Essay-writing as social practice: Implications for work with students

1. Essay-writing as social practice: Implications for work with students ADSHE Conference Workshop Christine Carter June 2014

2. Background Problem

3. Background problem

4. Outline • Essay-writing and dyslexia • Essay-writing as social practice: what does it mean? • Outline of research study • Issues for our practice

5. Essay-writing and dyslexia • Connections with cognitive markers of dyslexia • Doesn’t explain writing difference • Interactions between genes, environment and development • Deficit/difference within the individual • Dyslexia as culturally defined • Focus on individual experience within different discourses

6. Essay-writing as social practice • Ways we write emerge from social and cultural context • Writing as culturally driven as opposed to a set of skills • Less emphasis on cognitive activity and development

7. Essay-writing as social practice • Social practices are the ways we act, speak, write, feel, value, believe in particular settings • Practices are regulated by surrounding discourses • Writers are enabled or constrained differently in different disciplinary discourses

8. Essay-writing as social practice • Disciplinary discourses influence: • how knowledge is constructed • the kind of writing identity that is acceptable • social relationships (with tutors, disciplinary ‘ways of being’, other texts) Much of this remains implicit

9. Essay-writing research Purpose • To understand more about the writing differences amongst this group • To embed writers identified as dyslexic within a social practice view of writing

10. Essay-writing research Participants • 11 undergraduates from schools of archaeology, history and philosophy • 7 identified as dyslexic, 4 not

11. Essay-writing research Part 1 • Interest in how students experience essay writing, how they identify as writers • 3 interviews per student: before; when ready to write an essay; afterwards

12. Essay-writing research Part 2 • Analysis of pre-writing plans (where done), evolving essays and final version submitted • Use of model of coherence to analyse global paragraph and sentence structure

13. Essay-writing research Coding framework • Coding framework informed by ‘academic literacies’ (Ivanic and Lillis) and Burden’s thinking on ‘self-efficacy’ • Allows constellations of individual difference to be articulated in an organised way (See hand-out 1)

14. Essay-writing research Findings • Dyslexic difficulties mitigated or exacerbated by the writing culture. Tacit agendas a problem for all • Importance of meta-affective and meta-linguistic as well as metacognitive (‘solution-finders’, ‘able to create comfort zone’ ‘awareness of own language’) • Need for more nuanced understanding of how students structure essays • Made visible dyslexia-related issues

15. Essay-writing research • Compare with the national discourse: • Writing as a skill • Lack of skill can be remedied over time. • Problems within the individual • Emphasis on specialism

16. Implications for : a)contentb)concept of support Content: How do the findings, as shown in hand-out 2, affect the content and priorities of writing support? Concept: How can we meet expectations about ‘specialist dyslexia support’ and still meet our students’ actual writing needs (hand-out 3)?