Background

1. Shifting from Policy Reform to Quality Practices: Transforming Academic Writing Practices in Open Distance Learning • Mirriam Lephalala • University of South Africa • NADEOSA Conference 2014

2. Background Drawing on the Literacy Studies approach to academic writing practices, the paper • examines quality as an imperative for widening participation in DE • outlines the critical role of academic writing in widening participation in DE • explores the challenges faced by ‘non-traditional students’ struggling to make meaning of academic writing practices • suggests strategies for addressing the challenges of academic writing effectively and positioning AW as central to teaching and learning practices in DE

3. ACCESS AND QUALITY IN DE • Academic writing as a social practice • Widening participation and quality as a DE mandate: 1997 to 2013 • The role of AW in widening participation • The challenges of AW in DE • Positioning AW in DE

4. Theoretical Framework • This paper examines academic writing (AW) as a teaching and learning practice which is often taken for granted and overlooked. Often students who are unfamiliar with this practice are labelled as intellectually inferior, weak or lacking academic quality. • As Lillis (2002:40) contends the problem with academic writing is that it ‘involves and invokes particular ways of meaning/wording and can consequently serve to exclude others’. Consequently, instead of transforming teaching and learning practices to accommodate non-traditional students, it is often taken for granted that students should meet specific conventions which are contested, contextualised and heterogeneous with little assistance. • Drawing on the Literacy Studies approach to academic writing development this paper problematises students' writing as a social practice rather than a technical skill; • It moves away from focusing attention on issues of formal grammatical features and surface errors (i.e. spelling, punctuation, text-organisation, etc) to broader concerns of the influence of a particular social cultural context on writing. • It aims to contextualise students‘ writing as a social practice entails acknowledging that students write for the purpose of conveying a certain message (Ivanic, 1998) and that this practice is influenced by several discursive practices and contextual factors within the higher education institution.

5. White paper on Higher Education: 1997 and 2013 • DE and widening participation: Policy imperatives • 1997 Education White Paper 3: A programme for the Transformation of Higher Education • 2013 White Paper for Post-School Education and Training -’Education and social justice’; ‘equity’ -’massification’ ‘Expanding access, improving quality and increasing diversity’; ‘substantially expand access’ DE has ‘a cruicial role to play in meeting the challenge to expand access, diversify the body of learners and enhance quality’ • QUALITY ????

6. Quality: moving beyond access • Widening participation is not an end in itself, it is only a beginning. It is equally important that students progress through degree programmes and graduate. • This accords with Akojee's assertion that widening student participation in higher education is a dual process constituting a greater number of students gaining entry into higher education, 'access as participation', as well as greater numbers succeeding, 'access with success' (Akojee, 2002:2). • Access as participation, as Wagner asserts, is only one critical aspect of widening participation imperatives: to be unable to gain entry is to experience one dimension of failure (1997: 29). But, as he further argues 'access with success' is equally crucial: 'The sense of frustration and discrimination which accompanies the inability to enter higher education is multiplied many times if, having gained entry, higher education does not deliver to the black community what it promised' (Wagner, 1997: 30).

7. Academic Literacy What is academic literacy? • Academic literacy may be defined as the complex of linguistic, conceptual and skills resources for analysing, constructing and communicating knowledge in the subject area (Warren, 2003). • Academic literacy includes the ability: • to comprehend information presented in various modes, • to paraphrase, • to present information visually, • to summarise, to describe (e.g. ideas, phenomena, processes, changes of state), • to write expository prose (e.g. argument, comparison and contrast, classification, categorisation), • to develop and signal own voice, • to acknowledge sources, … (Yeld, 2003)

8. ACADEMIC WRITING- LITERACY • 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. (Lea and Street (1998)

9. ACADEMIC WRITING -LITERACY • While not denying the importance of other literacy practices, it is sometimes argued that academic writing is the most important language-related ability that tertiary students have to master to succeed in their college studies (Leki and Carson, 1994, 2 ;Zhu, 2004, Krause, 2001, Lillis, 2001). • That is because assessment in many academic disciplines is based, to a large extent, on students producing “good‟ writing texts in the form of essays, assignments, term-papers, or dissertations. Several writers have stressed the dominant place of academic writing ability in higher education situations. • For example, Thesen (2001: 133) states that University-based practices carry a heavy formal, written language load. A combination of knowledge practices and the way in which physical and social distances shape discourse suggest that the ability to operate in academic language is arguably the action.

10. ACADEMIC WRITING Therefore, the ability to write well is highly valued and emphasised by academics in higher education institutions as a means for students‟ achieving academic success and for demonstrating this achievement.

11. ACADEMIC WRITING • It can be claimed that university practices, especially those related to the assessment requirements in many higher education courses, are directly responsible for giving academic writing its current significance in students‟ lives. That is because in many institutions, essay writing is the preferred method of assessment of students‟ academic attainment not only in Humanities and Social Sciences, but also in some theoretical courses in Medicine and Science (Lillis, 2001, Bacha, 2002, Krause, 2001). • Some researchers argue that writing can promote students‟ learning processes by helping them make sense of their experiences (Manchón and Larios, 2007, Lillis, 2001). • Proponents of the writing-to-learn stance contend that writing can help students in at least four regards. • Firstly, it can aid them in learning the content of their subject courses (Ellis, 2004) in what is usually labelled as „Writing-across-the-curriculum‟ in the American higher education context. In this tradition, writing is incorporated into the curriculum of the disciplines and is designed to suit the different subject areas as a means of promoting students‟ learning of that subject. • Secondly, writing can also be linked to thinking and the development of cognitive and intellectual abilities, such as critical thinking, reasoning and evaluation, in addition to developing writing skills, such as summarising and text organisation (Bacha, 2002). • Thirdly, writing can help students improve their second language because during the process of writing, students are engaged in solving a linguistic problem (Manchón and Larios, 2007). • Fourthly, learning to write is in itself an important goal since possessing good writing ability is considered a vital skill for students in many careers and also when they consider further studies.

12. ACADEMIC WRITING University requirements implicitly support the notion that ability to write well is integral to academic success; often the single institutionally mandated course at university, for both L2 and NES students, is a term to a year of composition (Leki and Carson, 1994)

13. ‘ Understanding writing as part of the process of learning and making meaning, rather than as a reflection of what one knows, radically alters teachers’ and students’ pedagogical positioning to writing in HE. Issues of power become foregrounded to consider how certain texts and certain writers represent their knowledge claims and how these are recognised as il/legitimate and in/valid. This moves away from hegemonic approaches to the teaching of writing, such as bringing in models of ‘good essays’ to explain to students what ‘good writing’ looks like.’ (Burke, )

14. ACADEMIC WRITING • Academic writing is a new experience for first year students as it is the first time that they have to produce an extended piece of writing based on their own research and conforming to the academic conventions, such as research organisation and referencing. • In addition, when producing a piece of writing, students have to take into consideration the views and expectations of the various departments within the colleges. They have first to learn these demands and then conform to them if they want to be successful in their studies. That is because what is considered a good piece of academic writing can vary across these departments and sometimes even among teachers within the same department. • During the first year of tertiary education, students‟ negotiation of academic writing can become especially confusing and frustrating as students are still in a transitional stage into academic study. They are still trying to make sense of all the demands placed on them from their various subjects, learning what is meant by „academic writing‟, and what their teachers expect from their writing.

15. ACADEMIC WRITING • Approaches to students' writing differ with regard to their perspective on the nature of writing and the focus of teaching. Probably one of the factors that influenced the conceptualisation of writing in higher education is the changing views on the nature of literacy. • The distinction is usually made between the autonomous and the ideological models of literacy (Street, 1984). The former views literacy as asocial, autonomous, de-contextualised skill located in the individual, while the later conceptualises literacy as 'social practices, culturally situated and ideologically constructed' (Ivanic, 2004: 221). The autonomous model of literacy focuses on the skills that the individual is required to possess in order to be academically successful. These skills are typically presented in a form of lists of functional competencies, which are considered necessary or prerequisite for academic success (Street, 1984). The ideological model of literacy, on the other hand, emphasises that literacy is a context-dependent, social practice imbedded in the discursive practices of the academic community and not merely an inventory of context-free skills (ibid). • Based on the above conceptualisation, several researchers have discussed various approaches to writing in higher education. • For example, Baynham (2000) identifies three perspectives to theorization of academic writing, namely: the skills-based approach, the text-based approach, and the practice-based approach. Lea and Stierer (2000) and Lea and Street (1998) also classify models of understanding students writing into three categorisations of study-skills, disciplinary socialisation, and academic literacies. • these different approaches, highlighting the main features and the drawbacks of each.

16. ACADEMIC WRITING • the focus of assessment is on students producing actual artefacts, students' assessment is based on their writing whether in assignments, term papers, or in exams. Within this context, the likelihood of discrepancies between the perceptions and practices of students on one hand, and those of the teachers and subject teachers on the other hand is real. This makes first year students‟ experience with writing a topic worth studying, especially since writing is a major determiner of students‟ success in academia.

17. AW AND THE STUDENT students might analyse different examples of writing, not to place them as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but to consider more sophisticated questions about the written text and its production. For example: • how does the writer/reader locate himself/herself in the writing? • If she uses the first person, what effect does that have on the claims that she is making? • How does the writer draw on other writers exploring similar lines of enquiry? • Which voices are dominating and which are subdued or erased? • How does this link to the writer’s theoretical and/or methodological framework(s)? • What is the relationship between form and content in the text? (Burke, 2008)

18. AW AND THE STUDENT • This creates a space where students are able to collectively decode the practices of writing, so that it no longer is mysterious and unknown to those who have not had prior access to the forms of literary most privileged in academic spaces. This reconstructs concerns with quality and standards, challenging taken-for-granted practices, and placing emphasis on the development of inclusive and participatory pedagogies in HE. (Burke 2008)

19. AW: Creating a culture of success Positioning AW in DE: AW should (be) – central to teaching and learning - not only focus on 1st year but throughout undergraduate and extend to postgraduate levels (WAC) - focus on promoting multilingualism • incorporate the student voice • focus on retraining teachers, tutors to begin engaging with writing from various perspectives • incorporate research

20. Conclusion Additional research is required to identify the specific barriers posed by academic writing practices in HE, and in particular, in DE. More importantly, to identify models of AW that can accommodate diverse groups of students in DE.

21. Thank you