A Philosophical Approach to Perceptions of Academic Writing Practices in Higher Education

Through a Glass Darkly

Amanda French

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780429559747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book takes a philosophical approach to the question 'what is academic writing?' and specifically explores the question of how academic writing and writing development can be better understood and developed by lecturers in higher education.

It examines how a number of interconnected and interdisciplinary political, linguistic, discursive, ontological and epistemological frameworks can be used to inform a 'post-qualitative' approach for research into higher education academic writing practices, employing a Bourdusian/ Deluzean inspired approach. Using lecturers' own perceptions and experiences of academic writing, and treating them as part of a 'professional academic writing in higher education habitus', the book illustrates and analyses a number of ideas and concepts through a broadly post-qualitative paradigm. It also offers a number of innovative academic writing and writing development practices.

Offering an in-depth discussion into how lecturers might better negotiate academic writing practices and use their own academic writing experiences to develop students' writing, this book will be highly relevant to academics, scholars and post-graduate students working in higher education.

1 Reconceptualising academic writing practices Muddling through and mixing it up

DOI: 10.4324/9780429264726-2

Introduction

Throughout this book, I treat lecturers, academic writing practices and their associated artefacts and events in higher education as part of a generative rhizomic configuration of entangled (Barad, 2007) intra-actions, experiences and discourses, existing within what Donald called the ‘muddle of education’ (1985, p. 242). This chapter explores the interconnected and interdisciplinary political, linguistic, discursive, ontological and epistemological theoretical frameworks that inform my philosophising about this ‘muddle’. They include social literacy theories and their educational implications; theories of discourse and power, intersectionality and diversity, identity politics and the concepts of habitus and linguistic capital and post-humanism. I use these frameworks throughout the book to mobilise ‘[…] an endless tracing of established concepts and words’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 24).

Interrogating the conditions under which academic writing is produced is part of a wider social movement. Gee (1996) used the term ‘social turn’ to describe how, in the latter half of the twentieth century many social sciences, including the emerging field of literacy studies, began challenging old disciplinary certainties and hierarchies. At the heart of the ‘social turn’ is the issue of power relations in social domains (like higher education) and how they inevitably reproduce themselves through social practices (like academic writing). As Braidotti (2013) writes:

[…] power formations not only function at the material level but are also expressed in systems of theoretical and cultural representation, political and normative narratives and social modes of identification.

(p. 24)

The confusion and freedom offered by the social ‘turn’ allows for a critical examination of these interconnected and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks, opening up more philosophical ways of thinking about academic writing practices.

I also want, in this chapter, to make visible the ways in which academic writing relationships in higher education are shaped and often constrained by dominant discourses that create the illusion of choice and agency with regard to academic writing practices. Entangled and difficult to define, academic writing practices are taken to be relational, historically situated and politically significant. By foregrounding their historicity, I attempt to delineate how previous discourses and practices around academic writing have:

[…] in terms of power and knowledge shaped the structure of the present.

(Olson and Cole, 2006, p. 185)

It is pertinent, therefore, to ask how lecturers come to recognise, or are inducted into, specific forms of disciplinary-congruent academic writing practices whilst working in higher education. I am also concerned with the places/spaces occupied by academic writing in higher education – its ontologies – as well as what is thought or known about writing in academia – its epistemologies. As Turner writes:

[…] judgements about academic writing are necessarily ideological, but […] there is a general lack of awareness of those culturally immanent ideological roots.

(2018, p. 34)

I have used, in Chapter 4, a fluid notion of identity and positionality which posits that academic writing practices in higher education take place in active, conceptual spaces. In these spaces, lecturers’ experiences of academic writing co-exist, often in opposition, with institutional and disciplinary ‘truths’ about academic writing, which present themselves as ‘self-evident, universal and necessary’ (Foucault, 1981). In order to open up a more philosophic debate I have, therefore, sought ways to systematically deconstruct traditional attitudes to academic writing in higher education by applying the range of theoretical frameworks outlined above, to my analysis.

Intertextuality and context are especially constitutive to my way of thinking about academic writing practices. Lecturers endlessly read and assess texts (books, blogs, and journals as well as student assignments), in order to produce their own texts (dissertations, PhDs, new research papers, blogs, tweets and more books) all of which function as repositories for the exchange of ‘academic knowledges’. Use of quotations, citations and bibliographies are further manifestations of how written material in the academy is constantly recirculating and being (re)inscripted within specific boundaries. All of these practices are concerned with sustaining the academic status of demarcated written artefacts as markers of academic quality and proxies for academic rigour and intellectualism. They are, I contend, what largely ensures how academic writing gets differentiated from other forms of writing, even other high-status forms of writing.

My use of the frameworks discussed in this chapter is an attempt to avoid creating what Kincheloe (2005) calls ‘monological knowledge’ that posits:

[…] right and wrong answers that preclude the need for other perspectives. Thus, monological knowledge is a smug knowledge that is content with quick resolutions to the problems that confront researchers.

(p. 326)

Kinchloe further comments that ‘monological knowledge’ fails to recognise any cultural, discursive, ideological and epistemological dimensions, ‘in the rationalistic quest for order and certainty…thick descriptions are lost’ (Kincheloe, 2005, p. 326).

Wishing to avoid monological smugness, I insist throughout this book that uncertainty and complexity are central to any research into lecturers’ perceptions about academic writing in higher education.

Social and political considerations

There are social and political imperatives driving the consensus and conformity that characterises academic writing practices (and lecturers’ perceptions of them) in higher education. These imperatives create expectations that elide and discourage lecturers’ from thinking more creatively about their own and their students’ writing/writing histories, especially where they highlight uncomfortable facts about higher education’s historical elitism and homogeneity. Maintaining the status quo necessitates a lack of interest in and knowledge about academic writing processes by subject specialist lecturers, which is exacerbated by a lack of any training in writing development in the university sector. This neglect results in the erasure and/or denigration in higher education of non-standard literacies and writing histories due to lecturers’ often unquestioning acceptance of dominant academic writing norms and expectations.

The lack of interest in academic writing in higher education has become more problematic due to the exponential expansion of the sector since the 1960s. In the 1990s, New Labour, in particular, pushed for a widening participation agenda that aimed to open up and transform England’s traditionally exclusive higher education system by dismantling educational barriers and challenging traditional class-based learner identities associated with university entry (Reay, Crozier, James, Hollingworth, Williams, Jamieson and Beedellt, 2008). However, it was not long before critics of widening participation, particularly in the media, began to make a connection between expansion and falling standards, especially with regard to the alleged poor quality of students’ academic writing (French, 2013). This knee-jerk reaction to the massification of higher education recalls Cohen’s (1972) theory about ‘moral panics’ and provides an alternative, less pejorative way of contextualising the perceived decline in higher education standards and its link to opening up access. Namely the idea that moral panics occur specifically when institutions or communities find it difficult to adapt or deal with any change that appears to threaten their core (elitist) values Furedi (1994). Similarly, O’Farrell (2005) discusses how the liberalisation or democratisation of powerful institutions, like universities, often produces a counterculture of fear and danger that opposes discourses of change. This, he argues, is because democratisation and in the case of higher education, expansion, threatens, or at best renders conditional, the traditional privileges enjoyed by powerful groups in society.

Leaving aside the moral panic about declining standards (although I shall be returning to it later), one might think, given higher education’s sustained expansion since the 1960s, that there would be a greater diversity of students taking up opportunities to study at university, in place of the traditional young, white, middle class, male students who traditionally made up the bulk of the pre-1960s student body (Leathwood and O’Connell, 2003). It is true that patterns of recruitment in higher education globally have been changing, with a marked increase in so-called ‘widening participation’ students drawn from previously under-represented categories in higher education such as women, members of minoritised communities, disabled mature and working-class individuals. More recently classified as ‘new traditional’ (Belcastro and Purslow, 2021) or ‘post-traditional’ Aquino and BuShell (2020) these more diverse categories of students are ‘complex individuals with multifaceted and multi-layered identities’ (Kasworm, 2010, p. 16) who require different and more differentiated kinds of support and provision than the sector’s previously more homogeneous student body.

However, any analysis of student populations across higher education institutions (HEIs), in England at least, reveals that the pattern of student diversity in higher education is very uneven. The majority of widening participation (WP) students in England attend ‘post-1992’ institutions (these are the former polytechnics, central institutions or colleges of higher education, given university status in 1992 through ‘The Further and Higher Education Act’). Rather depressingly, the greater the diversity of the student body the less prestigious the type of institution/subject studied (Boliver, 2011; Bowl, McCaig and Hughes, 2018). These ‘modern’ or teaching-intensive institutions generally ask for lower entry criteria than the older, research-intensive HEIs, who tend to be ‘selective’ rather than ‘recruiting’. Typically, the latter rely on ‘gold standard’ entry qualifications such as A* A Levels and high scoring International Baccalaureate results to enrol students with higher educational and cultural capital and backgrounds that, traditionally at least, have prepared them better for university (Simister, 2011).

One can conclude therefore, that WP recruitment in higher education reflects entrenched educational inequalities as the link between lower academic achievement at A Level and lower socio-economic status is well documented (Ball, 2008; Reay, 2006; Waller, Ingram and Ward, 2018). In addition WP students have often taken more portfolio-based qualifications such as BTEC, so they are often less well versed in the essayist literacies predominant in many higher education assessment regimes. Of course, these are the very students who may experience special difficulties adapting to higher education (Murphy, 2009; Roberts, 2011). This is in large part because they have to fit into an education system not designed with their learning and development needs in mind (van Rhijn, Quosai and Lero, 2011). Specifically, I would argue, it is also due to their lecturers’ structurally enforced epistemic ignorance around how to best support them to become confident academic writers.

One result of the current market-driven, two-tier higher education system (McCaig, 2018 McGettigan, 2013) is that negative comparisons between universities are exacerbated by ill-informed media and political rhetoric, which ‘others’ widening participation students and the institutions that the majorit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Reconceptualising academic writing practices Muddling through and mixing it up
• 2 A professional academic writing in higher education habitus
• 3 Researching academic writing practices in higher education The need for a post-qualitative enquiry into academic writing
• 4 Onto-epistemological accounts of academic writing practices Listening differently to lecturers’ experiences
• 5 A queered philosophical practice imaginary for academic writing in higher education
• References
• Index