Writing in and across Disciplines
DISCIPLINE KNOWLEDGE, ACADEMIC LITERACY AND CULTURAL COMPETENCE: INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION IN SUPPORT OF STUDENTS’ DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURAL CAPABILITIES
DISCIPLINE KNOWLEDGE, ACADEMIC LITERACY AND CULTURAL COMPETENCE: INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION IN SUPPORT OF STUDENTS’ CRITICAL REFLECTIVE WRITING
Arlene Harvey¹, Gabrielle RussellMundine²
¹University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia ²University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
The aim of the project described in this paper is to understand the communication demands placed on students in demonstrating their cultural competence through disciplinebased assessment tasks such as essays, reports, case studies, and reflective journals. The literature suggests two of the most important academic capabilities required for cultural competence are reflective practice (knowing oneself) and critical thinking (understanding and challenging worldviews). While aspects of academic literacy support for students in developing these capabilities in various disciplinary contexts has been described (e.g. Borglin and Fagerstrom 2012; Szenes et al. 2015), what has yet to be explored are the academic literacy demands on students in writing disciplinebased assignments with cultural competence components, especially those which incorporate Indigenous knowledges that may be radically different from the Western knowledge that underpins the curriculum/discipline/academy (Battiste and Henderson 2009) and/or in contexts in which colonisation, marginalisation and racism make cultural competence development emotionally charged (Sherwood et al. 2010; Thackrah and Thompson 2013). This paper reports on our model construction, drawing on literatures from a variety of disciplines, theories and frameworks, including linguistics, critical linguistics, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, and discourse analysis. We describe underexplored similarities between the processes of embedding academic literacy and embedding cultural competence in the curriculum (and written assessment tasks), describe differences (especially around the ideas of 'decolonisation' and 'courageous conversations') and discuss what might need to be done to integrate these two processes to ensure students can confidently produce the writing expected of them.
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