This document outlines a research study that aims to investigate the extent to which writing and textual practices in higher education enable or inhibit learning among non-traditional students. The researcher plans to interview postgraduate and post-registration nursing students about their experiences with academic writing and how institutional contexts have influenced these experiences. Drawing on Marx's concept of alienation, the study will examine how writing practices in higher education could potentially alienate students from the writing process, writing products, their own capacities or fellow students and teachers. A pilot study involving observations and interviews of writing consultations will help identify students' experiences and how these are institutionally embedded.

1. Widening Access and Academic Writing: Learning or Alienation?
Alison McEntee
School of Education
University of the West of Scotland
alison.mcentee@uws.ac.uk
Supervisory Team:
Professor Rowena Murray (Director of Studies)
Dr Jeannie Daniels

2. Background and Context
Literacies, Identities and Transitions: An Investigation of Non-traditional Students’ Experience of Higher Education.
•Move towards a mass system of Higher Education; increase in cultural, linguistic and social diversity (Lillis, 2006, p.30).
•Writing and textual practices highlighted as key graduate skills, in addition to being essential for academic success(Catt & Gregory, 2006, p.17; Lea & Street, 1998).
•Institutional norms locate the ‘problems’ of academic writing with students (Ivanic & Lea, 2006, p.12):
–Writing instruction tends to be separated from subject teaching
–Writing is de-contextualised and externalised/objectified
–The potential of writing to enable learning is largely ignored (Catt & Gregory, 2006).

3. Research Aims
To what extent do writing and textual practices in higher education enable or inhibit learning amongst non-traditional students?
•Gather accounts of PG/Post-Reg nursing students:
–relationship to writing in Higher Education
–experiences of writing in Higher Education.
•Explore the link between students’ current and imagined future educational, personal, social and professional experiences and their relationship to and experience of writing.
•To examine links between HE policy and students’ experience of learning through writing and textual practice.

5. Marx’s Concept of Alienation
•Marx’s ([1844]1978) concept of alienation will be applied as a way of thinking about students’ experiences of writing and textual practice.
•In Marx: a historically specific concept, alienation can only be overcome by changing and replacing the capitalist economic system. In a capitalist system, the worker experiences alienation from:
–the product of labour, as it exists as an independent, hostile and alien object that has power over the worker
–working activity (the process of labour); the working activity of the worker becomes directed against him/herself. It does not belong to him/her and is not part of his/her life
–species being; one’s essential capacities as a human being
–other humans in relation to their labour and the object of their labour.

6. Marx’s Concept of Alienation: A way of thinking about students’ experience of writing
•Writing practices focus on the ‘exchange value’ of the ‘product’ (the essay grade), rather than the ‘use value’ (learning and personal development).
•Institutional and disciplinary ‘ownership’ of the rules, conventions and practices of writing, in tandem with the fetishisation of the products of writing as assessment objects (Lea, 2004) can inhibit learning, as students become alienated from:
–the product of the writing process
–the process of writing and potential new understandings of subject knowledge that could be gained through the process of writing
–potential capacity for personal and professional development and existing understandings gained through experience/other ways of knowing
–fellow learners and teaching staff (potential communities of learning).

8. Pilot Study
•Stage 1: Observation of student consultation with researcher in role as writing tutor:
–‘naturally occurring data’(Silverman, 2013).
–to identify the nature of the student’s experiences of engagement with academic writing.
•Stage 2: Follow up semi-structured interview to explore how the student’s experiences of academic writing are institutionally embedded.
–2 key questions:
•What have you experienced in terms of academic writing?
•What contexts/situations have typically affected or influenced your experiences of academic writing? (adapted from Creswell, 2006, p.61).
•Interview stories will be analysed to identify significant statements related to the student’s past, current and imagined future educational, professional, personal and social experiences.

9. Bibliography
Catt, R. & Gregory, G (2006) ‘The Point of Writing: Is Student Writing in Higher Education Developed or Merely Assessed?’ in Ganobcsik-Williams, L. (ed.) Teaching Academic Writing in UK Higher Education: Theories, Practices and Models. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan
Clark , R. and Ivanic, R. (1997) The Politics of Writing. Oxon: Routledge
Creswell, J.W. (2006) Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing among Five Approaches. (2nd Ed). London: Sage
Lea, Mary R. and Street, Brian V.(1998) Student writing in higher education: An academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education. Vol 23 (2) pp. 157-172
Lillis, T. (2006) ‘Moving towards an ’Academic Literacies’ Pedagogy: Dialogues of Participation’ in Ganobcsik-Williams, L. (ed.) Teaching Academic Writing in UK Higher Education: Theories, Practices and Models. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan

10. Marx, K. ([1844]1978) ‘The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’ in Tucker, R. (ed.)The Marx-Engels Reader. (2nd Ed.). London, Norton
Musto, M. (2010) Revisiting Marx’s Concept of Alienation. Socialism and Democracy. Vol. 23 (3) pp. 79-101
Ross, E. W (2000) Alienation, Exploitation and Connected Citizenship. Theory and Research in Social Education. Vol. 28 (3) pp. 306-310
Silverman, D.(2013) A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Qualitative Research . (2nd Ed.). London: Sage
Williamson, I. and Cullingford, C. (2010) The Uses and Misuses of ‘Alienation’ in the Social Sciences and Education. British Journal of Educational Studies. Vol. 45(3) pp. 263-275