EDUCATION

Education

Education

The article Student writing in higher education: An academic literacies approach by Lea, M. R., & Street, B. V, addresses the issue of student writing in higher education. It draws on the findings of an Economic and Social Research Council funded project which examined the contrasting expectations and interpretations of academic staff and students regarding undergraduate students' written assignments (Bazerman, 2007). It is suggested that the implicit models that have generally been used to understand student writing do not adequately take account of the importance of issues of identity and the institutional relationships of power and authority that surround, and are embedded within, diverse student writing practices across the university.

A contrasting and therefore complementary perspective is used to present debates about 'good°s and 'poor°s student writing. The article outlines an 'academic literacies°s framework which can take account of the conflicting and contested nature of writing practices, and may therefore be more valuable for understanding student writing in today's higher education than traditional models and approaches (Cohen, 2003).

Learning in higher education involves adapting to new ways of knowing: new ways of understanding, interpreting and organising knowledge. Academic literacy practices-- reading and writing within disciplines--constitute central processes through which students learn new subjects and develop their knowledge about new areas of study. A practices approach to literacy takes account of the cultural and contextual component of writing and reading practices, and this in turn has important implications for an understanding of student learning (Mullen, 2003).

Educational research into student learning in higher education has tended to concentrate on ways in which students can be helped to adapt their practices to those of the university (Gibbs, 2004)' from this perspective, the codes and conventions of academia can be taken as given. In contrast, our research is founded on the premise that in order to understand the nature of academic learning, it is important to investigate the understandings of both academic staff and students about their own literacy practices, without making prior assumptions as to which practices are either appropriate or effective.

The models are not mutually exclusive, and we would not want to view them in a simple linear time dimension, whereby one model supersedes or replaces the insights provided by the other(Barton, 2004). Rather, we would like to think that each model successively encapsulates the other, so that the academic socialisation perspective takes account of study skills but includes them in the broader context of the acculturation processes we describe later, and likewise the academic literacies approach encapsulates the academic socialisation model, building on the insights developed there as well as the study skills view.

The academic literacies model, then, incorporates both of the other models into a more encompassing understanding of the nature of student writing within institutional practices, power relations and identities, as we explain later. We take a hierarchical view of the relationship between the three models, privileging the 'academic literacies' approach (Bazerman, 2007). We believe that, in teaching as well as in research, addressing specific skills issues around ...