So… still thinking about the connections between images and reading and writing. Kress (2006) discusses shifts in power as we become (re)producers of multimodal texts and he explores differences in the reading paths created as we move between closed densely printed pages and new media representations. Look at Dusty Boots Line (1988) by Richard Long. A straight line in the landscape. A simple scuff from A to B which could be anywhere or nowhere. I’m conscious that I can present texts to be read in this decontextualised and linear way.

Kress describes the creation of  ‘open paths’ in new media. I wondered whether we can encourage students to produce ‘open path’ texts in order to offer a way into their reading of the densely printed page. We need to be able to shift between reading both text types but perhaps I can encourage students to make more conscious use of images. 

Shirley Brice Heath ‘Seeing our Way into Learning’ is an interesting read and I may have referred to this paper in earlier postings. I keep coming back to it because it offers some compelling arguments about the relationship between images, text and the development of thought processes. It made me think about how I can encourage my students to read. She says:

…it would seem that seeing and attending to specific features of perceived images engage us in calling up information we have stored through prior experience and can now recall and recount verbally.

In the gallery incident referred to in the previous posting, the engagement with the visual experience appeared to enable an enhanced connection with the theoretical text. Reading and talking about the text prior to the visual experience appeared to prime the observation – students got more out of the gallery experience but also appeared to have a better understanding of the text because there were connections with their lived experience. Students appeared to be participating in ‘collaborative theory building’ but importantly Brice Heath talks about creating the visual as well as reading images.

In ‘seeing and attending to…’ Brice Heath appears to be referring to observation – looking with intent. Engaging students with images still potentially positions them as receivers. We can’t just include any old image with text and imagine that this might create richer conditions for reading (I’m mentally scarred by the proliferation of over literal poorly produced clip art images). Enabling students to produce images in relation to texts appears to have potential. Sanders (2007) details a project where students produced photographs of their observations. The extent to which focused observation is connected with the development of critical capacities is usefully explored here in that it enables students to make connections with their own ‘life worlds’. Sanders also makes the distinction between a descriptive use of images and ways of enabling students to develop ‘skilful observation and reflection: to encourage critical thinking’ in geography. Of course this is a subject that demands an engagement with the environment and it may be less clear on how connections might be made in other disciplines.

Brice  Heath S. (2000) ‘Seeing our Way into Learning’ Cambridge Journal of Education 30:1 p121-132.

Kress, G. (2003) Literacy in the New Media Age

Sanders, R. (2007) ‘Developing Geographers through Photography: Enlarging Concepts’ Journal of Geography in Higher Education 31:1 p. 181-195.

I was working with some Year 3 students this week at Liverpool Tate. We’ve been reading Baudrillard and Lyotard both of which we’ve found Very’ard. Looking at the Nam June Paik exhibition seemed to really help some of us make sense of the reading. For example, we had been reading about relationships between the real and the virtual… the connect and disconnect between signs (texts, images and spaces) and their meanings. Last week in the seminar we were looking at Baudrillard (2000) The Vital Illusion where he explores ‘The Murder of the Real’:

‘In our virtual world, the question of the Real, of the referent, of the subject and its object, can no longer even be posed’ (p62)

There was a eureka moment in the gallery when we were looking at one of the installations:

Graham Gibbs recently lead a seminar outlining the TESTA project at Winchester (auditing/researching assessment environments http://www.testa.ac.uk/).

The outlines he provided ‘Criteria for ‘assessment working” that resonate with opportunities that might be provided by the use of short writing activities.

I’ve copied his notes below and am thinking about how these connect with writing development. Please contact me if you’d like further information regarding the full document.

Criteria for assessment ‘working’ – Graham Gibbs

• enough student effort distributed reasonably evenly across all important topics
• the effort they put in at a high intellectual level – focussed on understanding rather than memorising or ‘sufficing’
• students clear and about ‘goals and standards’ and orient their effort appropriately
• feedback is effective: students read it, understand it and use it to improve what they do next.
• progression over time so that students become more sophisticated in the way that they tackle similar tasks

The frozen symposium scheduled for 1st December has been thawed out and re-booked for 9th March. The programme remains the same but the session will start with lunch at 12pm and conclude at 5pm. Please contact me directly if you are interested in attending.

We are also starting to plan for the Writing Development in Higher Education Conference which is coming to Edge Hill University in 2012. I’ve included a link to previous conferences to give you an idea of the nature of the papers and keynoytes. Let me know if  you’re interested in presenting or reviewing papers for the conference.

http://www.writenow.ac.uk/news-events/wdhe-conference-2010/

The team at London Metroploitan University have produced this resource which may be if use to tutors and students. It draws on their extensive experiences of engaging students with academic writing and includes student and tutor perspectives:

Writing Essays @ University guide

I’ve been encouraged to break the ice on my frozen pages. I’ve shovelled through a light and dusty layer and am now hammering at a thick and compacted crust. Here’s one for Roy.

The Writing Symposium (the 11th CLTR Symposium) planned for 1st December had to be cancelled due to the adverse weather conditions everywhere, it seemed, but Ormskirk. It has now been rescheduled for 9th March and will, if necessary, take place in a small igloo at the end of my garden. Further details to follow.

This is the theme for the day and a short blurb about the proposed seminar sessions.

Academic writing and more specifically writing for assessment, plays a significant role in the student experience in higher education. This symposium will offer an opportunity to share examples of the ways in which writing has been employed to extend student engagement from a range of disciplinary perspectives and at different stages of the learning experience.

In attempting to promote engagement with learning through/with academic discourse, is it possible to identify what works and why?

How can writing promote/sustain engagement with learning?

What types of methodologies can we employ to identify effective developmental writing practices?

‘Writing Development for Students and Staff: Face-to-Face and Online ‘Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams (Centre for Academic Writing, Coventry University)

This session will explore strategies for engaging in face-to-face and online ‘whole-institution’ writing development. Drawing on the work of the Centre for Academic Writing (CAW) at Coventry University , the presentation will highlight a range of writing development activities and will focus on the practicalities and pedagogies of carrying out student writing tutorials and staff writing consultations on campus and online. The newest component of CAW, the Coventry Online Writing Lab (COWL), will be introduced and demonstrated, and meaningful discussion of both the benefits and limitations of online and face-to-face writing provision will be encouraged.

‘Writing as a socially situated act: turning theory into practice’.
Lisa Clughen (Nottingham Trent University)

In this session I shall invite participants to reflect on and discuss the calls from different quarters of literacy scholarship to recognise the sociocultural dimensions of literacy. Supportive literacy cultures, recognise that literacy is ‘essentially social’ and should be ‘culturally relevant’. Recognising the sociocultural nature of literacy renders literacy theories, policies and practices more complex than the dominant autonomous paradigm of literacy might allow and opens debate about culturally specific issues such as the varying epistemological approaches, writing and discourse conventions of different disciplines. Moreover, if writing is a complex social activity, then debates about power, identity and being also come to the fore when engaging with literacies. In this session, I will describe how I have encountered and responded to these matters in my work as Academic Support Co-ordinator in the School of Arts and Humanities at Nottingham Trent University. I shall do so with reference to my various interactions with different literacy cultures across the University, but will focus in particular on my work with a level 3 module in gender and sexuality in the English subject area. However, the sentiment that reading and writing are ‘complex human activities, inseparable from both people and the places involved’ will infuse this session and participants will be invited to share their own thoughts and experiences in order to produce together a contextualised, nuanced discussion that, in keeping with the situated approach to literacies, seeks to draw out the local and particular in literacy practices and support.

This may be of interest to those writing/studying with English as an additional language or for tutors and academic related staff looking for useful strategies. This information was posted on the EATAW list-serv – I thought it would be useful to share.

ACADEMIC WRITING FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS OF BUSINESS – Stephen Bailey

SCIENCE RESEARCH WRITING FOR NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH by Hilary Glasman-Deal (Imperial College London, UK)

“A very high proportion of the PhDs, visiting scholars and staff at Imperial College are not native speakers, and we have been using the material which has now been published as Science Research Writing: A guide for non-native speakers of English for the past six years.with great success. It’s about to go into reprint but should still be available.

This book is designed to enable non-native English speakers to write science research for publication in English. It can also be used byEnglish speakers and is a practical, user-friendly book intended as a fast, do-it-yourself guide for those whose English language proficiency is above intermediate. The approach is based on material developed from teaching graduate students at Imperial College London and has been extensively piloted. The book guides the reader through the process of writing science research and will also help with writing a Master’s or Doctoral thesis in English.

Science writing is much easier than it looks because the structure and language are conventional. The aim of this book is to help the reader discover a template or model for science research writing and then to provide the grammar and vocabulary tools needed to operate that model.
There are five units: Introduction, Methodology, Results, Discussion/Conclusion and Abstract. The reader develops a model for eachsection of the research article through sample texts and exercises; this is followed by a Grammar and Writing Skills section designed to respond to frequently-asked questions as well as a vocabulary list including examples of how the words and phrases are to be used.”
Hilary Glasman-Deal

I’d be interested to know if anybody has used these texts and whether they were of use?

What? Already?

Perhaps you think it’s too early or maybe you’re near to submitting a first assignment.

Introducing writing for assessment

Your writing  should continue to improve during the course of your degree.

Your approaches to reading and writing will develop as you become more familiar with the expectations of your course. Reading and writing on a regular basis will help you to develop an understanding of your subject and will help you to develop relevant academic skills.

You should aim to use writing as part of your learning.

                                                                                                Don’t just write for assessment.

Take some time to think about your experiences prior to your degree. It is useful to acknowledge how you think/feel about academic writing.

How confident do you feel about reading, writing and researching as part of your degree?

How confident do you feel about writing for assessment?

Think about your previous experiences of academic writing.

Can you describe a particular instance when you felt very positive about your writing?

Some strategies for developing your writing:

You could keep a reading log – Like an open-ended journal where you can write down your thoughts, feelings, ideas about any reading you are doing. 

Bean (2001) says: ‘Readers can describe their emotional, intellectual and philosophical responses to the text and call into consciousness the hidden memories and associations the text triggers.’

Having an informal means of writing what you think about what you have read is really useful particularly when you start to read more complex texts.

Play the believing and doubting game. See yourself in conversation with the author and play ‘skeptical doubter vs open minded believer’. Seeking out views that are different from your own is an important aspect of critical thinking. As a reader you need to adopt a dual role of being open to texts and being skeptical of them. Use these views as a starting point for short pieces of writing.

Marginal notes – every time you have an urge to underline part of a text – write out why you wanted to underline it. What does it mean? Why is it a significant phrase or sentence? This is more useful than painting most of your text with highlighter (an alternative is to use a black marker and reverse the process by obliterating words).

It’d be good to know if anybody finds any of these strategies useful?

How’s your writing going?

It is difficult to consider writing for assessment or academic writing for publication without recognising and working with the relevance of particular disciplines. Swantje Lahm and Nadja Sennewald discussed the changing context for writing instruction at the University of Bielefield, Germany, proposing a six ‘E’ model for working with students to enhance their writing through an awareness of features of particular genres within their discipline. The following information is taken from their handout which is also available via this link:

The six E

‘Together with the students we deconstructed examples of essay writing and explored the criteria which define ‘good’ essays…The students uncovered the secrets of textual structure and the different textual moves became more manageable for them. We suggest that our approach to analysing disciplinary characteristics of a text genre and to teach them specifically in a seminar situation can be transferred to other disciplines as well.                   

 Explore – Engage – Exchange – Explain – Elaborate – Evaluate

Explore – Students explore key features of a target genre as a professional form of communication in a discipline.

Engage – Students experiement with various strategies for writing in the target genre.

Exchange – Students and teachers use both the process and products of experimentation as the basis for authentic communication aboutthe subject matter.

Explain – Teacher models expert strategies for the target genre as a response to student texts.

Elaborate – Students elaborate and refine their strategies.

Evaluate – Students assess their knowledge, skills and abilities, give each other feedback and receive feedback from the teacher.

 Does anybody teach students explicitly about thesis statements?

Setting a clear purpose and intention to the writing gives it momentum. Some writing appears generally well produced but just sits on the page without clear direction or any sense of movement. I know. After receiving extensive reviewers comments on a paper and having the uncomfortable experience of having to re-read it, I was aware of the limp nature of the writing. It just sat there being writing about… rather than writing with something to say. This seems to relate to more than just a question of purpose.

The following notes are taken from a presentation by Dr Alex Baratta (University of Manchester) where he offered a comparison between the ways the thesis statement is taught in the USA and UK.

This link might be of interest:

http://www.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/studyskills/essentials/writing/how_to_write.html

I found this useful in thinking about my own writing as well as student writing for assessment. Although I’m familiar with creating a focus in an introductory paragraph, the thesis statement suggests (and demands) more thinking.

Wyrick (2002) ‘a good thesis states the writer’s clearly defined opinion on some subject. You must tell your reader what you think. Don’t dodge the issue; present your opinion specifically and precisely’. There is an emphasis on having an ‘attitude’ towards your subject but it’s more than a space for subjectivity – it’s about positioning yourself through your knowledge/awareness of the subject and identifying your contribution. 

How do you define a thesis statement in your particular discipline and how do you communicate this to students?

Christine Sinclair (University of Strathclyde) presented a range of strategies at the WDHE Conference which included showing students how she writes and the value she places on writing during her own study. This includes journal entries, initial drafts, examples of free-writing andways she has both received and responded to feedback.

I’ve scanned the handout, with Christine’s permission, because I think it made a really nice resource. Hopefully it won’t get lost in translation. This blog might also be of interest – Christine’s reflections on on-line learning and writing identity.

http://www.e-learningconfessions.blogspot.com

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One aspect I particularly liked was the way in which ideas/writing develops over time and showing your own drafts and writing processes can be useful in illustrating this. Showing how much time can/should be spent on the development of ideas as part of the writing process seems useful.