Writing and resistance
- 28 December 2011
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education
- Vol. 11 (4), 333-345
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022211429543
Abstract
Support for writing instruction amongst lecturers in UK Universities is high, but they often prefer it to be provided by dedicated study skills specialists operating outside subject curricula. Yet because of the well-documented problems with the skills approach (where literacy support frequently becomes a generic add-on), American models such as Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) make a strong claim that writing stratagems and thinking/theorizing within disciplines are actually intrinsically linked. It is accordingly now a commonplace in such literacy research that writing development needs to be contextualized within the disciplines, and interest in adapting such approaches to the UK context is burgeoning. A recent project at Nottingham Trent University set out to explore the prospects for such an adaption through the piloting of an embedded approach in the Social Theory subject area, but the project ran into a series of resistances that came close to thwarting it entirely. The initial challenge lay in convincing time-poor subject lecturers to engage with the literacy initiative and to find space for it in an already saturated curriculum. Yet it seemed that behind the surface perception that the embedding of literacy development would be onerous, or would squeeze out core subject content, there lay a deeper attitude that such development was both ‘beneath’ subject lecturers and unconnected to the specific concerns of their academic discipline. This reflection piece, co-written by the academic support coordinator championing the initiative and the Social Theory Subject Leader, seeks to understand some of these attitudes, using the work of Sigmund Freud and Theodor W. Adorno to probe various psycho-social aspects of the phenomenon of resistance to the embedding of writing development in a discipline. What emerges is a reflection on practice which arguably reveals a certain complex around the status of teaching as opposed to lecturing, alongside a process of displaced resistance to the managerialist and vocationalizing discourse which is on the ascendency within UK universities.Keywords
This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit:
- Pedagogies for diversity: retaining critical challenge amidst fears of ‘dumbing down’Studies in Higher Education, 2006
- If not Rhetoric and Composition, then What? Teaching Teachers to Teach WritingPublished by Bloomsbury Academic ,2006
- Exploiting the Potential of Writing for Educational Change at Queen Mary, University of LondonPublished by Bloomsbury Academic ,2006
- Teaching Academic Writing in UK Higher EducationPublished by Bloomsbury Academic ,2006
- Curriculum Design in a Context of Widening Participation in Higher EducationArts and Humanities in Higher Education, 2002
- Student writing in higher education: An academic literacies approachStudies in Higher Education, 1998