In one chapter they consider the
confusions wrought by academic work and embrace the frequently
advanced notion that social interaction is crucial
for dealing with the opacities of academic writing. It draws from
critical interest in dialogic forms of learning, wherein knowledge, in
this case knowledge about one’s subject, about the specific expectations
of the writing task and group knowledge about
the different understandings and difficulties facing students as they
write, is seen as ‘emerging from interaction
and the interpenetration of different voices’. In the interests of
building supportive communities for writing, their chapter offers dialogic
lecture analysis as a technique that aims, on the one hand, to promote a
sense of solidarity and shared identity amongst students as, together,
they face the challenges of academic writing and, on the other hand, to
stimulate tutor–student dialogue that opens the ground for tutor understandings of student confusions around
writing.
In their other article, they explore how, while support
for writing instruction amongst lecturers in UK Universities is high, lecturers often prefer it to be provided by dedicated study
skills specialists operating outside subject curricula. Yet because of
the well-documented problems with the skills approach (where literacy
support frequently becomes a generic add-on), American models such as
Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing
in the Disciplines (WID) make a strong claim that writing stratagems
and thinking/theorizing within disciplines are actually intrinsically
linked. It is accordingly now a commonplace in such literacy research
that writing development needs to be contextualized
within the disciplines, and interest in adapting such approaches to the
UK context is burgeoning. They discuss how a recent project at Nottingham Trent
University set out to explore the prospects for such an adaption through
the piloting of an embedded approach in the Social
Theory subject area, but the project ran into a series of resistances
that came close to thwarting it entirely. The initial challenge lay in
convincing time-poor subject lecturers to engage with the literacy
initiative and to find space for it in an already
saturated curriculum. Yet it seemed that behind the surface perception
that the embedding of literacy development would be onerous, or would
squeeze out core subject content, there lay a deeper attitude that such
development was both ‘beneath’ subject lecturers
and unconnected to the specific concerns of their academic discipline.
This reflection piece, co-written by the academic support coordinator
championing the initiative and the Social Theory Subject Leader, seeks
to understand some of these attitudes, using
the work of Sigmund Freud and Theodor W. Adorno to probe various
psycho-social aspects of the phenomenon of resistance to the embedding
of writing development in a discipline. What emerges is a reflection on
practice which arguably reveals a certain complex
around the status of teaching as opposed to
lecturing,
alongside a process of displaced resistance to the managerialist and
vocationalizing discourse which is on the ascendency within UK
universities.
Lisa Clughen and Matt Connell (2012), ‘Using
Dialogic Lecture Analysis to Clarify Disciplinary Requirements for
Writing’ in Lisa Clughen and Christine Hardy (eds.)
Writing in the Disciplines: building supportive cultures for student writing in UK higher education, Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing.
Lisa Clughen and Matt Connell ‘Writing and resistance: Reflections on the practice of embedding writing in the curriculum', Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Vol
11.4, October 2012
