Writing and Writing Instruction in Different Academic Contexts
DILIGENT STUDENT, CARING PRACTITIONER OR EXPERT SCIENTIST? THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY BY MSC HEALTH SCIENCES STUDENTS WRITING A REVIEW PAPER
Sarah Gartland
1. University of Roehampton, London, United Kingdom 2. UCL Institute of Education, London, United Kingdom
Identity is generally acknowledged to be important in academic writing (e.g. Ivanic, 1997), and studies of professional formation (e.g. Baynham, 2000) indicate that practitioners in training often experience some tension between their practitioner identity and the need to include more academic professionalised concepts in their writing. However, there appears to be little research on practitioners writing in academic contexts where the practitioner identity is sidelined or ignored. Therefore, this paper presents the findings from a small scale qualitative study of health professionals writing a scientific review paper for a module on an MSc Health Sciences programme. The review paper is an important genre in science as it synthesises and evaluates recent research findings on a particular topic (Noguchi, 2006) in order to influence the direction of future research (Myers, 1991). Hence, review papers tend to be written by research scientists engaged in research on the topic they are writing about. Taking an academic literacies perspective (Lea and Street, 1998), this study investigated how participants negotiated the tension between writing (in theory) as experts for an academic journal whilst (in reality) pursuing their own interests as practitioners and writing as students for their lecturer. Findings from classroom observations, semistructured interviews and textual analysis of participants’ review papers reveal how participants made strenuous efforts to conform to what they perceived their lecturers’ requirements to be, but at the same they subtly resisted lecturers’ attempts to position them as novice research scientists by emphasising professional practice in both their writing and the interviews.
References
Baynham, M. (2000) ‘Academic Writing in New and Emergent Discipline Areas’ in Lea, M. and B. Stierer (Eds). Student Writing in Higher Education: New Contexts. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press
Ivanič, R. (1997) Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Lea, M. R. and B. Street (1998) ‘Student Writing in Higher Education: An Academic Literacies Approach’. Studies in Higher Education 23(2), pages 157 – 172
Myers, G. (1991) ‘Stories and Styles in two Molecular Biology Articles’ in C. Bazerman and J. Paradis (Eds). Textual Dynamics of the Professions (pp. 45 – 75) Madison: University of Madison Press
Noguchi, J. (2006) The Science Review Article: An Opportune Genre in the Construction of Science. Bern: Peter Lang