Crossover pedagogy: The collaborative search for meaning

Robert Nash describes his cross-pedagogical approach to co-teaching with student affairs colleagues and shares a provocative classroom discussion that illustrates how it can help students create meaning for their lives.     

Playful explicitness with grammar: a pedagogy for writing

The place of grammar within the teaching of writing has long been contested and successive research studies have indicated no correlation between grammar teaching and writing attainment. However, a recent study has shown a significant positive impact on writing outcomes when the grammar input is intrinsically linked to the demands of the writing being taught. The study adopted a mixed methods design with a large‐scale randomised controlled trial accompanied by a qualitative dataset, which provided contextual information about how the intervention was implemented. In this paper, we will outline the pedagogical principles that underpinned the intervention, and illustrate both the theoretical grounding and practical classroom examples that exemplify the approach. We will argue that any future policy or professional development that draws on this research must take account of these pedagogical principles, rather than focusing too superficially on either the grammar or the teaching materials which exemplify them.     

Negotiating the challenge of collaborative writing: learning from one writing group's mutiny

With continuing pressure to publish or perish, interventions such as writing groups are increasingly part of the academic landscape. In this paper, we discuss our writing group's experiment with collaborative writing, which came unstuck as simmering concerns led to a mutiny within the group. The mutiny provided insights into tensions that are inevitably present in writing groups and collaborative writing exercises but are seldom written about. We explore these tensions via a collaborative autoethnography, drawing on published literature on writing groups and collaborative writing. The mutiny revealed three key dynamics. Experienced voices can have an important role to play but these voices need to be moderated so that other voices might be recognised and valued. Pleasure and productivity are two necessary components for sustaining writing groups and writing collaborations. Finally, hierarchies in the academic context are inescapable but they can be renegotiated so that more enabling power relations can be generated.     

ZPD-activated languaging and collaborative L2 writing

Recent second/foreign language (L2) research has witnessed the application of sociocultural tenets to L2 classrooms. This study aimed to probe whether Iranian L2 learners’ engagement in ZPD-activated collaborative dialogue, or ‘languaging’, mediates their learning process and, specifically, their appropriate use of metadiscourse to address content, organisation and audience issues in writing. English-as-a-foreign-language-writing classes at two universities were assigned to four different instructional conditions, namely, ZPD-activated collaborative, ZPD-free collaborative, fine-tuned L2-input provision and prevalent teacher-fronted approaches. The data comprised metadiscourse-oriented writing test scores, weekly writings and audio-recorded in-class collaborative dialogues of the ZPD groups. The results demonstrated the ZPD-activated collaborative writing approach significantly facilitated the learners’ appropriate use of metadiscourse. Complementary interpretative analysis of the ZPD participants’ metadiscourse-related episodes showed that the initially-other-regulated (undistributed) writing tasks became progressively reciprocal with less-skilled peers displaying microgenetic use of L2 metadiscourse resources and dynamically assuming more participatory roles in regulating the writing tasks. The findings suggest engagement in ZPD-activated ‘languaging’ is crucial to shaping opportunities for L2 learners’ microgenetic learning and to their longer term cognitive development. In sum, the application of sociocultural tenets and notions has shown to be highly fruitful in explaining the social genesis of L2 development as a higher order psychological functioning.     

English for Specific Purposes and Academic Literacies: eclecticism in academic writing pedagogy

Academic Literacies and English for Specific Purposes perspectives on the teaching of academic writing tend to be positioned as dichotomous and ideologically incompatible. Nonetheless, recent studies have called for the integration of these two perspectives in the design of writing programmes in order to meet the needs of students in the increasingly diverse and shifting landscape of academia. The aim of the present paper is to reflect on how this theoretical integration could be put into practice. Drawing on the design of a research-based writing workshop for postgraduate anthropology students, we argue that rather than a ‘hybrid’ model of writing pedagogy, a theoretically grounded but eclectic approach is needed in order to respond to students’ personal, local, and disciplinary contexts.     

The study of teachers' written feedback to students' writing: changes in theoretical considerations and the expansion of research contexts

This paper identifies four successive phases in the study of written feedback to students' compositions. The studies included in these phases are distinguished by views of writing instruction reflected in their theoretical frameworks: the view of writing instruction as a series of teacher provided stimuli and students' responses to these stimuli; the view that the writing class is a rhetorical community, where teacher and students interact as readers and writers over texts; the view of learning to write as a phenomenon both natural and problematic, where school may interfere with students' natural development; the view that learning to write, like all other learning, depends on successful student-teacher interactions within student's zone of proximal development. While reviewing recent studies of written feedback, the paper shows how these changing views of writing instruction are accompanied by changing theoretical perspectives for the study of the provision and processing of written feedback as well as by a gradual expansion of research contexts for looking at this problem. Finally, in view of such a line of development, it suggests an agenda for future research.     

Implementing technology-enhanced collaborative writing in second and foreign language learning: A review of practices,technology and challenges

Education and Information Technologies - Technology-enhanced collaborative writing (TECW) for second language development is receiving increasing research attention from educators and teachers....     

Multimodal texts in Higher Education and the implications for writing pedagogy

Although studies on writing pedagogy and academic literacies have examined changing genres in tertiary education, there has not necessarily been an emphasis on how a range of modes and media have influenced texts in various disciplines. This paper explores the influence and incorporation of the visual into student texts in Higher Education, looking at the semiotic weighting of modes, conventions and functions of images, visual / verbal linkages and visual composition. These aspects of multimodal texts have implications for the ways in which we teach ‘academic literacies’ practices and writing as multimodal composition to students.     

Problematising problematisation: insights from critical pedagogy in a writing lesson in Bangladesh

Problematisation is the means by which critical pedagogy attempts to destabilise power relations related to gender, race, class, identity etc. Studies in critical pedagogy in language teaching explore different ways of problematisation treating problematisation as classroom practice. However, they do not specifically address the teacher’s struggle in employing problematisation and the learners’ experience with it in classroom settings. Hence the complexity of problematisation remains neglected in research in critical pedagogy in classroom contexts. This article explores the notion of problematisation through an analysis of a writing lesson involving undergraduate students in Bangladesh. It analyses both the teacher’s and a student’s encounters with and reflections on problematisation throughout the lesson, and reveals that problematisation embodies complexities, and is empowering when it is self-reflexive.     

Power,pedagogy and the personal: feminist ethics in facilitating a doctoral writing group

The paper explores questions of power arising from feminist facilitators running a doctoral writing group at a UK university. Butler’s [2014. Re-thinking Vulnerability and Resistance. [Online]. Accessed September 12, 2017. http://www.institutofranklin.net/sites/default/files/files/Rethinking%20Vulnerability%20and%20Resistance%20Judith%20Butler.pdf] theorisation of precarity and vulnerability inspired us to re-think normative constructions of research writing and the academic identities and subjectivities this presupposed. Our doctoral writing group was imagined as a space to think collectively and reflexively about the thesis, the multi-faceted power-dynamics at work in its production, and our relations to the text as both writer and audience. This paper antagonises some of the pedagogic consequences of inviting seemingly ‘personal’ matters into the space of the writing space and, subsequently, the doctoral text itself. We speak back to discourses that position doctoral writing as always and only an individual, and individualising endeavour, that eschews encounters with the personal and relational. Indeed, we recognise that configurations and spaces for research writing are always ‘political’.     

Scaffolding teachers to foster inclusive pedagogy and presence through collaborative action research

Teachers can be influential change agents in transforming their schools if they regularly reflect on their pedagogical practices, looking for improvements that will help all learners reach their full potential. However, in many sub-Saharan African countries, teachers seldom get an opportunity to collaboratively reflect on their practices. Action research, as an in-service professional development strategy, can be an ideal means of empowering teachers to collaboratively reflect on and improve their pedagogy to be more inclusive. Drawing from collaborative action research projects conducted by teachers in two primary schools in Zanzibar, Tanzania, this article explores the role of collaborative action research in developing the capacity of teachers to inform improvements in their pedagogical practices. The findings show how the participating teachers, with scaffolding influence from a critical friend (research facilitator), developed professionally along their zones of proximal development by promoting their pedagogical and research skills to enhance the presence, participation and achievement of all learners in their schools. Based on the findings, the article shows both the advantages and disadvantages of using collaborative action research in teacher professional development in the study context. The article also discusses the significance of organisational learning in in-service professional development in order to foster inclusive pedagogy through collaborative inquiry among teachers.     

Research leadership in writing for publication: A theoretical framework

Academics experience difficulty in managing competing tasks, particularly in relation to writing for publication. In a study conducted on a writing retreat, analysis of data obtained from academic writers revealed that facilitative leadership provided at a writing retreat was central to managing task complexity and writing‐related anxiety. The question remains, however, about how this leadership can be modelled in campus settings in order to continue to support academics in managing the complexity of their multiple roles as teachers, researchers and writers, beyond purely technical‐rational approaches. This article outlines one approach to answering this question: it explains how containment theory was used to shed light on the leadership role at the writing retreat, and it proposes a model—strategic engagement—for the leadership role in writing for publication in campus settings.     

Young Lives,Learning and Transformation: Some theoretical considerations

The term 'learning' is now used to signal a range of political, social and economic aspirations. At the same time, the political, economic and cultural conditions under which learning occurs are changing. In these circumstances, it is appropriate to return to some fundamental questions about what learning is. This paper draws from a four-year longitudinal study of young people and their experiences of learning, jointly directed by Phil Hodkinson and myself. The study was based upon semi-structured interviews commencing with 50 young people in their final year of compulsory schooling. Over the four-year period, it witnessed transformations in their lives, including transformations in their dispositions to learning. In the paper, I draw from a range of theoretical sources for the illumination of these transformations and attempt to ground the work in a critical theoretical framework. I argue that theory must acknowledge the situated, positional, relational and participatory nature of learning if it is to capture adequately the complexities of learning and transformational processes. I conclude, also, that the explanatory power of theory is enhanced when it incorporates a temporal dimension and when it addresses how learning is embedded within the complex and continually changing patterns of other life experiences.     

Indicators of institutional achievement: some theoretical and empirical considerations

This article outlines a number of general approaches to organisational effectiveness, and three approaches to effectiveness in the more specific field of higher education.The literature survey is used to derive a broad framework suggestive of the main causal relationships likely to exist between various areas of institutional achievement, and this framework is used as a background to discussion of empirical evidence.Empirical findings in the field of institutional achievement are sparse and poorly interconnected. The article summarises findings from product portfolio matrix studies and Cameron's work on effectiveness, discusses some aspects of institutional management, and outlines some differences between British and American universities regarding the acquisition of funds.The article concludes with comments on some methodological aspects of assessing institutional achievement.Revised version of a paper prepared for Jornadas Internacionales Sobre Demanda de Education Superior y Rendimiento Academico en la Universidad, Madrid, 9–11 April 1986.     

Harming not helping: The impact of a Canadian standardized writing assessment on curriculum and pedagogy

Test-based accountability programs are designed to promote improved standards of teaching and learning within the systems of education that they are connected to. Brenan [Brenan, A. L. (2006). Perspectives on the evolution and future of educational measurement. In: Robert (Ed.), Educational measurement (4th ed., pp. 1–16). Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers], however, suggests that little evidence exists to support the claim that these standardized assessment programs are achieving this goal. This study examines a Canadian high-stakes writing assessment's effect on the teaching of writing in three grade 12 academic English classrooms. Analysis across cases revealed that factors shaping the exam's impact on teachers’ pedagogical choices include their attitude toward the exam, the pressure they felt from their school communities and their years of experience. The study also found that the exam caused teachers to narrow their teaching of writing in relation to processes taught, assignment design, and evaluation criteria utilized. The study concludes that in the cases observed, the exam is having a negative impact on the teaching of writing.     

Peer-feedback and revision process in a wiki mediated collaborative writing

This study investigated the use of a wiki for collaborative writing among primary levels five (P5) and six (P6) students (n = 119) in a Chinese primary school in Hong Kong where English is taught as a second language (L2). Three classes of students and their English subject teachers participated in a three-month English language writing programme using a wiki. Quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed from activities recorded in the wiki system, including posted edits and comments, students’ group writings and student and teacher interviews. The wiki page history revealed information on the types of revisions that occurred, showing that different types of feedback elicited actual revisions, which may have resulted in better group writing. Findings from the study may shed light on how wikis can help provide support for students’ collaborative writing process with wikis, and how peer-feedback can influence this process.