Working with writing in LD
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Keynote for Leeds University teachmeet, thinking about what we as LDers should *do* with academic literacies theory
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Working with writing in LD
- 1. Working With Writing in Learning Development: what to do with Academic Literacies? Dr Helen Webster Writing Development Centre Newcastle University @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities
- 2. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Why are we so obsessed with writing? Academic staff Students Researchers Learning Developers?
- 3. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Academic Literacies (Lea and Street) “Educational research into student writing in higher education has fallen into three main perspectives or models”: • Study skills • Academic Socialisation • Academic Literacies
- 4. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Problematising writing: literati Compilatio historiarum / Giovanni, da Udine Switzerland, Basel, ca. 1476 MS M.158 fol. 3r “Academic literacies is concerned with meaning making, identity, power and authority” (Lea and Street, 1998) “The principal function of student writing is increasingly that of gatekeeping” (Lillis, 2001)
- 5. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Strategies: don’t be complicit Learning Outcomes Lecturers Learning Developer Students
- 6. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Strategies: open spaces for negotiation Mentor Listener Teacher Coach Tutor Knowledge Tutor Agency Student Agency Student Knowledge
- 7. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Problematising writing: Integumentum “moral or philosophical truths can be clothed in literary form” (Haug, 1985) “this [conduit] metaphor signals the following common sense notions about language: […] that language is a transparent medium, reflecting rather than constructing meanings” (Lillis, 2001) Writing is making meaning (Lea and Street, 1998)
- 8. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Strategies: the 5 Ps of LD The 5 Ps of LD: • Presenting ‘problem’ • Pertinent factors • Perception of the task • Process • Product “At some level, it all makes sense” (Butler, 1998) Diagnosis vs Formulation
- 9. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Problematising writing: sententia “In these [study skills] approaches, the distance between tutors’ expectations and student-writers’ understanding of such expectations is problematized as a mismatch which can be resolved if tutors state clearly to student-writers, in written or spoken words, what is required” (Lillis, 2001)
- 10. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Strategies: Don’t peddle snake oil The Snake Oil Manifesto: •What does it mean? •How do I do it? •How do I know I’ve done it?
- 11. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Problematising writing: “A common misapprehension about academic writing, like reading, is that completion of an assignment should happen in one sitting. […] This […] does not stop people believing that they ought to write assignments ‘in one go’, and that their private strategies are a deviation from this ideal” (Peelo, 1994)
- 12. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Strategies: the palimpsest • Offer a range of approaches • Separating process and product: • Writing as thinking • Writing as communicating • Focus on strategies for re-writing and re-reading • Breaking writing down the task of writing
- 13. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Problematising Writing: lectio ‘The first act of the feminist critic must be to become a resisting rather than an assenting reader, and, by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcising the male mind that has been implanted in us’ (Fetterley, 1978)
- 14. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Strategies: constructing authorial identity Authority • Who can you you be? • Who do you you want to be? • Who do you you need to to be? Authorial Presence • How can you you say it? • How do you you want to say it? • How do you you need to to say it? Authorship • What can you you say? • What do you you want to say? • What do you you need to to say? ‘Heuristic’ adapted from Lillis, 2001
- 15. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Problematising Writing: disputatio “An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its quality of being directed to someone, its addressivity. [...] The utterance has both an author [...] and an addressee.” (Bakhtin, 1986)
- 16. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Strategies: dialogic Q&A
- 17. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities ‘Can the Spanish Civil War be interpreted as a “social revolution”?’ • Why does the Spanish Civil War need re-interpreting? • What is a ‘social revolution’? What are its defining characteristics? • What are the defining characteristics of the Spanish Civil War? • How many of these meet the criteria for a social revolution, and why? • How many of them do not fit the criteria for a social revolution, and why? • Is it helpful to interpret the Spanish Civil war as a social revolution? • How accurate is it to do so? How misleading would it be? • How does this reinterpretation change our understanding of the period or key research fields?
- 18. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Paragraph level Self assessment can also develop skills which make a student more attractive to prospective employers. Employers value students with skills in self assessment because these types of skills are relevant to a wide range of employment contexts. They want graduates who can accurately assess their own competencies in performing tasks. Students who can do this are well placed to take on responsibilities and adapt readily to roles in work places. The value in developing these types of assessment can be seen to go beyond meeting immediate educational needs. Students who have developed an autonomous approach to learning are well set up for life-long learning which will continue throughout and beyond their working lives. How? Why? Such as? So what? So what?
- 19. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Problematising Writing: exegesis • Reader Response theory: • Who or what is ‘the reader’? • Where does meaning reside? • How is meaning made? Interpretative communities (Fish), Experts and novices (Lave and Wenger) The inscribed author, the inscribed reader Barthes: Death of the Author, Readerly and Writerly texts • Educational Psychology
- 20. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Strategies: modelling reader response “Riffaterre develops a two-stage model [of reading]- a first ‘heuristic’ linear reading and a second ‘hermeneutic’ or retroactive reading” (Bennett, 1995)
- 21. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Problematising Writing: auctoritas Marking, n. The action of putting a mark, marker, token, indicator, etc., on something. In extended use: the action of distinguishing, identifying, or giving emphasis to something. The action in an animal of depositing a pheromone- containing substance, as faeces, urine, etc., on an object or territory. The action of appraising and assigning marks for an examination paper, test, piece of work, etc. (OED)
- 22. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Strategies: Assessment Literacies • ICE: Ideas, Connections, Extensions (Fostaty Young and Wilson, 2000) • Inductive or deductive scaffolding?
- 23. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities What else can we do? • Close the loop- Educational Development • Occupy transgressive, hybrid spaces
- 24. @ncl_wdc Writing Development Centre Explore the possibilities Contact: Dr Helen Webster • Head of the Writing Development Centre, Newcastle University • Email: helen.webster@ncl.ac.uk • Twitter: @scholastic_rat • Blog: https://rattusscholasticus.wordpress.com/
Editor's Notes
- Who and what are are learning developers? What makes our role or our approach different? Focus on 1-2-1 work and on writing, but generally also what do we do with the theory in our practice? Also, why the medieval pictures?!
- I don’t care about writing. Academic Staff - Writing is the main mode -not the only one - by which we assess students. (There are others, so why writing?) Historical reasons Asynchronous and flexible Efficient - Quicker than viva with large cohorts *the real work becomes invisible- you don’t get paid for marking *Illusion of summative, fixed instead of messy, Rule bound, clear norms, Strunk and White I care because students care- we make them worried about it *the idea that it’s just a matter of surface features is reassuring – it’s straightforward, rule-governed and instrumental Researchers – rich and complex area We’re learning developers, not writing developers. So why are WE so obsessed with writing? Writing is meaning making (Lillis) so it’s a helpful learning tool – thinking aloud on paper. It’s the locus of the problem BUT writing is not learning, and it can lead us astray, pedagogically and ethically.
- Key points on handout – main theoretical underpinning of LD But what do we do with this as LDers? Give students a lecture on cultural capital?!
- Gateway to the Tower of Babel - To be literate in the middle ages, it had to be latin, not the vernacular Institutional practice of mystery - Lillis Academic literacies scholarship: writing is a social, culturally situated act, involving power and authority, access or exclusion. Discourse switching, negotiating, contested Gates are about access – entry and exit (what about what happens in between transition and graduation?)
- It’s not our curriculum. We’re outsiders and that’s what we have to offer of value. We are different from EAP and librarians – we’re not normative or prescriptive and we don’t have that automatic authority from being a ‘native speaker’ or designer of the system. We aren’t gatekeepers – what would our metaphor be? It makes us feel good that we can offer a fix, be the one to solve the problem, It’s cheap authority, and we’re complicit in something that doesn’t fit our values – emancipatory, empowering, student-centred – and aligns us with things we may not think are helpful – marketization, student as consumer, privilege and exclusion. We need to balance pragmatism with our values as we’re hired to solve a problem in a way we know isn’t good. Can lead us to very surface, ‘fairy dust’ strategies – bad pedagogy Different approach – each party brings something expert. True embedding –the student brings the curriculum with them, and its context. Make a virtue of this
- How to open a space for negotiation between discourses? We have a variety of roles open to us to allow each party to bring what’s most needed. We are mostly teachers, but we may work in other ways to invite student agency
- Integumentum – skin. Parchment is animal skin, and may have holes from the tenterhooks (wherein be dragons, apparently) Haug is discussing medieval literary theory Before we get to academic literacies proper, one issue that it doesn’t raise. Even if you do have the cultural capital to write, it still won’t give direct access to learning. A piece of writing is not learning. You can’t eff the ineffable. Medieval literary theory that the text, the narrative, is just a skin covering the real substance, and it can ben peeled back to reveal the true meaning – ageless truths. CS Lewis’s Aslan But writing isn’t this transparent – it isn’t just a wrapper for learning or a conduit for meaning. We privilege what we can see – we focus on outcomes as this is the only way we can see learning, but it’s a construct, a representation. Writing is a tool to make meaning for the student, but that stays in their head. We aren’t behaviourists. Don’t be led astray into looking at textual issues before learning issues. NEVER assume you can tell process from looking at the product –damaging feedback (“you clearly didn’t spend much time planning this”) Never assume you can ‘see’ learning unmediated in the essay. The text is fixed, but learning evolves (note the use of tense to describe what an author ‘argues’ if that thinking is still held to be current, quite aside from whether the author’s views have in fact moved on, or indeed, they’ve moved on completely as I have!) the text can be inpenetrable to its own writer too! Students may feel their writing doesn’t represent what they want to say – we should take this seriously.
- (Don’t want JK to sue, so hidden – reminder only)
- Sententia – pithy aphorisms Examples – make sure your writing is clear, manage your time effectively, only include relevant information’ Minimisations- just, simply, all you have to do Imperatives: you should, need to, have to, always, never. ‘but we’ve told them’ an Lder telling them won’t be any different – telling them doesn’t work Reassurance makes us feel better, or at least that we’ve done our duty, but it passes the blame to the student when they can’t do it It’s often not something to do, but something to be. We spend a lot of time unpicking bad advice of this sort. Don’t be complicit
- Using urine as a diagnostic…. Reassurance can be very helpful, but we know writing is complex, dynamic, nuanced, situated, epistemological and social. So don’t pat students on the head. It might be better to acknowledge complexity. If it was that simple, it would be that simple. These are questions to ask yourself to check your advice is useful, but also a discussion to have with the student- the answers aren’t simple. You may be working in mentor mode here. Online or paper based generic advice – we have to teach students to reflect and give them criteria to judge
- Moses, receiving tablets of stone from heaven, ready written. There’s a very strong belief in a Right Way™ , sometimes fostered by us if we only focus on what worked for us – ‘this worked for me’ becomes ‘this is how it is done’
- Palimpsests can be overwritten and scraped clean (ish) Offer a range – reflect on pros and cons (each has a pro), and ask them to try them out and reflect. Experiential dimension to advice. Editing is really important. I’m not sure that polishing is a helpful metaphor tho – it’s a change of audience and function – get them to see the value in early drafts and meaning making Make the complexity visible What would you miss out on if you did just write it straight off?
- Early readers would literally have read in their lecturer’s voice – ‘lectio’ (note also the resisting readers in the back two rows….) Academic socialisation – become like us. Decolonising the curriculum. What about the resisting writer? And should they resist, or what to do if they are resisting and aren’t sure what to do about it (identities) The authorial voice is a fictional construct, but we don’t treat it that way – we talk about the writing as a fixed thing, representing the student’s very identity, not a snapshot of their evolving learning. Channelling the resisting (academic) reader – what might they object to? Write defensively.
- I’ve added the last layer as a place to bring together the writer and the reader and negotiate a way forward. wAS developed as a research heuristic, but could be a nice model for a developmental conversation. The resisting writer- negotiation and identities, constraints and potential. Polyphony – your ‘own’ words and ideas? Also helps to validate invisible or unintended learning – what we capture is a sampling, a snapshot only Can – both constraint and possibilities – open up multiples. Need – this brings in the lecturer’s dimension and is where negotiation happens Could be a workshop discussion, and also a pro forma for them to work through an assignment with
- The viva, the quaestio Students focus more on “what I want to say” (monologue) than what the reader needs to see (and that can be negotiated from both sides) Make the reader present in the text – it’s a dialogue, not a monologue. Make it a conversation. Writing as a defense – anticipating challenge, solving problem, not a collage of what I found
- St Cuthbert, praying for favourable winds to help him ‘flow’ the right way MS278 – a quaestio- question as rubric, answer in black. Good assessment format! As Lder, I have no answers only questions Brainstorming questions, not content, is liberating for student as well as LDer- ignorance as a strength Flow comes from getting the questions in an order they work in a conversation, answering them before the reader really realises that’s their question Questions can pick up on where the reader would want more analysis or evidence Questions can help with paragraphing and signposting (tv interview technique) Questions critiquing, questions arising
- Example of questions used as a planning device to ensure structure (can be retrofitted as editing strategy)
- Example of questions as developing a point fully
- Then I saw in the right hand of him who sat on the throne a scroll with writing on both sides and sealed with seven seals. And I saw a mighty angel proclaiming in a loud voice, “Who is worthy to break the seals and open the scroll?” (Revelation, 5) If we’re talking about writing, we need to talk about reading – academic literacies research doesn’t look at this so much. What can we learn from literary theory and educational psychology about reading? Who is the reader anyway – fake audiences ‘as if for a lay person’ – but it isn’t!
- Medieval reading wasn’t silent – you could hear it. Also, Hildegard. Effing the ineffable with mystic octupuses. How do you read student work in a 1-2-1? How I read (model silent, then model reader response) What students see is the product of re-reading – intertexual, hermeneutic benchmarking against the criteria and also other essays in the set. They get this reflected in feedback. What they don’t get – other than occasionally in the marginal comments if at all – is in-the-moment linear reading (less so with summative coversheets) – they don’t get to see reading working on the reader. If we read first in silence, we’re giving them the same – let them SEE us reading in real time. Articulate your expectations and what you’re looking for – model when you find it or not (introductions) Ask questions, express confusion Subvocalise, indicate with pencil or finger where you are, where you’re struggling Students can hear their text afresh in your voice and spot issues themse;ves re ambiguity They can anticipate strategies to control your response and negotiate They can gain strategies to edit as I explain what I’m doing when I’m checking.
- St Dominic. Head of the Inquisition- combatting heretical reading and writing Novice and expert reader – reading is also meaning making Marking essays – overwriting. Readers (markers) literally get to overwrite your meaning or tell you you don’t mean that, it doesn’t mean that Reading for assessment is different, and students are complete novices in this – they don’t read for assessment – academic reading isn’t the same thing. They have to inscribe an expert reader while having no experience in being that kind How can a novice writer inscribe both an expert writer and, more to the point, an expert reader? Anticipating, controlling and guiding the reader’s response, but also letting them have space to come to their own decisions – overcontrolling doesn’t go down well ( as we/you can see) It becomes a tug of war over meaning We Lders are non-judgemental. That’s the value we can add, how we can provide a safe space to negotiate meaning and discourse
- Are Lders just angelic building helpers? Not just learning to interpret questions and marking criteria but learning to think like an assessor ICE as criteria to look for –what would evidence look like in a text? Which way round should we teach? Working backwards – don’t give rules and build up, deductive or inductive? Principles to apply (behaviourist) or examples to derive from? (constructivist)
- Talk to ed devs and researchers – we see a perspective they can’t We work with the curriculum as it is, not as it should be, but we need to feed back Students don’t have power to negotiate and contest – we don’t have a lot, but we need to keep asking awkward questions and saying awkward things, not be the simple sticking plaster soluytion to a complex problem, as we were hired to be – it’s not fair on students. We need to be pragmatic, but true to our values. We’re neither fish nor fowl, so be a mermaid! With wings!