Writing in and across Disciplines
THE THEORETICAL SHAPING OF EMBEDDED WRITING INSTRUCTION
THE THEORETICAL INSTRUCTION
SHAPING
OF
SUSTAINABLE
EMBEDDED
WRITING
4 5 Arlene Harvey¹, Bronwyn James², Eszter Szenes³, Minkang Kim , Marie Stevenson
¹University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia ²University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia ³University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia 4 University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia 5 University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
In this paper, we report on a model that extends previous work on embedding support for academic writing within disciplinary contexts (see e.g. Jones et al. 2001; Harris and Ashton 2011). This model involves collaboration between academic language and learning (ALL) and discipline specialists during the early stages of curriculum design, with a view to encouraging sustainability by supporting discipline teachers to take over language and learning support for their students. A sustainable approach is especially valuable for universitywide ALL centres, as embedding work, while effective, tends to be more resource intensive than generic adjunct support (Harris and Ashton, 2011). This sustainable model has been successfully applied over three consecutive years in a first year Undergraduate subject in the Education faculty of a large Australian university, with the Education/ALL team working collaboratively on a written critical reflective report assessment task. The team worked on marking criteria and rubrics, targeted writing resources for academic literacy development, learning activities, and tutor training. While this collaboration resulted in demonstrably improved outcomes in students' capacity to understand the disciplinary requirements involved in writing the report, as described here, the process of embedding also had a broader positive impact on teaching and learning. This was made possible not only by the invaluable theoretical exchange that took place between discipline and ALL specialists (Thies et al. 2014), but also by making explicit the different yet complementary theoretical models, assumptions and approaches influencing the members the ALL team, as elaborated in this paper.
References
Harris, A. and Ashton, J. (2011) ‘Embedding and integrating language and academic skills: An innovative approach’. Journal of Academic Language ad Learning, l5 (2) 7387
Jones, J., Bonanno, H., and Scouller, K. (2001) Staff and student roles in central and facultybased learning support: Changing partnerships . Conference on ‘Changing Identities: National Language and Academic Skills: Changing Identities’. held 2930 November at University of Wollongong, Australia
Thies, L.,Wallis, A., Turner, A., and Wishardt, L. (2014) ‘Embedding academic literacies curricula: The challenges of measuring success’. Journal of Academic Literacy and Learning , 8 (2), 4359