DRAFT – Version: 24/11.10_v7_JF

Writing in the Disciplines

SectionContentsPage

1.Introduction2

2.Executive summary3

3.Key themes 4

4.Context 5

5.Objectives 6

6.Project overview 7

7.London Metropolitan projects 8

8.Liverpool Hope projects15

9.Feedback onWiD initiatives21

10.Conclusions and recommendations24

11.References26

12.Write Now journal articles27

13.Further resources28

14.People29

  1. Introduction

The Write Now CETL wasa partnership between London Metropolitan University, Liverpool Hope University and Aston University and wasfunded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) from 2006 to 2010. Write Now focuses on the act of writing as a means to work through academic problems. We work to support discipline-specific academicwriting and aim to foster confident and engaged student writers and learners.

A central aim of our work is to promote and facilitate the embedding of more effective writing practices within the academic curriculum. This Writing in the Disciplines (WiD) approach considers that attention to writing should be integrated within students’ content-driven curriculum. This approach resists seeing academic writing as a separate skill which students already possess when entering HE or which can be acquired in generic writing support classes. It also builds on Academic Literacies theorists’ arguments (Lea and Street 1998, Lillis 2001, Wingate 2006)that students’ “problems” with writing academically are often a result of confusions concerning disciplinary and institutional epistemologies and praxis. Opportunities to practise writing as part of their subject-based tuition help students to develop an understanding of what they are studying as well as an ability to adopt the writing conventions of their discipline. This embedded writing supportalso means that all students are given the opportunity to benefit, rather than just those who seek or are referred for additional support.

WiDinitiatives involve subject lecturers and Writing Specialists working together to think about ways to improve student writing and to support lecturers to make changes to their assignments, modules and teaching designed to bring about a more effective learning and more engaging writing experience for students. Write Now staff collaborate with lecturers to design and assist in the teaching of disciplinary modules, with the aim of embedding effective writing and assessment practices within the teaching curriculum. We have worked on numerous WiD projects, for example in the disciplines of business, computer science, design, education, film studies, psychology, religious studies, sports science and postgraduate skills training programmes.

This guide gives a brief overview of our experiences with and research onWiD projectsat London Metropolitan and Liverpool Hope. We hope that it will be of interest to other universities which are looking for effective ways to improve their provision in writing instruction.

  1. Executive summary

This guide gives a brief overview of our experiences with and research on Writing in the Disciplines (WiD) projects at London Metropolitan and Liverpool Hope universities.

In section 4 we introduce our WiD projects in the context of writing developments in the US and more recently in the UK. These developments are based on ‘academic literacies’ theories andmake a strong case for the need to embed writing within regular disciplinary teaching in order to benefit all students.

Key objectives of our WiD initiatives were to enhance students’ academic writing skills and to promote engagement with writing issues that are specific to subject disciplines.

Write Now’s approach to WiD has been to work with various academic departments at the two institutions on a variety of projects. In sections 7 and 8 we describe some of these projects and provide case studies to highlight the different approaches adopted and to share what we have learnt. Monitoring and research into the effectiveness of these projects have been key to our work in order to ensure that we continue to improve existing writing provision and to help us extend our work throughout our organisations in the future. This research is briefly outlined here and is also described in numerous articles and a forthcoming book on the subject (see section 11).

In section 10 we draw conclusions about and recommend WiD as a sustainable way to embed writing development in the curriculum thereby benefitting all students on the courses involved and underpinning universities’ strategies to improve the student experience and support widening participation initiatives.

3.Key themes

•Writing development

•Embedding writing support

•Confident, independent writers and thinkers

•The connection between students’ thinking and writing, and writing and learning

•Staff development

•Widening participation

•Student retention

•Technology and writing

•Assessment and feedback

4.Context

Academic writing instruction in the UK has hitherto been largely discreet - confined to Study Skills or Learning Development Units or to specialised English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses- rather than embedded within disciplinary courses and modules. As a result, the teaching of writing has been associated with remediality and with providing support for failing or under-prepared students. However, building on academic literacies theorising, recent thinking about writing in Britain has made a strong case for the need to embed writing within regular disciplinary teaching. It has been pointed out that many of the ‘problems’ of student writing are a result of confusions concerning disciplinary demands and epistemologies (Lea and Street 1998, Lillis 2001, Wingate 2006). As such, attention to writing becomes the responsibility of all academic staff and has the potential to enhance the learning experience of all students.

Important UK work in this area has taken place at the Thinking Writing programme at Queen Mary University of London at Coventry University’s Centre for Academic Writing This work echoes widening participation agendas in Australia and South Africa which have led to important discipline-focused writing initiatives which seek to embed writing and academic literacy tuition within the learning experience of all students in disciplinary contexts. In the US, there have been 35 years of vigorous activity by writing teachers and pedagogically-attuned subject-based professors involved in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) as well as WiD initiatives (Russell 2002).For these movements, attention to writing is seen not as a matter of addressing remediality, but rather as a means to promote the learning and critical thinking of all students (Bean 2001, Monroe 2002, Monroe 2003).

  1. Objectives

The objectives of the WiD initiatives at the twopartner institutions were to:

•Enhance students’ academic writing skills

•Improve students’ learning experience

•Encourage students to discuss and explore the challenges of writing at university

•Promote engagement with writing issues that are specific to subject disciplines

•Support the institutions’ widening participation and retention initiatives to retain and motivate students

•Support academic staff in improving support for their students’ writing

•Support training development for staff

•Research the effectiveness of WiD initiatives

•Disseminate our findings across the higher education sector.

  1. Project overview

Write Now’s approach to WiD has been to work with various academic departments at the two institutions on a variety of projects. In sections 7 and 8 of this guide we describe some of these projects to highlight the different approaches adopted and to share what we have learnt.Monitoring and research into effectiveness of these projects have been key to our work in order to ensure that we continue to improve existing writing provision and to help us extend our work throughout the organisation in the future. This research is outlined in this guide and also in numerous articles and a forthcoming book on the subject (see section 12).

Write Now advocates an approach to assessment and feedback that views it as a means of facilitating students’ learning and writing development and to help them continually improve and learn from their written work. As assessment and feedback are such a vital part of WiD work we have prepared a separate guide on this subject.

The WiD projects described were run by Write Now Writing Specialists in conjunction with academic department staff.

7.London Metropolitan projects

7.1Phase 1 – Projects during 2006-09

From 2006-09, the Write Now CETL at London Met carried out WiD initiatives with many departments, including design, film studies, management and psychology.

The Write NowWriting Specialist at London Metropolitan, Dr Peter O’Neill, worked with lecturers in various departments to introduce writing elements into a number of course modules. These staff were “recruited” through a number of means. Initially, we contacted several lecturers who taught core first- year modules and who we knew were interested in teaching and learning projects. But we also recruited staff as a result of presentations of our work at professional development events and at the London Metropolitan teaching and learning conference for staff.

We include below, as an example of our WiD work during this phase, a case study of the Writing design initiative, one of London Met’s more ambitious disciplinary writing collaborations.

Case study 1:Writing design
Introduction / This project was a WiD collaboration between design history and theory specialist at the London Metropolitan University Sir John Cass School of Art, Media and Design, Dr Dipti Bhagat, and the Write Now CETL Writing Specialist at London Metropolitan University, Dr Peter O’Neill. The collaboration has led to consideration of the role of academic writing in practice-led design courses and to curricular change designed to help design students to become better academic writers and ultimately more thoughtful and expressive designers.
Objectives / We identified our task as negotiating and managing the role of discipline specific academic writing in courses that are predicated on practice - that is designing, making, producing.
In the case of practice-led design education in particular, academic writing is sometimes resisted by students, who may be unprepared for it. Writing design attempts to address such concerns and has as its goal to enable students, who may be both reluctant to engage in historical and theoretical study and wary of academic writing, to write critically, confidently and effectively about design and design practice in its historical and theoretical contexts.
Summary of project / The module on which we collaborated is the compulsory first-year “Context of Design” module for all practice-led design courses taken by approximately 200 students a year in six practice-based courses. As the “higher education orientation” module, it has a dual function: it underpins the development of students’ criticality, theoretical and historical knowledge base and academic skills; and it focuses on design history, between 1851 and 1945, as practice and object, in its widest context.
The curriculum of this module was re-designed as a “writing-intensive module”, to bring discipline-specific, academic writing to all teaching and learning activities (Bean, 2001) and to replace the traditional end of semester essay with four mini-essays, each focusing on a real design object from the period of study. Replacing the long essay with four mini-essays helped us to think of students’ academic writing in their first semester as developmental, with an opportunity to provide formative feedback between essays. The best three of the four essays counted for final assessment.
Crucial to the module is a workshop taught in week three of semester. This workshop was developed jointly between subject specialist and Writing Specialist and was delivered by all staff involved in the course (10 workshops in total were held). The nature of the collaboration between the CETL Writing Specialist and the design history subject specialist was dialogic (Lunsford, 1991), porous and genuinely interdisciplinary, thus reflecting the ethos of a writinginthedisciplines approach. Collaboration within the design history teaching team was necessarily hierarchical, in order to ensure parity of delivery and student experience and in response to the reality of working with a team of part-time and hourly paid lecturers. The Writing Specialist co-taught this workshop with some of the design teaching staff and as such the workshop provided considerable staff development in the area of academic writing, encouraging design history staff to engage with an aspect of pedagogy – teaching subject based writing – the responsibility for which subject lecturers may be reluctant to embrace.
The goal of these workshops was for the students themselves to produce – with our guidance – an actual mini-essay that constituted an “object analysis” (of a work of design specific to the period studied), which would serve as a model for future academic writing and which would address some of the complexities of academic writing in design which often perplex students: referencing, bibliographies, quoting sources, selection and ordering of material, and the appropriate questions to ask in an object analysis.
In advance of the workshop, students were given pre-selected museum objects to consider (the object varied according to the particular class specialism). At the workshop students were provided with brief extracts of academic texts (as ‘research’) relevant to the object in focus. Students were then placed in groups and each group wrote a short paragraph in response to specific questions on the object. We provided an introductory paragraph and each student paragraph contributed to a complete mini-essay on the object in focus. Six groups provided paragraphs on:
• the object’s description and function
• its decorative style
• materials/technology used in making the artefact
• its social context
• its historical context
• a conclusion.
The structure of these paragraphs is designed to demonstrate a coherent approach to building a fluid ‘story’ that enables students to develop their own argument about the object. The paragraph foci encourage students to make informed judgments about the object (in part using the academic extracts and their own visual skills): this works as an introduction to critical thinking and writing. Students begin to experience how structure, argument and criticality are fundamentally connected to writing progressively about design.
Students were given 40 minutes to discuss and write their paragraph which had to include a quotation, footnoted reference and bibliography, on the template provided for this task. Students were also expected to offer an appropriate caption for an image of the object on the template. We then went through the versions on a visualiser and discussed good and less good features. The templates were then collated and distributed to all students so that everyone had the complete mini-essay and the guidance for all the individual paragraphs. Naturally, some paragraphs were better than others but this did not matter, especially as the group nature of the work took pressure off individuals. The aim was above all to show students that the mini-essay is do-able (rather than to provide a perfect model), to suggest a structure for writing it, and to provide them with a space to try out the practice of referencing.
Evaluation / The workshop also offered an opportunity to elicit student responses to questionnaires on their views about academic writing in design. We were pleased to see that students were positive about its potential to improve practice. For one student design history methods helped to ‘understand the social context of design’; for another, in the spirit of postmodern designers, it provided a resource to plunder: ‘understanding previous design and its history give me a wider range of eras to study and items to gain inspiration from’. The potential for knowledge transfer was well recognised, with students suggesting history and theory ‘gives the designer the ability to argue her viewpoint when discussing design’ or enables them to ‘learn about design and understand it properly in order to use the knowledge to be more successful in designing objects yourself’. The most ambitious student felt history/theory learning could be ‘very helpful to write publications such as articles and explanations of your work. Maybe in the future if I decide to write a book about design I can use the knowledge gained at university’. No student hinted at writing being inessential. Rather all found writing and history served their development as designers. Indeed, one student said ‘now I understand that I have to look very carefully, see the details’, suggesting that writing about design history enhanced her visual literacy.
Conclusions / Writing design began as a major project with 10 workshops held for all first-year practice-led design students (approximately 200 students) and it is now embedded in the curriculum and is a compulsory part of all practice-led design students’ first semester at London Met. Our concern to embed rigour in writing for practice-led design courses is not just about utilising writing to enhance learning about design, its history and its theory. The focus on writing practice, embedded in history and theory teaching and learning adheres to the recommendations of the QAA Subject Benchmark for Design to bridge the theory-practice gap: “to enable students to acquire knowledge and understanding of the critical and contextual dimensions of their discipline, master the communication and information skills, and develop the critical awareness required to learn and articulate their learning in this area.” (QAA 2002 p.1).
We hope that the ultimate outcome of our collaboration will be that careful, considered academic writing in design history and theory will make more intelligent, more visually literate, and more ambitious designers.
Further impact / This writing design collaboration led to Dipti Bhagat and Peter O’Neill getting involved in the ‘Widening participation in Art and Design’ project. WiD as an approach is very compatible with recent widening participation thinking around inclusive cultures and practice (eg Bridger and May’s recent HEA report on inclusive cultures). See
for further details.
Further information / Bhagat, D. andO'Neill, P. (2010) Writing design: A Collaboration Between the Write Now CETL and The Sir John Cass School of Art, Media and Design.Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education, special issue.

Important lessons were learned during Phase 1 of our WiD work including the following: