focus a writer’s attention on their conceptual knowledge, and, when used in document-based interviews, can help to reveal traces of a complex network of texts, people, locations, and concepts spanning time and space” (222). The combination of multiple modes of communication through mapping, interviewing, and remapping, in a modification of the DBI, worked especially well to elicit tacit knowledge about the complex networks engaging writers and their writing, which we have here conceptualized and described as spheres. To illustrate our approach more specifically, we highlight in the analysis that follows several examples of maps and student observations from our discourse-based interviews.

Contribution to the Development of Tacit Writing Knowledge

Our research plan anticipated that students would take up our invitation in both prompted and surprising ways; in this expectation, we were not disappointed. Through the mapping exercises bookending the interview, students first described their understanding of writing visually, drawing and re-sizing circles representing their writing spheres and creating arrows to show relationships among the circled spheres. Students used written language in this exercise as a secondary modality, to delineate writing activities, genres, and values within spheres and make annotations across them. Maps completed, students then explained in the interview through oral language the choices they made in the mapping exercise, sometimes confirming descriptions as the interview continued, other times describing their writing somewhat at odds with the representation of the map. The second mapping activity, by design, occurred at the conclusion of the interview and provided an opportunity for students to revise their maps. It also provided space for students to revisit their understanding of writing and of what writing means for them as writers.

Methodologically, two activities in this process were especially important in helping students articulate tacit writing knowledge.

First, to assist students in the process of making a map of their writing spheres, as explained above, we provided sample maps as examples (Figure 1), then gave students, electronically, a largely blank document with spheres identified at the bottom (Figure 2). As the examples below illustrate, students used both the sample map(s) and the template as a guide to creating their own maps, which take a variety of forms, but which are all visual descriptions of writing in the sense that they represent where and how students write and the relationships they perceive across spheres.

It’s worth noting that in creating their maps, some students chose to ignore the researcher-created spheres appearing on the template we provided, preferring instead to describe their writing through their own terminology and categories. For example, Taylor’s first map included a “writing for” designation, with four different objects: writing for social media; writing for fun; writing for school; and writing for a purpose/cause (Figure 3). Some of these, of course, focus on purpose (e.g., fun), while others are located in medium (e.g., social media) or context (e.g., school). Moreover, given that Taylor’s second map retained three of these designations, dropping the very broad “writing for a purpose/cause” and adding no new spheres, Taylor seems committed to a self-identified set of lenses articulating a personal understanding of writing. Taylor’s visual map thus represented spheres, or larger contexts for writing (as indicated above), although Taylor’s spheres went by another set of names.

Second, the combination of mapping with talking that occurred throughout the interview—when students talked about the initial maps, about the process of mapping, about writing, and about the revised maps—seemed especially useful in helping students articulate their tacit knowledge of writing. The original map, in this interview context, served as a kind of reference point for students, a representation that was meaningful and unique, but also contingent, with the interview providing something of a test of its accuracy of representation. The re-mapping exercise, even when students only suggested what they might change in the map (rather than engaging in the re-mapping itself), evoked a reflective culminating descriptive verbal summary of their writing, based in large part on what their own revised map was now helping them understand about their own writing. In other words, the students concluded the interview with a reflective dialogue with and about the maps; those maps representing their writing thus served as a mechanism for tapping and elaborating their tacit knowledge.

Mapping Writing: Visual and Spatial Strategies

Students employed a mix of visual and spatial strategies to provide information about their spheres of writing and the relationships among those spheres, among them Venn diagrams; circles with sizes showing importance or frequency of activity; color of spheres as a discriminating element; arrows (single and double-headed); various kinds of structural relationships, including hierarchical and networked; and annotations and other explanatory notes. More specifically, the 24 students who were interviewed employed the following visual and spatial strategies in creating and/or revising their maps, with the first number denoting institution, the second the student:

Table 1. Visual and spatial strategies used by students in creating and/or revising their map.

Visual and spatial strategies	Student
Used different colors to identify spheres	1.1, 1.4, 3.1, 4.4, 6.2
Put spheres together, overlapping them or using a Venn diagram	1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 2.2, 3.3, 4.1
Added spheres	2.4, 3.1, 3.2
Changed size of spheres	2.4
Assigned numbers to spheres	6.2
Added items within a sphere	2.2., 2.4, 3.4, 4.1, 4.2, 4.5, 6.1, 6.2
Used arrows to show relationships	1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 3.2, 3.5, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 6.1, 6.2
Re-designed former arrows and/or added new ones	2.4, 4.1, 6.1, 6.2
Annotated arrows and spheres	1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 2.2., 2.3, 2.4, 3.1, 5.2, 6.1
Used asterisks and other symbols	1.1, 1.3, 2.4
Indicated importance of specific spheres	1.1, 1.3, 1.4, 2.4, 4.4, 6.2
Created structural organizations for spheres like hierarchies and networks	1.1, 1.3, 2.4, 4.3, 4.5, 6.2

Visual and Spatial Strategies in Initial and Revised Maps

Four students show some of the range of students’ initial map-making of writing. Maggie uses both a Venn diagram and different colors to represent her writing spheres (Figure 4). Academic writing, in yellow, is the centerpiece, with writing for work in blue on one side and self-motivated writing in pink on the other. She has also mapped relationships, pointing out that two spheres, the academic and work, are “close knit,” while stress from those spheres leads to self-motivated writing. According to Maggie, the practice of map-making itself was also instructive. As she explains, Maggie understands her writing better as a consequence of mapping: “It was interesting to see just how like close-knit everything else was.”

Rebecca, a second student, also used different colors in mapping, in her case to create a spectrum of writing seriousness as conceptualized spherically (Figure 5). Rebecca draws two spheres in red: first, the Workplace, where she “was a social media coordinator,” and second, the Academic, because “they were more like, serious, necessary things.” The blue spheres, Social—which was her designation, not one of the suggested spheres—and Self-motivated are in blue, a color Rebecca chose “because that seems like a happier, less serious color.” Interestingly, for both Maggie and Rebecca, mapping writing includes mapping the role of affect in writing: for Maggie, the role of stress relief; for Rebecca, happiness.

The third student, Iris, mapping the four spheres of Academic, Internship, Political/Community, and Self-motivated, relies on three strategies in visually articulating how she understands her writing: spherical size; arrows; and annotations (Figure 6). Because she has done most of her writing in the academic sphere, it is the largest circle: “So I started out with my course and classroom, which is my biggest circle because that’s probably the most writing that I’ve done.” Equally important, however, is that the circle sizes show how she “prioritize[s] my writing. It's like, I’ve focus[ed] on my Academic, then my Work, then my Social, then my Self-motivated.” This map, in other words, reads something like a flow chart establishing writing priorities: classroom writing is attended to before other writing activity can be undertaken. Arrows, the second strategy, demonstrate commonalities and relationships and are often accompanied by annotations. For example, as an annotation explains, email is a genre crossing spheres. Another annotation speaks to the influence of one sphere, “Course/Classroom,” on another, as Iris explained in the interview:

I wrote this little kind of side note between Self-Motivated and Course/Classroom that really my—the past four years of taking classes ... have changed both the content and the way I write Self-Motivated stuff. Really the concepts that I’ve learned in the classroom have just changed the way that I see the world and have given me kind of fodder to make creative pieces.

Students drew on the same strategies in the remapping exercise concluding the interview, sometimes without commenting on the changes, though the changes were typically both obvious and subtle. A fourth student, Mel, articulated a much more definitive and coherent account of her writing in her revised map through an expanded use of visual and spatial strategies, including color; fuller accounts of spherical writing inside the circles; arrows denoting relationships across them; and annotations accompanying the arrows. In Mel’s initial map (Figure 7a), for example, emails were included in a faintly drawn sphere. In the second map (Figure 7b), that sphere, the civic writing sphere, is now located in something of a spherical ecology: an arrow points from this sphere toward the academic sphere, as an annotation explains that “you can use what you learn in academia to build a strong letter/email.” Through such visual elaborations and connections, Mel’s writing life comes into focus.

The Effect of Combining Mapping, Talking and Re-Mapping

Many of our 24 interviewees also spoke about how the interview itself helped them re-imagine the map representing their writing. Put another way, the sequenced combination of initial mapping, interviewing, and then re-mapping prompted students to explore and articulate their understanding of their own writing and of their writing lives. One student, for instance, was explicit about how his understanding had changed as a consequence of the interview and wanted his map to reflect this more accurate conceptualization. In his first map (Figure 8a), Brian visualizes and enumerates four spheres, while also using circle-like figures attached to spherical circles as sites for annotations; the spherical sites themselves are connected via double lines that do not provide information about directionality from one sphere to another. And the spherical circles themselves are multi-purpose: while most students included annotations outside circles, Brian incorporates annotation-like information inside spheres. We thus learn inside the internship circle that it is “similar to self-motivated” while also drawing from the classroom. At the conclusion of the interview, Brian revises this map through employing several strategies: re-numbering the spheres; providing arrowheads indicating directionality to the doubled lines; and adding an annotation accompanying a number (Figure 8b). In talking about a proposed revision to the map, Brian focuses on which sphere should be first, noting that “having spoken about it for say the last hour,” his tacit knowledge is more explicit:

The one thing I would probably do, I don’t think I can do it now here because I’ve done it all in pen but I would probably make the self-motivated sphere the number one. Like I would have had classroom as number one before. I would have had that, say, as the most important in my opinion, the one that everything comes from, but I actually think having spoken about it for say the last hour I would think self-motivated is probably the most important one.

Informed that he can make changes by crossing out and/or replacing items on the first map, Brian does exactly that: “Yeah, I can just change the number that’s over the two of them and indicate that self-motivated is... Like I really do think having looked at it all I really do think that self-motivated is where it all ultimately does come from.”

Another student also drawing on her interview as the source for her re-mapping began her interview by referring to her first map, frequently indexing her understanding with the word notice to indicate what that initial map was showing her about her own writing. In explaining her initial map as the interview began (Figure 9a), for example, Shelby observed that “For classroom based and self motivated, I now notice the biggest relationship between them was that I do them the most frequently.” Similarly, in thinking about the importance of voice to her, Shelby spoke to the influence of the interview itself: “But I... actually doing this interview with you has made me realize I'm always thinking in those terms [her own voice].” Then, in the concluding re-mapping activity (Figure 9b), Shelby chiefly drew on three visual and spatial strategies to show her later understanding: a new circle signifying a new sphere; more connections across spheres; and more annotations. In adding the civic sphere, Shelby intentionally made it smaller while immediately seeing its likeness with self-motivated writing:

“So I added the civic circle. It's the smallest one on there. I noticed that it was self motivated kind of like my self motivated writing is.” Shelby also nearly doubled the number of annotated connections in her second map: 5 appear in her initial map and 9 in her second map. Moreover, in explaining these changes and the logic for them, Shelby cites the role of the interview:

Yeah, and then work based, co-curricular and civic all required some sort of... some sense of professionalism like being addressed to a government official obviously. Then I also made another note between classroom based writing and self motivated, I said that there is an influence for my writing to be stronger when you connect the two, because we had talked about that. So those are the changes I made.

Although using different strategies than Maggie and Mel, Shelby also creates a fuller and more elaborated account of her writing life through the remapping activity, and she, like Brian, cites the interview as the source of this more accurate representation, thus helping to make her tacit writing knowledge more explicit.

Rachel also revises her map, in her case taking care to show separations as well as connections. She begins her first map with separations (Figure 10a): only two of the five spheres are linked. In the second map, however, she uses a set of visual strategies to emphasize relationships of both similarity and difference (Figure 10b). One arrow is accompanied by the word influence denoting the relationship between two spheres; an asterisk marks the word audience, which functions as something of a bridge between two spheres; a larger circle encompasses the two spherical internship and workplace circles; and an X shows the distinction between the academic and the “personal/self-motivated.” As revised (Figure 10b), this map appears to show writing as a set of islands with multiple connections and influences circulating around them.

In explaining these changes, Rachel is explicit about her intention:

Okay. I guess I’ve just drawn sort of better lines between them a little bit. Like, I’ve put an X between the self-motivated and the coursework, because for me they’re very separate. And then emphasised that the audience, I think, matters with the co-curricular and the sort of community, political spheres. And that the coursework has sort of influenced a little bit the impersonal voice that I use for the internship and things like that. [Laughter]

In closing the interview, Rachel also comments on the role of the interview in helping her articulate the different spheres in which she writes. Ordinarily, she says, she writes frequently and fluently, but not reflectively: the interview changed that. “[T]his is not something I think about when I write. And I do a lot of writing. I sort of just automatically go into these different head spaces to do each area. I’ve never really thought about the differences between them, when they are very clear.”

In sum, revising their maps as they reflect on the interview itself helped students articulate some understandings they had not expressed before and other understandings that were developed or revised during the interviews along with the maps. More generally, in this map-interview-remap process students not only represented their writing knowledge, but also, through the triangulation of methods:

• composing a map serving as a point of reference;

• explaining it to others somewhat as a mechanism for explaining it for themselves;

• thinking aloud with interviewers about writing spheres as each had experienced them; and then

• re-mapping a more accurate representation, as it was emerging from the interview.

As a result, students came to better understand and articulate some aspects, at least, of their writing knowledge previously invisible to them.

Constraints/Challenges/Opportunities Associated with the Approach

There were a number of challenges associated with this approach, particularly when it came to differences in understanding and language, as well as challenges presented by the unexpected shift to remote data collection in the spring of 2020. However, these challenges also presented affordances: different uses of writing-related language often provided revealing insights into students’ understanding of writing and college, and the remote data collection enabled participants to have more privacy when drafting their maps due to Zoom’s ability to mute microphones and cameras.

The gap between language and understandings used by the researcher and those of the research participants is common among qualitative studies. This challenge surfaced in our terminology for writing pedagogy, as well as the conceptualization of “spheres” that guided our research. As writing studies researchers, we came into this research sharing an understanding of concepts such as “direct instruction in writing” and “writing processes” that may not have been understood in the same way by the student writers who responded to our survey or participated in our interviews. In addition, depending on institutional context, terms such as “composition courses” and “writing-intensive courses” were more or less familiar to the student writers. For example, a senior at one institution reported in her survey response that she had taken zero courses with direct instruction in writing, despite having successfully completed the scaffolded writing-intensive seminar sequence at her college.

Similarly, some of the students we interviewed did not find our terminology of “spheres” suitable to describe their writing practices. One result of limiting students to our seven predefined categories (even though one was “other” as a catchall) may have been that students we interviewed did not submit samples from some of the spheres they identified on their maps, potentially resulting in less rich verbal reflection on those writing practices during the interview.

Other students did not understand the categories provided by the spheres in the same way that we did. For example, when asked to describe her writing in the civic sphere, Maria included a circle on her map labeled “Civic (?)” with a list of professional and academic genres: résumé, cover letter, statement of purpose, and papers. This sphere was separate from “work,” where she described in detail the genres and communication embedded in her campus job as a resident advisor. When describing this category, she explained that she grouped these genres together because of their stylistic similarities: “And that was very much just very professional, straightforward, not a lot of fluff writing.” It is also possible that Maria’s grouping of academic and professional genres indicated an understanding that her college degree would likely prepare her for writing in a professional setting beyond her campus job; however, the differences in terminology between researchers and participants presented some challenges when it came to analysis.

Our mapping protocols and sample maps may have led students to focus more on listing the genres of writing they produce in each sphere, rather than the practices and processes they engage in when producing texts in that sphere. However, the post-mapping interview did provide students the opportunity to verbally describe those processes and practices, which often led to actual or verbalized revisions to the map at the end of the interview.

Because our interviews took place in the late spring of 2020, we found ourselves in the position of recruiting students to complete the interviews via video conference in the midst of a global pandemic. Particularly on the residential campuses, some students who may have been willing to drop by in person to be interviewed face-to-face may have been reluctant to spend an hour on yet another video call. For institutions with more commuting or day students, however, the synchronous remote interview option was more appealing than an in-person interview. Having the option to disconnect or mute the camera and video while composing the initial map may have given the students more freedom to be creative because they did not have to produce it under the gaze of the interviewer.

The pandemic also presented challenges in terms of the material aspects of completing and submitting the maps. For example, in our original research plan, we had intended to provide standardized materials to all participants in all sites: that way, regardless of location, the participants would be working with the same material resources. However, the shift to remote data collection meant that participants were limited to whatever writing utensils they already had at home. Similarly, the extra labor involved in photographing and emailing the maps at the beginning and end of the interview may have impeded some more extensive revisions.

Conclusion

Our study highlights the capacities of participant-generated visual maps combined with spoken responses in DBIs. When embarking on this study, we knew that we needed a data collection approach sensitive to the complexity of individual writers’ experiences; since our project analyzed data collected across six distinct individual contexts and required participants to reflect on writing, potentially, in seven disparate spheres, attending to nuance was key. As has been illustrated above, our study employed multimodal methods, specifically in terms of its focus on visual mapping method-a three-stage initial mapping, interviewing, and then re-mapping process-to support respondents in articulating their tacit writing knowledge. Our findings suggest how the use of the multiple modalities not only helps the researcher to understand the tacit knowledge of participants, but also how the process helps participants themselves better understand their writing development. In sum, the visual and spatial strategies embedded in this method prompted participants to gradually articulate a more refined understanding of their writerly selves.

The three-part, multimodal approach of our study’s design offers a unique contribution to the existing repertoire of methods in writing studies in general and DBIs in particular. This study provides further support for recent research that advocates for the inclusion of visual methods in qualitative, interview-based research (Olinger; Sánchez-Martín and Seloni; Workman) by suggesting the power of multiple modalities as a way of enhancing interview methodology and increasing the capacity of using DBIs to elicit tacit knowledge. Our sequenced combination of initial map-interview-remap not only helped the interviewer triangulate the information, but it also enabled the interviewee to triangulate their own perceptions, often resulting in a revised map. As an expanded approach to DBIs, these modifications to include visual mapping and re-mapping as methods have the potential to be replicated in different contexts in future writing studies research. Its sensitivity to complexity coupled with its emphasis on triangulating participants’ data has the potential to enrich our knowledge of how, where, and why college students write—on campus and beyond.

Acknowledgements: The authors wish to acknowledge the generous scholarships awarded by Elon University, which allowed them to attend the Center for Engaged Learning 2019-2022 research seminar on Writing Beyond the University: Fostering Writers’ Lifelong Learning and Agency. In particular, we wish to acknowledge the seminar leaders, Jessie Moore, Julia Bleakney and Paula Rosinski, who brought the group together and made this international, multi-institutional research possible. We acknowledge the students who responded to the surveys and, in particular, those students who took time to participate in the interviews and share their writing experiences within and beyond the university. Finally, we wish to acknowledge Storm Murray who helped with the transcriptions.

Appendix: Semi-structured interview questions

SECTION TWO (~40 minutes)

Now that we have discussed the relationships among the writing in the spheres, we’d like to talk about writing you’ve identified in each sphere in more detail.

Before this interview, you sent me several representative texts from the spheres in which you write. Thank you. For each of the individual sample texts you have provided, I have 7 questions.

Let’s start by identifying each text and the sphere to which it belongs.

1. Tell me about Text [X]...

(Note: The following prompting questions can be used if the interviewee is struggling to describe the text: Motivation? Purpose? Audience(s)? Process? Writing environment/materials? Genre? Rhetorical Situation?)

Based on your experience of writing this text in this sphere...

2. What has this text taught you about writing in this sphere?

3. Was this the kind of writing you expected to do in this sphere?

4. Was this text/experience typical of your writing in this sphere?

5. How was/is writing in this sphere satisfying?

6. How was/is writing in this sphere challenging?

7. Is there anything else you want to tell me about writing in this sphere that this text doesn’t represent?

[Repeat above set of questions as needed for each representative text.]

Now I’m going to ask you 4 questions about the relationships between and among the texts...

8. Given what you’ve said above about each of these individual texts and the spheres in which you composed them, what relationships between and across the spheres do you see? Do you see any of the relationships as recursive—that is, as informing each other? If so, how? If not, why or how not?

9. What similarities do you see between and across the writing in the different spheres? What differences do you see?

10. How, if at all, has your classroom learning informed or influenced your writing in any one, any combination, or all of the other spheres?

11. Given your observations about relationships between writing in the university/college sphere and writing outside that sphere, what recommendations can you make about how writing is taught in college? In other words, what might you change in order to support students’ development as writers in college?

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