Academics Engaging with Student Writing

Working at the Higher Education Textface

Jackie Tuck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317358909
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Student writing has long been viewed as a problem in higher education in the UK. Moreover, the sector has consistently performed poorly in the National Student Survey with regard to assessment and feedback. Academics Engaging with Student Writing tackles these major issues from a new and unique angle, exploring the real-life experiences of academic teachers from different institutions as they set, support, read, respond to and assess assignments undertaken by undergraduate students.

Incorporating evidence from post-1992 universities, Oxbridge, members of the Russell Group and others, this book examines working practices around student writing within the context of an increasingly market-oriented mass higher education system. Presenting a wealth of relevant examples from disciplines as diverse as History and Sports Science, Tuck makes extensive use of interviews, observations, texts and audio recordings in order to explore the perspectives of academic teachers who work with student writers and their texts.

This book will be of interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of academic literacies, higher education, language and literacy, language in higher education, English for academic purposes and assessment. Furthermore, academic teachers with experience of this crucial aspect of academic labour will welcome Tuck's pioneering work as an indispensable tool for making sense of their own engagement with student writers.

1 Introduction

Why another book on student writing?

At its core, this book is about student writing, a subject on which there is no shortage of opinion, research-based and otherwise, within and beyond academic circles. Those with a professional involvement in student writing know that in a casual conversation, the merest hint of an interest in such matters is often enough to open a floodgate to comments deploring the poor quality of students’ writing and lamenting the role of the Internet and social media in driving standards down. Occasionally, a different sort of torrent may be unleashed, recalling painful memories of struggles with academic writing or devastating, mystifying or frustrating feedback from lecturers. Sometimes, reactions tend more towards incredulity that anyone might wish to spend their time teaching or researching anything so utterly boring as academic writing. All of these typical reactions to the topic of student writing say something about what this book is, and is not, about. Firstly, the research on which this book is based does address student writing as a problematic issue within higher education – however, in keeping with research in an emerging tradition known as ‘academic literacies’, rather than seeing this as a problem with student writers themselves, it seeks to explore in greater depth the institutional conditions in which student writing is taught, elicited, read and assessed by academic staff in the disciplines at university. Secondly, while the work discussed in these pages acknowledges the pain and difficulty often experienced by student writers as they negotiate the expectations of the academy, including a widespread dissatisfaction with the support they receive for their writing through feedback and other means, it reaches empirically beyond the student experience to focus more particularly on the experiences of university academics with a disciplinary teaching role. The aim has been to enquire from their own perspectives just what academic teachers¹ in the disciplines are doing and what they believe they are doing and hope to achieve when they work with student writers and their texts. Finally, this book acknowledges a crisis in writing in the academy, but it argues that this is not a crisis of skills but of meaning and of value. It does this by looking in depth at some of the deeply familiar – but centrally important – routine literacy and pedagogic practices of higher education and, through ethnographic enquiry, making them strange again. To achieve this, it takes a fresh interest in one of the most notoriously tedious and difficult aspects of work in higher education and explores in detail the experiences of fourteen UK academic teachers themselves as they set, support, read, respond to and assess undergraduates’ written assignments in a range of forms.

The research on which this book is based arose out of the author’s dual perspectives both as a writing teacher-researcher and as a subject lecturer. The book is intended to speak to practitioners and researchers working with student writers both within and outside the disciplines. It is relevant to higher education researchers, both those interested in teaching and learning and those concerned with questions of academic identity and academic labour in the university as workplace. However, its focus on pedagogic practices and its insights into the lived experiences of academic teachers also make it relevant to the work of those engaged in staff training and development in universities and in debates about approaches to academic development. The book also speaks to those interested specifically in academic writing teaching and research, particularly those staff who work to provide and improve writing development support for students in universities – either through writing initiatives embedded in the disciplines or through discrete forms of provision, such as English for Academic Purposes courses and writing centres. It also makes a contribution to writing research, particularly research which highlights writing in institutional contexts and the ideological and material interests which underpin particular literacy regimes. Although the study which forms the foundation of the book was conducted in the UK, many of the issues it explores are also well documented in higher education sectors beyond British shores. The hope is that the insights generated here will resonate for those working in other European contexts and in English-medium tertiary education contexts internationally.

Above all, this book aims to be of interest to individual academics themselves engaged in teaching in universities. Perhaps because of its very familiarity to an academic audience, until recently there has been a lack of empirical work which sees academic labour from an insiders’ perspective, and much of the writing-related work documented here is generally ‘invisible’ to institutions. The intention here is to go some way towards making visible a routinely neglected and undervalued aspect of academic labour. It is hoped that readers teaching in the disciplines will recognise themselves in the data and analysis presented in these pages as well as gaining insight into the variety of practices across the university sector. Further, the book aims to make some contribution to the wider recognition, as well as to the development, of work ‘at the textface’.

Student writing in the contemporary academy – is it still important?

Higher education literacies are in flux as the result of a number of developments. Technological advances have led to rapid changes in the ways students can and do engage with texts as part of their studies and beyond (Archer and Breuer, 2016; McKenna, 2015; Bayne and Ross, 2013; McKenna and McAvinia, 2011; Lea and Jones, 2010a; Ivanič et al., 2009). These developments have fed a burgeoning of ‘innovative’ assessment genres (Leedham, 2009) tried and tested by scholars in the disciplines and increasingly described and taught by academic discourse specialists (O’Halloran et al., 2016; D’Angelo, 2016; Kuteeva, 2016; McKenna, 2015; Trimbur, 2013; Archer, 2010; Hyland, 2006). Assessed texts in many disciplines now incorporate a wider variety of modes. Assessment through the spoken word is a continuing and long-standing tradition in some national contexts such as Southern, Central and Eastern Europe but has increasingly become a feature in Anglophone contexts too, for example, in the form of oral presentations (see overview by van Ginkel et al., 2015), often accompanied by multimedia (e.g., Cox et al., 2010). Non-verbal visual modes such as photography (e.g., Latham and McCormack, 2007) are often combined with the verbal in multimodal texts such as websites, video diaries, blogs or posters (e.g., Parkin, 2009; Archer, 2006; Stein and Newfield, 2006; Brumberger, 2005; Duncum, 2004). Digital texts including multilayered genres such as the ‘e-portfolio’ (Goodfellow and Lea, 2007; Cotterill et al., 2006) now appear frequently, deploying the affordances of hypertext in ways which disrupt traditionally linear processes of composition and reception (McKenna, 2015). Use of visual modes in otherwise traditional written academic assignments is widespread and generally accepted in a range of disciplines (Leedham, 2015), not confined to those in which visual media and design have traditionally played a major part (Cox et al., 2010). Change has been further fuelled by the context of a growing number of vocational disciplines at the tertiary level (Lea, 2012; Lillis and Rai, 2011; Baynham, 2000), which increasingly strive for ‘authentic’ assessment (Ashford-Rowe et al., 2014; Clegg and Bryan, 2006; Mueller, 2005) and require students to produce hybrid texts which straddle both the academic and the professional worlds.

Widespread expansion into ‘new’ genres and modalities notwithstanding, the written mode continues to play a dominant part in students’ higher education experience. It is still “privileged, mediated and policed as the dominant mode in the institution” (Thesen, 2001:133) and continues to be the main form of assessment (Lillis and Scott, 2007), so the stakes remain high for academic writing. Even where students are working exclusively within the written mode, and within more traditional subjects, there has been a proliferation of text types that students are required to produce. The spectrum of required writing has widened to include genres such as reflective journals, blogs, web pages, business reports, wikis, online postings or professional case notes. Though this greater variety is in some ways enormously welcome, it arguably means that writing at university has become even more complex and difficult, with a bewildering range of explicit requirements, shadowed in many cases by an equally complex range of unarticulated expectations, some of which may be emergent and unclear to teachers as well as students (Lea, 2012; Lea and Jones, 2010b). Students are often asked to tackle these new genres with an eye to the traditional requirements of “essayist literacy” (Lillis, 2001), resulting in complex and unfamiliar texts which they may have only one chance to get right. However, traditional forms of writing, such as the essay, dissertation or lab report, still hold sway in many university contexts as the ‘default’ assessment genres (English, 2011; Creme and Lea, 2008; Womack, 1993), particularly when the stakes are highest.

One approach to the perennial – and intensifying – difficulties perceived to surround student writing at university might be to take the view that such traditional written genres, and a default focus on the written word generally, are anachronistic and unhelpful. With the emergence of new technologies and the possibility of multimodal learning and assessment, it may be thought that the ‘problems’ associated with writing in higher education are best solved by eschewing the traditional written mode where possible or reserving it for high-stakes assessment such as exams. This inclination is likely to be reinforced in a resource-limited context since, as Gibbs (2006) argues, the production and formal assessment of large amounts of writing is labour intensive for students and teachers and resource intensive for institutions. Indeed there are strong arguments against the narrow privileging of the essay, lab report or IMRD journal article as uniquely valuable forms of knowledge. Academic researchers’ own text production practices are rapidly changing to embrace new technologies (Kuteeva, 2016; Fransman, 2013), as evidenced by the presence of peer-reviewed journals such as Kairos dedicated to multimodal ‘papers’ (see also McKenna, 2015; papers in Archer and Breuer, 2016) and by the increasing proliferation of doctoral theses in multimodal and electronic form (Andrews et al., 2014). Challenges to the reign of essayist writing have emerged from various quarters, ranging from those who seek to question the epistemological rigidity of strict adherence to conventional textual practices, through those who seek greater alignment between the academy and the ‘real world’ of industry, business and the professions, to those who argue from a critical perspective for greater openness to students’ vernacular practices and knowledges (including multilingualism) as essential for the democratisation of higher education. An argument is also sometimes made that digital genres are potentially more accessible and democratic than their more traditional analogue counterparts, for example, because they afford online anonymity, and so opportunities to safely try out other, more writerly and authoritative identities, and because of the predominance of ‘low-stakes’ genres (Warnock, 2015) in the production of which writer collaboration is more widely accepted. At a more practical level, multimodal assignments are thought to be appealing – seen as more ‘fun’, more ‘relevant’ and less intimidating to undergraduates of the Web 2.0 generation – though this assumption is not always based on evidence of student experience and opinion, as Bevitt (2015) has argued with regard to ‘innovative’ assignments.

Without denying the need for – and fact of – rapid change in academic communication, this book will adopt a note of caution. It will argue that when looked at through the lens of meaning making, ‘problems’ surrounding student writing cannot be avoided purely through a diversion towards contemporary digital genres and multimodality. While writing in any form continues to play a major part in what goes on in the academy, it cannot be allowed to atrophy as a medium of teaching, learning and assessment. New forms help us think anew, but we need to think differently both through and about the more traditional forms too, particularly while these continue to be associated with significant consequences for student success or otherwise. Moreover, practices around students’ assessed texts continue to involve substantial investments of time and effort in the work of academics who teach undergraduates. In a 2016 survey of members, the UK’s University and College Union found that marking occupied approximately 7 percent of academics’ time (UCU, 2016). This figure did not include time spent on individual student consultations, email exchanges, or class time devoted to writing issues, all practices which emerged as significant in the study represented here. Thus there are good reasons to continue to tackle the vexed issue of student writing, and to try to find new ways to explore and understand what academic teachers do with it, so that it can be renewed as a resource for academic learning. This book represents one such attempt.

Student writing – what’s the problem?

It is not difficult to find assertions that students “can’t write any more”. These concerns may be expressed as informal corridor grumblings but also appear frequently in wider conversations conducted within and beyond academic institutions, as illustrated in a series of articles in the UK’s Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) with headlines such as “Grammar’s gone downhill” (1998); “Riting good is a tuff choar, innit?” (2006); “ ‘Appalling’ writing skills drive tutors to seek help” (2007); and “Fundamental problems” (2009). This is not just a UK phenomenon. To give just one example from a US-based Psychology professor’s blog:

Why can’t college students write anymore?

Is it just me, or are student competencies like basic writing skills in serious peril today? … There are only so many times you can correct a “their” that is meant to denote “there” before wondering, when was the last time this college student’s writing abilities were actually assessed? As a psychology professor, I am starting to feel like an English instructor, because so much of my feedback on these papers is focusing on such basic writing skills, that the coherency or theoretical merit behind the content is getting lost in the shuffle … In the digital world where language is reduced down to 120 characters or less, is some essential part of ourselves that needs to be cultivated to express ourselves clearly through the written word, also being lost in the shuffle?

(Aalai, 2014)

The frequency with which such concerns about university student writing have been consistently expressed over the last two or three decades amount to a powerful narrative of decline in written standards and skills (Gourlay and Deane, 2012; Lea, 2007), closely aligned to what has been called a “deficit discourse” of student writing (see, e.g., Coleman, 2016 in South Africa; O’Shea et al., 2016 in Australia; Horner and Lu, 1999 in the United States). In September 2014, for e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of participant profiles
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Researching pedagogies around writing as social practice
• 3 Academics’ experiences of engaging with student texts
• 4 The tyranny of the pink sheet: the assessment of student writing in institutional context
• 5 ‘Is it my job to teach them how to write?’: identities and relationships around student writing
• 6 ‘Somebody else’s issue’: distributing and justifying work around student writing
• 7 Creating hospitable spaces for writing pedagogies in the disciplines in higher education
• 8 What is writing in higher education for?
• References
• Appendix
• Index