The dynamics of knowledge creation: academics' changing writing practices – international...
-
Upload
queens-university-belfast -
Category
Education
-
view
105 -
download
1
Transcript of The dynamics of knowledge creation: academics' changing writing practices – international...
CGHE Seminar October 13th 2016
The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation: Academics' changing
writing practices - international implications
#acadswriting
Project team: Karin Tusting (PI), David Barton, Ibrar Bhatt, Mary Hamilton, Sharon
McCulloch
Literacy Research Centre, Lancaster UniversityDepts of Linguistics and of Educational Research
Funded by the ESRC
Introduction
Project Description and Significance
Why Study Writing in HE?
Writing work is at the heart of knowledge production in many cultures, and traditionally, the university has been a pivotal and highly valued site for this.
Transformations in the HE workplace lead to changes in the work, responsibilities and identities of academics which can be tracked through their writing practices.
How Universities are changing and the implications for academics’ work Universities are changing within the context
of an international, competitive knowledge-based economy (Sum and Jessop 2013) from which emerge new, competing versions of “knowledge” – new producers and audiences
Changing Student Bodies Massification/widening participation - from
an elite to a mass system Internationalisation of student body Dispersed International campuses Consumerisation and marketisation – fees
Transformations in managerial practices in universities Accountability and audit (Strathern 2000) Intensification of work and job
flexibility/insecurity
Changing resources – working within changed time/space – new digital tools (Goodfellow and Lea 2013) Facilitating distance and blended learning
and collaboration (Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), video conferencing,
changing nature of scholarship – the ‘digital scholar’ - online library resources,(Weller 2011);
mobilities - smartphones and portable devices
• to publish in strategic ways which can conflict with disciplinary norms and established practices
• to be accountable to standards which change the nature of academic work
• to respond to new demands around impact, public engagement, open access
• to engage in social media and maintain public online persona
• to use new technological platforms eg VLEs which take time to learn
These changes in the demands and resources of the academic workplace lead to tensions and pressures:
Theoretical perspectives A literacy practices approach: researching what
people are doing, not what they ‘should’ be doing or what skills they should have (Barton 2007; Hamilton 2012; Tusting 2012).
A sociomaterial perspective: researching how people’s writing practices are shaped by social and material tools and contexts, resources including the digital (Fenwick et al 2011; Orlikowski 2007; Callon 2002)
Some examples of concepts that guide our research and illuminate the dynamics of knowledge creation
Textual trajectories : tracing the life of texts in institutional ordering (Smith, 2005)
Inscription “all the types of transformations through which an entity becomes materialized into a sign, an archive, a document, a piece of paper, a trace” (Latour 1999, 306). Inscription enables social action, helping to move forward intellectual and practical projects
Symmetry requires us to attend equally to the
material, affective and social aspects of writing practices
all writing work is real and contributes to the production of epistemic cultures
Mundane materiality asserts the value of first-hand accounts and observations of the material conditions and strategies of everyday writing work
Research designMaths Marketing History TOTAL
interviewsUniversity A: research-intensive 1960s campus
9 7 8 24
University B: urbanpost-1992
6 6 3 15
University C: red-brick research-intensive urban
10 3 10 23
TOTAL no. of interviews
25 16 21 (62)
We are here
Phase 1: working with individuals
• Interviews with individuals about their work practices, technobiographies, and typical days’ practices
Phase 2: detailed study of writing
processes• Recording the
detail of writing processes using screen capture, digital pens, keyboard tracking, informed by interviews
Phase 3: understanding the community
• Interviews with managers, administrative staff, colleagues and collaborators
Screen shot from Phase 2 recordings of writing
Distribution of writing activities
TeachingResearchAdminService
Example 1
Mobilising Research Networks in the
accelerated academy
Tracing a text trajectory
First contact: entirely at a distance
?“I still don’t understand
where I fit”
Next: face to face meeting
“Skype and email conversations are misunderstood, plus you’ve got an interdisciplinary thing going on”
“We got too tired … These are academics that are used to crafting … If you try to wordsmith too early, you can’t capture and it slows you down.”
Third phase: writing from task list
“I came away going, ‘OK, now we need to …. ‘ “
Fourth phase: co-ordinating writing in a small team
Leveraging the multimodal affordances of Word and Skype to allow people to write together across continents – “IT becomes crucial”.
Fifth phase: co-ordinating with the larger bid team
How long did this take?
How long did this take? Diane contacted on 1st day of month. Meeting on 20th day of that month. Bid submitted on 11th day of the following
month.
>>> All the written communications involved in producing the bid after the meeting needed to happen in a space of about 20 days (including weekends).
Internationalisation and global interdisciplinary collaboration depend on a range of writing practices
In a context of strategic pressure to be involved in large international research bids
Interdisciplinarity changing both the kinds of work which can be done, and the kinds of work which need to be done
Digital technologies changing what is possible Support division of writing labour Co-ordinate writing tasks Enable a back and forth process between face
to face and distance Make a highly intensified accelerated process
possible – and, increasingly, expected?
Shows the importance of becoming enrolled into international networks Developing a range of ways of doing writing
within these network Different writing practices at different points in
the process
Example 2
New forms of workNew genres
In Higher Education, new strands of activity have been brought together
Therefore, new textual work that academics must contend with
These can carry different value systems and increase/change workload
Don’s report
“Something which I have been working on this morning is this draft
of the Head of Department’s response to the Examiner’s Reports.
It has gone through several different drafts. This year for the first
time the Examiners’ Reports is going to have to be made available
to students via Moodle... So that has kind of changed the way in
which it is written … because students are going to see it.” (Don, Historian)
Example
This is the first time that this report is being written for students
Recontextualising an established genre for a new audience
A new kind of student relationship = new and different writing work on the part of academics
Accountability and transparency
New demands
Digitisation facilitates the rapid dissemination of texts = the acceleration of work
Both in terms of speed and quantity of texts being produced
New demands
Does this sound familiar? What are the implications for academic
professional work?
International Dimensions
Implications and Networks
International dimensions
International interest, personally and professionally
Superdiversity
Global networks and academic mobility
What can the project offer internationally:
A ‘telling case’ which can be used as a point of comparison
Methodologies: data collection instruments and approaches to analysis
Social issues
Different contexts of massification, internationalization and managerial practices;
North-South disparities, including access to technologies;
Global networks and academic mobility.
Language issues 1: Who speaks what to whom and in what language?
The language of school education? The language of HE teaching? The language of the discipline? The language of publishing? The language of everyday life? The language of social media?
The Superdiverse academic
Language issues 2
Publishing in English
Why the rejections?
A question of equity?
The multilingual scholar
Discussion
We are currently collecting data for Phase 3. To follow the project’s progress:
Blog at http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/acadswriting/
THE END
http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/acadswriting/
ReferencesBarnett, R. (2000). University knowledge in an age of supercomplexity. Higher education, 40(4), 409-422.Barton, D. (2007) Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Oxford: Blackwell, Second edition. Callon, M. (2002) ‘Writing and (re) writing devices as tools for managing complexity’, in J. Law, A. Mol (Eds.). Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, Durham, NC: Duke University Press,191-218. Evans, James, and Phil Jones (2011). "The walking interview: Methodology, mobility and place." Applied Geography 31.2): 849-858.Fenwick, T., & Landri, P. (2012). Materialities, textures and pedagogies: Socio-material assemblages in education. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20(1), 1-7.Goodfellow, R., & Lea, M. R. (2013). Literacy in the digital university: Critical perspectives on learning, scholarship and technology. Routledge.Jerejian, A. C. M., Reid, C., & Rees, C. S. (2013). The contribution of email volume, email management strategies and propensity to worry in predicting email stress among academics. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 991–996. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2012.12.037Latour, B. 1999: Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge: HUP. http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/23/235
Lea, M. R. & Stierer, B. (2011). Changing academic identities in changing academic workplaces: learning from academics’ everyday professional writing practices. Teaching in Higher Education, 16(6), 605-616. Lupton, D. (2014). ‘Feeling better connected’: Academics’ use of social media. Canberra: News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra.Orlikowski, W. J. (2007) ‘Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work.’ Organization studies, 28(9), 1435-1448. Smith, Dorothy E. (2005) Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Rowman Altamira.Strathern, M. (2000). Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. (J. P. Mitchell, Ed.)European Association of Social Anthropologists. London and New York: Routledge.Sum, Ngai-Ling, and Bob Jessop (2013) "Competitiveness, the knowledge-based economy and higher education." Journal of the Knowledge Economy 4, no. 1 (2013): 24-44. Tusting, K. (2012) ‘Learning accountability literacies in educational workplaces: situated learning and processes of commodification.’ Language and Education, 26 (2), 121-138 Vonderau, A. (2015). Audit culture and the infrastructures of excellence: On the effects of campus management technologies. Learning and Teaching, 8(2), 29–47. doi:10.3167/latiss.2015.080203Hamilton 2012 Weller, M. (2011). The digital scholar: How technology is transforming scholarly practice. Basingstike: Bloomsbury Academic.