“I feel small in relation to university. And feel that most people are higher achievers than myself. I often predict that I am a lower achiever than I.

• “I feel small in relation to university. And feel that most people are higher achievers than myself. I often predict that I am a lower achiever than I am. It also shows that I sometimes feel as though I don’t belong in university and often doubt if I’m good enough to be here” (S2)

The individual and the institution: engagement with writing in a ‘liminal’

space

Lesley Gourlay & Janis Greig Napier University

Scottish Higher Education Developers Conference 25-27 June 2007 Skye

Overview

• JISCPAS data collection 07 (conducted with Janis Greig)

• Ideology and emotions surrounding writing • Staff: contrasting paradigms • Students: writing and identity• Writing and liminality• Conclusions and discussion

JISCPAS- funded study 2007 aims

•To investigate the first year student experience of coursework •To investigate staff attitudes and strategies for the development of first year students’ academic literacies

Methods overview

• Two rounds of semi-structured interviews with 9 students, based around journalling, drawings and photos. Being transcribed.

• 3 staff focus groups, initial analysis complete • Staff questionnaire using Ultimate Survey, still

live, 74 responses so far. Analysis July 2007

Initial focus group findings

• Teaching staff and academic support staff operating on very different conceptual models / ideologies concerning student literacies and the locus of responsibility.

Academic Literacies

• Literacies embedded in social context • Linked to issues of identity • Fluid, negotiated and individual • Not equivalent to a finite, transferable skills set • Transforming / empowering potential

(e.g. Candlin & Plum 1998, Ivanic 1998, Lillis 2001, 2003, Wingate 2006)

Focus group: academic staff• Were critical about secondary school literacy

‘standards’• Some were less positive about student diversity

& non-traditional entrants in terms of writing • Tended to operate on a deficit model,

“plugging the gap”• Tended to focus on subject and content, rather

than process

Focus group: academic support staff

• Used an academic literacies model• Were very positive about diversity • Tended to be more holistic in approach and

focus on process and formative activity. • Neither group integrated anti-plagiarism

strategies with other types of academic development

Focus group: library staff

• Views consistent with information / academic literacies model

• Also tended to be more holistic in approach and focus on process and formative activity.

• Placed great emphasis on partnership with academics

• Embedding development in the curriculum

Student writing & emotions

• Lillis (2001): access, regulation & desire• Complex emotional responses to writing • Writing as the point of interface between the

individual and the university • Construction of self to the institution, main

channel to receive messages about self from the institution

• “I see myself as a statistic / number to the university” (S8)

Fear “So, eh, most of, most of our subject was in our home language and eh one or two subject every year we have English. So when I came in this country and when I was eh sitting for examination I really feel panic…And em before exam day I was really panic and I failed in everything, and I eh took some copy and I got…I mean eh I was studying a lot but eh I forget everything so this was for the exam day. Eh, I thought that if I took some point eh it would, it might be very helpful for me…I was caught…. Very short, limited time, and all this eh tension is working all the time, the time is going, and what about the, what happen, you know, if I, I not able to em, eh, put all answer to the example, so what happen?" (S3) (Gourlay 2006)

• ‘Me stressed! I had three assignments to hand in last month and I absolutely found them so stressful to do! Collaborating all the info, checking grammar etc has putting me under so much strain and I lost a lot of sleep!’(S3)

• “I’m so stressed! … or I was when I was doing my essay. Doing my essay made me uneasy and annoyed! It really pushed me to the edge!” (S3)

Anger

“I mean it’s not, it’s not fair taking off someone else’s work is it? You know, you’re not going to anywhere in life with that.” (Student 2)“So like why bother doing the course if you’re just going to cheat? It’s not, maybe if you’re not found out you’ll pass, yeah, but does that make you feel good, you know, I couldn’t cheat and feel good about it, because then I’d feel I hadn’t, I hadn’t properly done the work to deserve, you know, the degree.” (S4) (Gourlay 2006)

• “Lots of responsibility, I could hold the group back hence feeling stressed. Everyone else’s work dependent on the results. I am stressed, angry, worried, stressed again.” (S2)

Confusion

“Eh, somehow to meet the requirement of plagiarism eh because we are not habitual of eh doing this sort of activities in our home country…So that is why I feel some how difficulty and eh unintentionally I just caught in, in plagiarism case……Which eh resulted eh to produce me a rework for the coursework again. Eh, it was not somehow a plagiarism like eh, yeah, mm…, mm.., I was not aware of this thing and I just, just avoided the plagiarism…and eh very less attention is being given in their home countries eh to avoid this thing.” (S1) (Gourlay 2006)

Satisfaction “It’s eh, you know, you’ve got like 3 views in front of you ‘cause you’ve got to do different authors’ views. You sort of sit there and think oh this is going to take ages, you know. But once you find it and, you know, you’ve got a bit of paper to write in it’s, it’s quite good ‘cause you sort of feel quite good about yourself after you’ve struggled through it really well and you think no, that’s really good…There’s a sort of, there’s a good feel good factor after you’ve finished it and say right I’ll hand my draft copy in to my tutor, yes, ‘cause you knew you’d done a good job of it, spent a lot of long, hard hours on it. So it was quite a good feeling but there’s other times when you feel like oh here we go, how many books do I have to look through today or I’ve got to trail round Edinburgh doing a research, you know.” (S2) (Gourlay 2006)

Ambivalence • “Sometimes I feel

ambivalent when I’m at uni. I feel happy because I’ve come this far. On the other hand I feel depressed as I really want to pursue a more artistic design course. I couldn’t go down that route as my parents weren’t content with it.” (S3)

Liminality

• The second stage of a ritual where participants are in transition in terms of social status (Van Gennep 1909)

• “The liminal state is characterised by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One’s sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation.” (Wikipedia 2007)

Writing as a site of struggle

“…the development of writer identity needs to be seen as a part of the ongoing epistemological negotiation that occurs between students and lecturers as they struggle to construct desired meanings across texts”

Thompson 2005:1

Writing, transition and liminality

• Student’s tentative steps into heavily regulated and unfamiliar discourse territory

• Writing as primary means of identity formation and transition for the individual student

• Van Gennett’s transition to postliminality was achieved via transformative ritual

• However, for HE students possibly a more incremental, non-linear trajectory?

Inhabited words

When each member of a collective of speakers takes possession of a word, it is not a neutral word of language, free from the aspirations and valuations of others, uninhabited by foreign voices. No, he [translator’s generic pronoun] receives the word from the voice of another, and the word is filled with that voice. The word arrives in his context from another context saturated with other people’s interpretations. His own thought finds the word already inhabited.” (Bakhtin 1973:167)

‘Inventing the university’

“The student has to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse…he [author’s generic pronoun] invent the university by mimicking its language while finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, on the one hand, and the requirements of convention, the history of a discipline, one the other. He must speak out language. Or he must dare to speak it to carry off the bluff, since speaking and writing will most certainly be required long before the skill is ‘learned’.” (Bartholomae 1985: 134).

Narrow path

• Narrow path between plagiarism, intertextuality and taking on voices of the academy (Chandrasoma et al 2004)

• No such thing as originality in discourse, only redeployment of available resources for meaning making (Ivanic 1998)

• Challenges the concept of student’s ‘own words’ (McGowan 2005)

• Diminished space for development of student writer identities?

Will I survive?

• “Direction? Will I survive? Who will help?” (S5)

Mood swings • “That’s how I feel about Uni

when my life is balanced, I don’t have too much work outside my Uni. I really like it at that time!”

• “That’s how I feel when there’s too much work in life. I need to earn my living on my own and when is combines with too much work at Uni, it can be really depressing. I manage but I do get my mood swings.” (S4)

Charting your own voyage

• “…broader institutional changes, where processes and procedures allow less time for contact between teachers and learners and rely increasingly on students charting their own voyages through the learning process.” (Lea 2005: 182).

Stepping stones • “The stepping stones of my

chosen path. University is the starting point and will enable me to get where I ultimately want to be. The dark blue lines represent other pathways of life that I could also be on. The black lines represent how I feel in terms of transcending to higher levels of knowledge and thought processes in order to get to where I want to be.” (S6)

Mountain • “So this is me, Davith. I left the

possibility to work in factories etc. behind, packed my bag and decided to climb the mountain Goliath (university). It is steep and I have not come very far yet – you have to be careful because rocks from the top or dark clouds could might come your way or slow you down a little...even though I am just Davith and Goliath is huge it is not scary because I know I can do this if I’m smart enough” (S9)

Implications for staff development

• Lecturers can be encouraged to…• play a role in explicitly inducting students into

academic discourses (Northedge 2003) • provide one-to-one development via talk about

developing texts (Lillis 2001 & Ivanic 1998) • include a focus on academic literacies at

programme level (Lea 2004)• use short writing tasks in their teaching (Mitchell

2007)

Staff responses to student emotions

• Reduce fears through positive approaches to developing academic literacies, not only dire warnings about plagiarism penalties

• Acknowledge anger at unfairness and work to make systems and staff responses consistent and transparent, e.g. groupwork

• Reduce confusion by ‘unpacking’ and clearly stating writing requirements

• Celebrate satisfaction and allow it to inspire staff and students

Implications for institutional development

• Institutions can be encouraged to:

• Embed academic / tertiary literacies policies e.g. Auckland University of Technology (Kirkness 2006), University of Wollongong (2003)

• Building in, not bolting on – exploration of models

• Recent developments at Napier

Small• “I feel small in relation to

university. And feel that most people are higher achievers than myself. I often predict that I am a lower achiever than I am. It also shows that I sometimes feel as though I don’t belong in university and often doubt if I’m good enough to be here” (S2)

Bigger

• “I am happy. I feel I belong. I now feel I can place myself alongside other high achievers without putting myself down. I also feel I’m bigger in relation to the uni compared to the picture I drew at the beginning of the diary.” (S2)

Any questions?

References • Bakhtin, M. M. 1973. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. by R.W. Rotsel. Ann Arbor MI:

Ardis.• Bartholomae, D. 1985. Inventing the university. In Rose, M. (Ed.) When a Writer Can’t Write. New

York: Guilford.• Candlin, C. & Plum, G. (eds) 1998. Researching Academic Literacies. Framing Student Literacy:

Cross-Cultural Aspects of Communication Skills in Australian University Settings. Sydney: NCELTR Macquarie University.

• Chandrasoma, R., & Thompson, C. & Pennycook, A. 2004. Beyond plagiarism: transgressive and nontransgressive intertextuality. Journal of Language, Identity and Education 3/3: 171-193.

• Gourlay, L. 2006. Framing the discourse practices of HE: Academic literacies, hidden cultures and the transition experience of postgraduate Chinese students. Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia Annual Conference University of Western Australia, Perth.

• Ivanic, R. 1998. Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

• Kirkness, A. 2006. Critical reflections on an academic literacies policy five years on. Refereed Proceedings of the Higher Education Research Society of Australasia Conference 2006: University of Western Australia, Perth.

• Lea, M. 2005. ‘Communities of practice’ in higher education: useful heuristic of educational model?’ In Barton, D. & Tusting, K. (eds) Beyond Communities of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Lillis, T. 2001. Student Writing: Access, Regulation, Desire. London, Routledge.

References • Lillis, T. 2003. An “academic literacies” approach to student writing in higher

education: drawing on Bakhtin to move from “critique” to “design”. Language and Education 17/3: 192-207.

• McGowan, U. 2005. Does educational integrity mean teaching students NOT to ‘use their own words’? International Journal of Academic Integrity 1/1

• Mitchell, S 2007.“Thinking Writing”. Queen Mary University of London • http://www.thinkingwriting.qmul.ac.uk/ [Accessed 27/4/07]• Northedge, A. 2003. Enabling participation in academic discourse. Teaching in Higher

Education 8/2 169-180. • Thompson, C. 2005. 'Authority is everything': A study of the politics of textual

ownership and knowledge in the formation of student writer identities. International Journal for Educational Integrity 1-1.

• Van Gennep, A. 1991 (1909). Les Rites des Passage. Paris: Picard. • Wingate, U. 2006. Doing away with ‘study skills’. Teaching in Higher Education 11/4:

457-469. • University of Wollongong. 2003. Tertiary Literacy Policy and Procedures. University of

Wollongong Policy Directory. http://www.uow.edu.au/about/teaching/tertiary_literacy.html [Accessed 25 Aug 06]