Editors SHERRAN CLARENCE & LAURA DISON

Writing Writing CentresCentres in in Higher EducationHigher Education

Writing Centres in Higher Education: Working in and across the disciplines

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of the authors for their contributions to this volume, and for their commitment and enthusiasm throughout the process. It has been a pleasure to work with all of you. Thank you to Lisa Ganobscik-Williams from the Coventry Centre for Academic Writing for her foreword, and for her comments on earlier drafts of the book – we are grateful to have had you as part of this process. We would also like to thank Wikus van Zyl, Emily Vosloo, Johannes Richter and the publishing team at AFRICAN SUN MeDIA for their support, assistance and professionalism in producing this book. Special thanks to the peer reviewers for their feedback and advice, and to Reville Nussey for her excellent copyediting. A big thank you to our families for their support throughout this process.

We would also like to acknowledge with gratitude the financial support from Rhodes University’s Research Office, and the School of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand. This project would not have otherwise been possible.

This book is dedicated to all the writing centre directors, coordinators, peer

tutors, consultants and administrators in South Africa who work with creativity,

passion, integrity and empathy to make academic writing more accessible,

possible and enjoyable for students in higher education.

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Contributors

Arlene Archer is the coordinator of the Writing Centre at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. She teaches in Applied Language Studies, Higher Education Studies, Film and Media. Her research interests include drawing on popular culture and multimodal pedagogies to enable student access to Higher Education. She has published in journals such as Language and Education, Teaching in Higher Education, English in Education, Social Dynamics, British Journal of Educational Technology, and Visual Communication.

Nicole Bailey Bridgewater is Executive Director of Student Success Innovation at Indiana State University. Her background is in Writing Centre direction and composition, and research interests include multilingualism, international writing centres, code-switching, and the connection between social justice and language. She recently completed her dissertation on language, protest, and the writing centre at Stellenbosch University (SU), titled ‘“The Languages of Other People”: The Experiences of Tutors, Administrators, and Students in a South African Multilingual Writing Center’.

Sherran Clarence was the coordinator of the University of the Western Cape (UWC) Writing Centre from 2009 to 2014. She completed her PhD at Rhodes University in 2014, researching approaches to pedagogy that enabler greater potential for cumulative knowledge-building and learning in the disciplines. Currently, she is a research associate in the Centre for Postgraduate Studies at Rhodes University, where her research interests encompass disciplinary teaching and learning, as well as postgraduate and early career academic writing and literacy development in higher education. Her work has been published in Teaching in Higher Education, Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, the Journal of Education, and Higher Education.

Sharifa Daniels is the Afrikaans head of the Writing Lab at SU University. She holds an MA in Linguistics (University of Iowa, USA). Her research interests include writing centres and diversity, inclusion, and identity issues in teaching and learning. She has recently published an article in Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and is co-editor of Writing Centers and Disability (2017).

Laura Dison has worked at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) as a higher education specialist for 25 years. Starting in the Academic Development Programme, she now works as a senior lecturer at the Wits School of Education (WSoE) where she is director of the WSoE Writing Centre. She trains writing consultants and works with Education specialists to design embedded writing interventions in the disciplines. Her present position is the co-coordinator of the Post Graduate Diploma in Higher Education, which aims to foster a scholarly and professional approach to university teaching. Recently, she has been involved in collaborative research projects which focus on the role of reflective practice, assessment and mentoring, and she is keen to build the scholarship of teaching and learning for enabling student success in our present context.

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Emmanuel E. Esambe is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education, Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), and teaches Workplace Communication and Academic Literacy at CPUT. He has more than 8 years of experience working in the Writing Centre at CPUT, and also serves as principal facilitator in CPUT’s First Year Experience Programme. His degrees include a BA (English Modern Letters) from the University of Yaoundé1, a Honours in English Literature from the UWC, and a MEd from CPUT. A member of the Work-Integrated Learning Research Unit team, Emmanuel’s research focuses on literacy support for underprepared university students in South Africa, and technology-enhanced teaching of technical writing in the sciences and engineering programmes. He writes poetry as a hobby; his poems have been published in anthologies in Cameroon, South Africa, and online.

Cheng-Wen Huang is a lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK,SZ). Prior to joining CUHK(SZ), she was a researcher on the Commonwealth Digital Education Leadership Training in Action (C-DELTA) project at the Centre for Innovation in Learning at the University of Cape Town. She completed her PhD in Education at UCT in 2015. Her PhD thesis explored the possibilities of a multimodal approach to academic argument in Media Studies. Specifically, she examined how students produce academic arguments in video, comics and PowerPoint. Her research interests include multimodal social semiotics, academic literacies and digital literacies.

Anne-Mari Lackay is the coordinator for consultations at SU Writing Laboratory. She holds an MPhil degree in Document Analysis and Design from SU.

Belinda Mendelowitz is a senior lecturer at WSoE. She teaches postgraduate courses in English Education: Writing theory and practice; and home and school literacy practices. Her other teaching includes English and English methodology courses in the Bachelor of Education programme mostly in the areas of creative writing, grammar, writing pedagogy and sociolinguistics. Belinda’s PhD focused on teachers’ conceptions and enactments of imaginative writing pedagogy. Her current research focuses on imaginative writing, the critical imagination and narratives in education, multilingualism and identity. She is particularly interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning and how the implementation of powerful pedagogies can generate new forms of knowledge. Her work challenges the binaries between teaching and research.

Hervé Mitoumba-Tindy is a Writing Centre Coordinator at the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ) main campus. He holds a Master’s degree in English from UJ. His research interests include postcolonial Third World literature in English (the depiction of moral depravation in literature, revolution in language, the politics of language/the language of politics), academic literacies development and support to students, writing centre pedagogy, writing consultancy strategies, writing consultants’ training and development, student life, and the role of university support divisions in the advancement of residence academic advisory support. He is currently preparing for PhD study in the area of support to first-generation students, investigating strategies aimed at mitigating the effect of potential gaps in cultural capital on students’ drop-out rates and thus improving their success rates.

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Nosisana Mkonto is the Head of Department of Student Learning Unit at CPUT’s Fundani Centre for Higher Education Development. She has more than 15 years of experience in tutoring and mentoring across faculties at CPUT. Currently, she is the institutional Coordinator of CPUT’s FYE Project. She is also the deputy chairperson of the isiXhosa Lexicography Unit (XNLU). Her research covers issues around student support and development, learning styles, and peer support; she has presented papers at both national and international conferences.

Thembinkosi Mtonjeni is an Academic Literacy Lecturer at CPUT in Cape Town. He has worked in the Writing Centre since 2001. In 2013, he obtained an MPhil in Intercultural Communication from SU. He is affiliated with the Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa (HELTASA), the Western Cape Writing Centre Association (WCWA), the Writing Centre Special Interest Group (SIG) of HELTASA, the South Africa Society for Engineering Education (SASEE), the South African Applied Linguistics Association (SAALA), and the South African Association for Language Teaching (SAALT). His research interests include academic literacies, second language writing, critical language awareness, multilingualism and intercultural communication and critical discourse analysis. He has published ‘Geometrical concepts in real-life context: A case study in South African Traffic Road Signs’ (2014) and ‘Making Sense of Errors Made by Analytical Chemistry Students in their Writing’ (with Puleng Sefalane-Nkohla, 2015).

Pamela Nichols helped found, and since 1998 has been the Director of, the Wits Writing Centre: a resource for academic writing and for creative writers, which has produced 16 award-winning writers, co-organised six literary festivals as well as currently promoting a Writing Intensive programme at Wits. Nichols took her first degree at Sussex University, taught and studied at the American University of Beirut, completed a teaching degree at the Institute of Education in London, before attending New York University where she completed a doctorate in Comparative Literature guided by the work of, and personal engagement with, Edward Said. Her published work focuses on writing centres, WI teaching, new African writing, and on strategies to enhance democracy through the development of citizen scholars. She is currently also Head of Writing and Learning at the Centre for Learning Teaching and Development at Wits.

Akisha Pearman is a PhD candidate at UCT’s School of Education. She has taught at the UCT Writing Centre for 4 years, most recently with students at the Graduate School of Business. She has academic degrees in English and Spanish literature, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, and Higher Education Studies, which indicate her interest in communication. In addition to personal interests in photography and documentary film, her professional background includes teaching English and conducting teacher training for teachers of English as an additional language in the USA, Spain, Madagascar, South Korea, Mozambique and Angola.

Rose Richards is the English head of the Writing Lab at SU. She holds a PhD in Psychology (Stellenbosch) and an MA in English Literature (Wits). Her research interests include auto-ethnography, disability, narrative and identity, and writing centre work. She has recently published on voice and silence in Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus and

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on the ethics of writing about the embodied self in Inside Teaching in Higher Education: South African Academic Autoethnographies (edited by Daisy Pillay, Inbanathan Naiker and Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan).

Kabinga Jack Shabanza joined the UJ in 2007 and occupied several positions ranging from tutor, junior lecturer and lecturer for academic literacies modules, to writing centre coordinator in 2013. He obtained his BA Honours and MA in English Education from Wits, where he is currently pursuing a PhD degree in Applied English Language Studies and education. The PhD research is entitled ‘A Socio-Constructivist Approach to Writing Centre Practice: Challenges of raising Academic Genre Awareness through Group Writing Consultations’. His research interests include writing centre theory and practice, academic literacies, academic genres, writing in the disciplines, teaching materials design, English Foreign Language (EFL) and Tesol. His most recent publication is entitled ‘Struggling with postgraduate studies: B-Tech students writing academic genres’.

Puleng Sefalane-Nkohla is an Academic Literacy Lecturer with vast experience in leading and coordinating the Writing Centre at CPUT. She is the member of the WCWA, the HELTASA, the South African Council of Educators, the Reading Association of Southern Africa, the Writing Centre SIG of HELTASA, the SASEE, the SAALA, the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa, and the SAALT. Her interests are in student writing in higher education, second language writing, academic development of students and leadership in higher education. She graduated with a Masters in Language Technology in 2009. She recently published ‘Making Sense of Errors Made by Analytical Chemistry Students in their Writing’ (with Thembinkosi Mtonjeni, 2015).

Fatima Slemming was the Coordinator of the UWC Writing Centre from 2003 to 2008 and has since worked as a Lecturer in Academic Development for the Faculty of Education at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. She has a MA degree in Linguistics and a Higher Diploma in Education from UWC. Her research interests include the study of community- based literacies, academic writing genres, particularly in post- graduate studies, and the professional development of writing centres theory and practice as an area of academic scholarship in South African higher education.

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Acknowledgements .......................................................................................... iii

contributors .................................................................................................... v

Foreword .......................................................................................................... 1Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams

introduction .................................................................................................... 5Laura Dison and Sherran Clarence

PART I – Theorising and extending writing centre practice in the university  17

Chapter 1The place of education theories in writing centres: Why this makes for significant research ..................................................................................... 19Fatima Slemming

Chapter 2Writing democracy: From writing centres to writing fellows to writing intensive courses in a university-wide writing programme ............................. 35Pamela Nichols

Chapter 3A relational approach to building knowledge through academic writing: Facilitating and reflecting on peer writing tutorials ......................................... 49Sherran Clarence

Chapter 4Working in the interspace between subject knowledge and academic literacies: Writing centres as a zone of proximal development ....................... 67Hervé Mitoumba-Tindy

Chapter 5Training writing centre tutors for argument in a digital age ............................ 81Cheng-Wen Huang and Arlene Archer

Table of Contents

x

Chapter 6Diversifying monolingual tongues: What American writing centres can learn from their multilingual South African counterparts ................................ 97Nicole Bailey Bridgewater

PART II – Case studies: Negotiating practices in the disciplines 111

Chapter 7Negotiating writing centre practices within and between disciplines in a university of technology ................................................................................ 113Emmanuel Ekale Esambe and Nosisana Mkonto

Chapter 8The Writing Lab in the centre: A collaborative model for integrating writing consultations in a first-year Engineering module ................................ 129Sharifa Daniels, Rose Richards and Anne-Mari Lackay

Chapter 9Meaning-making through writing in the applied sciences: A metadiscourse analysis of authorial choices in students’ academic texts ................................ 145Thembinkosi Mtonjeni and Puleng Sefalane-Nkohla

Chapter 10Enhancing reflection on writing: Using group writing consultations to develop meta-awareness of disciplinary writing .......................................... 161Kabinga Jack Shabanza

PART III – New approaches to evaluating writing centre work  175

Chapter 11Supporting academic communication in writing centres in the digital age: Video composition in the context of a writing centre consultation .................. 177Akisha Pearman

Chapter 12Reflecting on writing centre practice through students’ experiences of a contextualised writing centre ........................................................................... 193Laura Dison and Belinda Mendelowitz

index ................................................................................................................. 209

1

As a writing centre and writing development practitioner, manager and researcher, I am always eager to learn about higher education writing development work that is taking place in other contexts and countries. In recent years, writing programmes at higher education institutions around the world have begun to be showcased in books like Writing Programs Worldwide: Profiles of Academic Writing in Many Places (Thaiss et al. 2012) and through online research projects such as the web-portal http://writingprogramsworldwide.ucdavis.edu/ What is different, and interesting to me, about Sherran Clarence’s and Laura Dison’s edited collection, Writing Centres in Higher Education: Working in and Across the Disciplines, is its sustained focus on the work of writing centres and writing developers who are based in a particular locale, South African higher education. Reading this book has taught me a great deal about the history of South African writing centres and it has brought me up-to-date with South African writing centre pedagogy and theory – so much of which, I believe, will resonate with writing centre and writing development practitioners, managers, and researchers across the globe.

I first heard about South African writing centre and writing development work in the late 1990s when I attended ‘Academic Literacies’ research group sessions convened by Mary Scott at the Institute of Education, London and became a member of the group’s

Foreword

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Lisa Ganobcsik-WiLLiams

‘aclits’ email discussion list (Lillis et al. 2015:6). At that time and through the years, as research by Lucia Thesen, Cecilia Jacobs, Arlene Archer, and others was presented and discussed at this forum and at the UK’s biennial ‘Writing Development in Higher Education’ conference, I became aware that academic writing development was a strong and growing area in South African higher education. What I never fully appreciated is why Academic Literacies theory is so relevant in the South African writing centre context and why working with students on their writing in the disciplines is so important from the perspective of South African writing developers. Writing Centres in Higher Education: Working in and Across the Disciplines provides clear and compelling explanations of both of these topics through discussions, case studies, and examples.

The book has given me a number of ideas to discuss with colleagues and potentially to implement in the university writing centre that I direct. Large-scale ideas include: establishing long-term writing support collaborations with lecturers in the disciplines; researching the rhetoric of multimodal assignments and training academic writing tutors to work with students on multimodal coursework that involves writing and rhetorical choices; using technology to work with students on their writing at the same time that their module lecturers are working with them on their writing; moving writing tutoring into disciplinary modules; and setting up satellite writing centres within disciplinary contexts. The book also theorises and describes practical suggestions for improving the everyday work and effectiveness of writing tutoring. An example of this is chapter three on using Semantics (and the conceptual tools of semantic gravity and gravity waves) to enable writing tutors to analyse to what extent generic writing advice and specific writing advice come into play during their writing tutorials. The author insightfully argues that this analysis can help tutors to build a balance of both generic and specific writing guidance into their tutoring practices “rather than trying to squeeze our work into one or another ‘box’” (53).

Writing Centres in Higher Education: Working in and Across the Disciplines identifies and explores a key tension of writing centre work, by asking questions about whom writing centres are meant to serve (e.g. students? academics in the disciplines? the institution? writing developers?). One chapter posits that, literally and figuratively, ‘[w]riting centre spaces are constantly being shifted, negotiated and contested. As writing centre practitioners, we make spaces, claim spaces and move through spaces that are not wholly ours’ (129). My own experience of working in universities in the United States (USA) in ‘traditional’ writing centres whose remit was primarily student-focused, and later, of establishing a writing centre in a UK university to serve as a hub for a variety of writing development activities, has shown me that operating with an expanded vision of what writing centres can accomplish enables different types and layers of writing support to become available to students and colleagues throughout an institution.

This edited collection offers the opportunity for readers to learn about a number of writing development initiatives that have grown out of writing centres in South African universities, and to reect strategically upon how far, and in which directions, to expand writing centre work. The book’s case studies have prompted me, for instance, to think about the benefits of expanding the definition of writing centres to meet institutional

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Foreword

priorities, but also to consider when it may be wise, as experts in writing pedagogy, to resist or reconfigure writing development ideas that stakeholders across the institution would like to impose.

This collection makes a timely and relevant contribution to scholarship and debate about theoretical, pedagogical, and operational concerns of writing centre and writing development work worldwide. It also features ‘best practice’ examples that will be of interest to practitioners who are tutoring and teaching academic writing, such as writing centre tutors and lecturers in the disciplines. Although the book is grounded in the work of South African writing centres, its arguments and the examples it offers will speak to those working in other contexts to support writing and academic development.

Lisa Ganobcsik-WilliamsCentre for Academic Writing Coventry University, England

ReferencesLillis T, Harrington K, Lea M, and Mitchell S. (eds). 2015. Working With Academic Literacies:

Case Studies Towards Transformative Practice. Colorado: Parlor Press/WAC Clearinghouse.

Thaiss C, Bräuer G, Carlino P, Ganobcsik-Williams L, and Sinha A. (eds). 2012. Writing Programs Worldwide: Profiles of Academic Writing in Many Places. Colorado: Parlor Press/WAC Clearinghouse.

Thaiss C, Sinha A, Bräuer G, Carlino P, and Ganobcsik-Williams L. 2016. Writing Programs Worldwide – A Web Initiative to Capture Writing Programs Worldwide. Web-portal: http://writingprogramsworldwide.ucdavis.edu/.

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Shannon Carter, in her essay ‘The writing center paradox: talk about legitimacy and the problem of institutional change’, writes:

The writing center is made up of a series of rhetorical spaces in which tutors and students attempt to negotiate academic projects assigned by and evaluated by individuals who are not directly associated with/involved in the writing center’s daily activities. We represent the student, not the teacher. We represent the system, not the student. We represent neither, and we represent both. (2009:136, emphasis added)

This essential tension is at the heart of much writing centre work both in South Africa, the context for the chapters in this volume, and globally. We are there for the students, we are there for the university, and we are also there for ourselves. How to balance and manage these tensions, these pushes and pulls that make our work both interesting and challenging in a rapidly changing higher education context, is a question all writing centre directors, coordinators and consultants/peer tutors1 must confront and grapple with.

This edited collection reects critically on a number of central tensions under a broader question: how do writing centres, which traditionally tend to sit outside of academic disciplines, enter into the disciplines to work with both students and lecturers in context-

Introduction

Laura Dison and Sherran Clarence

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Laura Dison anD sherran cLarence

relevant, collaborative and useful ways? In other words, how do we get from the outside in, and make our contributions count when we get there? These tensions are thus: working in both generic and specific ways as regards writing and literacy development to navigate disciplinary knowledges and skills; grappling with new modes of knowledge production and text creation to push our own pedagogic boundaries further; doing the ‘pedagogical work’ that promotes ‘good writing in English’; and, recognising Academic Literacies as an emerging discipline in the changing university.

Before detailing the arguments this volume makes about writing centre work inside and across the disciplines and the opportunities and challenges this presents, we will begin with a brief background of writing centre and academic development work within the South African context. With this in view, we will move on to consider the ‘philosophy’ (Bell 2001) underpinning writing centre work within this context, and other global contexts – our broad epistemological, ideological, and ontological underpinnings and values. Details on the chapters included in this volume are woven into this discussion on how this volume contributes to the broader field of writing centre and academic literacies research in higher education.

Writing centres within academic literacy development in South AfricaAt this point we would like to briey trace the development and growth of writing centres within the South African context. Part of this context and history is analysed critically in the chapters written by Fatima Slemming and Pamela Nichols, which echo this book’s claim for a need for theorised research within and from writing centres, and for enhancing lecturers’ awareness of educational theories that underpin approaches to curriculum development, teaching and assessment.

The first writing centres in South Africa opened their doors in the mid-1990s. Located largely within academic development units, such as the former Academic Development Centre (ADC) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), and the Academic Support Programme at Wits University, writing centres were closely aligned with academic student development work that was focused on disadvantaged, underprepared, and predominantly black students coming into higher education during the transition from apartheid to democracy in the early to mid-1990s (Nichols this volume; Slemming this volume; Thesen and van Pletzen 2006). The standard way of thinking about academic writing and literacy development work during this time was remedial in nature, aimed at bridging the gap that existed between these students’ prior schooling and the expectations of higher education literacies and learning. It was informed by a deficit perspective on the part of the universities who funded these writing centres, by a sense that these students did not have the right kinds of ‘capital’ (Bourdieu 1986[2011]) – cultural or educational. As a result, they needed to be given additional time and support through a writing centre or academic writing course to gain this capital in order to participate in the dominant communicative practices within the university.

Research in the United Kingdom in the mid to late 1990s, within a context that had been grappling since the 1980s with the challenges of widening access to higher education, referred to this deficit-led approach as a ‘study skills’ approach to literacy development

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Introduction

(Lea & Street 1998). This inuential research showed that remedial, add-on attempts to bridge between what underprepared students bring with them to university as educational capital or competencies, and expected competencies, were often approached from a position that saw becoming literate as gaining discrete, value-free skills, easily transferrable once mastered.

Essentially, a ‘study skills’ approach to literacy development gave rise to additional writing courses offered mainly to disadvantaged black students deemed to be ‘at-risk’ of failure, largely as a result of poor prior schooling. These students, who spoke English as an additional language, were constructed as lacking learning and language skills, conceptual knowledge and the ability to think critically (Boughey 2010). These courses taught them how to write generic argumentative essays, how to construct parts of an essay such as paragraphs and introductions, how to reference their sources accurately, and some also taught requisite skills like note taking in lectures, mind-mapping or essay planning, and basic grammar and comprehension. In several universities across South Africa these kinds of courses persist and tend to still view the medium of instruction as “the barrier to students’ success in their disciplines of study” (Jacobs 2014:134). More recently, there have been shifts in the thinking behind these approaches to literacy development, but they remain outside the formal curriculum and focus on language support for academic purposes rather than on the disciplinary nature of academic literacy practices.

Subsuming and extending the ‘study skills’ approach, Lea and Street’s study revealed another level at which universities could work to develop and improve students’ ability to consume, create and critique knowledge more effectively in their disciplines. This approach moved beyond deficit constructions of underprepared or “non-traditional” (Lillis & Turner 2001:57) students, and viewed literacies, instead, as being inuenced by and situated within specific social or practice-based contexts. Simply put, each discipline forms a community of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991) and each community uses particular genres (Swales 1990) or kinds of texts to communicate, create and critique knowledge claims. Thus, to become literate in creating and utilising these texts, and join the community of practice as legitimate participants, students need to be socialised into the community, and into the particular as well as more general rules their community follows in creating, consuming and critiquing knowledge.

The ‘academic socialisation’ approach (Lea & Street 1998) built on the ‘study skills’ approach but also challenged and extended it in important ways, debunking deficit conceptions of literacy development as necessary only for underprepared (largely black and poor) students in South African universities. Rather, this approach inducted students into new, and strange communities of learning, including but not limited to students whose home and school backgrounds were less congruent with the forms of writing privileged by universities. Boughey (2010:10) discusses this ‘second phase’ of academic development as “indicative of what might be termed a ‘social turn’ involving a movement away from a focus on individual behaviour and individual minds to a focus on the social and the cultural” aspects of learning in higher education.

Writing centre work has been firmly inuenced by an understanding of literacy development as academic socialisation. The move from study skills to socialisation in

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teaching students to respond to assessment and learning tasks with appropriate forms of research, reading, and writing shifted writing centres from an association with autonomous skills teaching to a stronger association with notions of writing as a practice and a process that recognises ways in which literacy practices vary between academic disciplines. In particular, four chapters in this book have indicated the importance of students developing their writing competence over time through embedded disciplinary support (chapters seven through ten).

Working within a paradigm of writing as different forms of social practice, and writing centres as spaces that work with students and lecturers to unpack, demystify, and even contest elements of these practices, writing centre consultants/s have a challenging role to play. Rather than trying to ‘teach’ students generic writing skills or give tips on writing a ‘good’ essay, writing peer tutors/consultants are required to play the role of writing advisor and peer mentor who can offer students writing guidance, probe their thinking and question their clarity of response to specific tasks they are working on. Hathaway (2015:3) describes this shift in thinking and learning as “relocating the ‘problem’ away from the students and their supposed inadequacies to the task with its complexities and opaqueness”. This shift also references the third approach advocated by Lea and Street (1998): the ‘academic literacies’ approach.

The ‘academic literacies’ approach that shapes a great deal of writing centre work currently, both in South Africa and in contexts like the UK and Australia, emerges in several of the chapters in this volume including those that demonstrate the value of working with lecturers to enable students to engage with the academic literacy practices valued by different disciplines. Subsuming and building on the ‘academic socialisation’ approach, an ‘academic literacies’ approach seeks to go beyond simply inducting students into disciplinary communities of practice, taking their literacy conventions, practices and ways of knowing as given. Rather, it seeks to give students access to both the means to work within those communities of practice successfully and the means to eventually critique, challenge and change their knowledge-making practices over time. An ‘academic literacies’ approach shifts the focus from students’ texts to the practices behind the creation of their texts, and how these practices contribute to the development of students’ emerging scholarly identities as they become familiar with the discourse requirements of new writing environments (Gourlay 2009).

Fundamental to an ‘academic literacies’ approach is the “ideology … of transformation” (Lillis & Scott 2007:7) that seeks to push back against dominant and ‘commonsense’ approaches to creating, assessing and critiquing texts in a range of modes. This approach asks us – lecturers, writing centre tutors/consultants and students – to think carefully about what we are doing, why, and how, and to locate our practices firmly within the social contexts within which we are working. It asks us to question these contexts and their literacy practices, as well as the social, economic, political and cultural factors that inuence and shape them. Several chapters in this volume explore ways of moving beyond the demands of university writing to “a profound re-orientation in terms of what knowledge itself is and how it is constructed” (Hathaway 2015:5).

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Introduction

New writing centres, old tensionsWriting centres in South Africa, moving into the 2000s, saw both the higher education and schooling sectors undergoing significant curricular and organisational changes. The latter half of the first decade of the 21st century also saw several new writing centres established across the country, especially in former technikons (now universities of technology). The establishment of these writing centres signalled a recognition that widening access had not necessarily resulted in enhanced success for many students, and that students across the university needed additional time and support in becoming proficient and confident writers. However, this growth in writing centres in South Africa has resurfaced the tensions referred to at the beginning of this introduction. If these new writing centres have been and are being established and supported by universities working from a paradigm of skills development and language support as key to (certain) students’ literacy development, then who are these writing centres for? How do they carve out and hold a role for themselves underpinned by a different paradigm, one that perceives academic literacy practices and processes as socially and contextually informed and not easily mastered outside of the formal curriculum as discrete or autonomous ‘skills’?

In the past 15 years, the university mergers and changes in the higher education and schooling sectors have raised several important questions around transformation and management of education in South Africa, echoing similar debates and questions in other parts of the world. With this has come recognition that writing centres have become firmer in their stance on writing as a social practice that needs both writing ‘composition’ and context-dependent input. These questions relate to the two main tensions this book reects on: working in both generic and specific ways, and grappling with new modes of knowledge production and text creation. We will now move on to explore the structure of this book, and the ways in which the chapters respond to and explore these questions.

Structure of the book

Part I: Theorising and extending writing centre practice in the universityThe chapters in Part I show that rather than working with texts and literacies normatively – socialising students into working with them in ways that take them for granted, or treating them as hegemonic and unchangeable – an ‘academic literacies’ approach challenges us to be conscious of what we are socialising ourselves and students into through our writing centre work (Jacobs 2014; Lillis & Scott 2007). It challenges us to consider what transformation in our current context means, and how our work from writing centres can contribute to transformative moves in higher education teaching and learning. Our view, which supports that of several authors in the book, is that integrated approaches have assisted staff in improving their teaching practices as they clarify and make explicit the conventions and requisite skills for the discipline. The chapters raise a number of questions about the nature of the disciplines themselves and why particular academic literacy practices and genres are valued.

Part I presents six chapters that analyse how writing centres in different contexts are theorising and thinking of writing centre practice in the university. They ask us to consider questions of knowledge: what knowledge students are asked to consume and

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create, and whether and how they are encouraged to critique both the consumption and creation processes within their disciplines as social contexts. They also ask us to consider questions of inclusion and voice: whose voices are heard, whose are silenced and how can a multitude of voices be expressed and nurtured from within the curriculum and alongside it? Writing centres, although without a formal curriculum of their own as Nichols (this volume) points out, have a vital role to play in questioning the assessment tasks students come to consult about, and in building a “culture of writing” within the university (Ganobscik-Williams 2011:250). They can reect back to the disciplines their assumptions and choices regarding knowledge in the curriculum with a view to both critiquing and supporting necessary changes.

In their chapters, the authors in Part I all look at ways of making meaning and knowledge in new ways that can extend students’ learning beyond the confines of their university coursework. A central issue is how we develop writing consultants/peer tutors’ capacity to work with students who are struggling with the kinds of assessment tasks they are being asked to write, and the kinds of reading and research they have to engage with. Writing centres, if they are to be truly free, just and caring spaces, cannot ignore students’ resistance to the kinds of knowledge they are asked to consume and create. They must grapple with a tension between socialisation and critique, helping students to work out the rules of the meaning-making game in their disciplines and how to better play by them is often precisely about socialisation (see Clarence, Huang and Archer in this volume). An ‘academic literacies’-informed approach becomes valuable if we can balance helping students to become more confident and able writers with helping them to see and be appropriately critical of the social context in which their writing is being assessed.

The opening chapter looks at the role of educational theory in developing teaching proficiency. Fatima Slemming argues that lecturers need to be aware of educational theories that underpin approaches to curriculum development, teaching, learning and assessment. The process of writing consultants/peer tutors becoming aware of relevant theories in a deliberate way, through reective practice, is a useful model for thinking about educating emerging academic lecturers and practitioners in higher education. In chapter two, Pamela Nichols demonstrates how WI courses at the University of the Witwatersrand are moving writing centre theory and philosophy from outside of the disciplines closer to the disciplines and to ways of teaching students to know and act on that knowing. WI approaches have become tools for creating systematic and holistic responses to student learning as opposed to ‘bolt-on’, remedial models of support. Nichols reects critically on the role of Writing Intensive (WI) courses, mediated by writing fellows, in creating more democratic and free spaces and practices that can contribute to university transformation.

Chapter three explores a novel approach to analysing writing consultations that focuses on how knowledge about writing is made over time. It investigates how non-discipline-specific peer writing tutors can enable students to think about their writing, both in terms of the immediate assignment and future writing assignments through activating students’ longer-term learning about academic writing. Sherran Clarence illustrates the use of an analytical tool drawn from Legitimation Code Theory, to move between contextualised

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writing requirements and the more generalised notions of how writing conveys ideas, knowledge and meaning in different genres. Ultimately, the chapter argues, following chapter one, for a theorised approach to peer tutoring in writing centres, and proposes one way of enabling theorised, reexive and conscious tutoring practices.

Hervé Mitoumba-Tindy, in chapter four, explores an approach to writing support using Vygotskian theory; in particular, the chapter positions writing centres as zones of proximal (academic) development, and writing centre consultants/peer tutors as the ‘more knowledgeable others’ students can approach for help. Using this kind of theorised underpinning for writing centre work may enable tutors to see their role as peers in a different light, and encourage them to work more collaboratively with students, further challenging the notion of tutors as experts and students as unknowing novices that need to be “socialised” into the dominant ways of being in the academy.

Also working with peer tutors, Cheng-Wen Huang and Arlene Archer reect on their methods of facilitating writing consultants/peer tutors’ understanding of the multi-modal academic argument as ‘difference’ in a digital age. This approach broadens an understanding of argument restricted to traditional written texts. They argue that writing centres, on their own with students and in partnership with disciplinary lecturers, need to work more effectively and creatively with forms of text other than writing.

Adding an international view to questions of transformation and writing centre policies and practices, Nicole Bailey Bridgewater’s chapter questions the issue of language: what languages we write in, and what effect an insistence upon ‘standard’ forms of English may have on students feeling included or excluded from their own education experiences. Connecting her American context with a writing centre context in the Western Cape, Bailey Bridegwater’s chapter troubles the notion of having one (better) form of a language in which to write, and shows how beneficial multilingual language policies and practices can be within writing centres, and the wider university.

While Part I sets the tone for the book, laying out ‘bigger picture’ arguments for current and future writing centre work, Part II brings us back to the issue of context, reminding us that contextual positioning and factors always inuence what we can do, and how we can do it. These chapters unpack case studies of writing centres working in and across the disciplines in South African universities at present.

Part II: Case studies: Negotiating practices in the disciplinesOne of the most valuable contributions writing centres can make within the current climate of change across universities in South Africa, and in other contexts such as the UK, Canada and the USA, is by giving students a louder voice at a micro level. Writing centres, ultimately, are there for the students; this is the core constituency we represent. Through one-on-one, small group and workshop discussion and meetings, writing consultants/peer tutors shine the spotlight on students: their current writing projects; the struggles they experience while learning what they are doing; and the ways in which they are trying to make sense of their disciplines and the university requirements more generally. As these chapters illustrate, listening to what students and peer tutors have to say about their writing processes on a daily basis gives us a profound and valuable

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insight into what the most important constituency within higher education really thinks about the education and work they are participating and engaging in at universities.

The key question posed and answered in the chapters constituting Part II is how to engage students optimally in knowledge-making within disciplinary and professional fields. Emmanuel Ekale Esambe and Nosisana Mkonto’s chapter looks at writing in professional disciplines, and the ways in which collaborative partnerships between the writing centre and different professional disciplines have yielded positive results in helping both lecturers and students to demystify and unpack disciplinary writing practices. These authors attempt to understand how students develop writing in the two very different disciplines – Dental Sciences and Personnel Management – at a university of technology. They use action research and Photovoice to work in collaborative pedagogical spaces with lecturers. This helps lecturers to understand students’ realities, and shows how an innovative approach to opening up space to talk about writing gives students a louder voice within their context.

Similarly Sharifa Daniels, Rose Richards and Anne-Mari Lackay discuss the development of a decade-long partnership with the Department of Engineering at Stellenbosch University (SU), in which they reexively created and updated an integrative ‘collaborative model’ to help students ‘enter the academic conversation’ in a compulsory communication module in engineering. Their chapter highlights the affordances and constraints of working from a space outside of the formal curriculum and discipline, but shows the value a writing-focused perspective can add to writing in the disciplines.

Thembinkosi Mtonjeni and Puleng Sefalane-Nkohla further explore writing in the disciplines in their chapter, using the conceptual tool of metadiscourse to unpack students’ meaning-making in an applied science subject, environmental health. They argue that using a metadiscourse analysis enables them to find a way into disciplinary ways of learning, in this case in the sciences.This analytical lens can provide writing centre practitioners with a way of engaging students (and their lecturers) pedagogically about the specifics of the discourse and rhetoric of science writing.

In the final chapter in this part of the book, Kabinga Jack Shabanza critically analyses how writing centres in his context have responded, through small group consultations, to the high drop-out and failure rate. This situation is partially attributable to large classes and reduced time for individual or small-scale consultations with students in the disciplines. He engaged students and writing consultants/peer tutors in focus group discussions to facilitate an understanding of the affordances of small group writing tutorials for enabling students to reect critically and collaboratively on their disciplinary contexts and genres. The author highlights the importance of developing students’ meta-discourses in the disciplines through reective processes. This acts as a means of bridging the pedagogic distance of traditional, large lectures that are, for many students, alienating and difficult to navigate.

Part III: (Re) evaluating writing centre workThe two final chapters present alternative ways of evaluating the ‘impact’ of the work of the writing centre.

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Akisha Pearman’s study explores the role of videos in informing students and the wider university community about the diversity of writing centre stakeholders, practices, and approaches. She argues that writing centres in South Africa can utilise an alternative mode to print, such as video, to publicise their work with students, to promote their vision and mission, and also to further challenge the ways in which they evaluate their impact on the university community they serve. Her chapter also highlights, connecting with chapter five, how visual modes and methods of engaging with meaning-making are becoming more common in higher education. This approach challenges writing centres to be open, rather than resistant, to multimodal forms of making knowledge about their work.

Finally, Laura Dison and Belinda Mendelowitz elaborate on how in-depth focus groups as a mode of evaluation have provided their writing centre with valuable insights into students’ experiences and frustrations with writing in ‘transitional spaces’ as they attempt to develop their authorial ‘voice’. Their analysis of focus group feedback raises critical questions about the notion of students’ deficits in a context of transformation as students are inducted into normative assessment practices. The findings of the qualitative evaluation practices they are using shed light on existing models of embedding writing centre work in the disciplines, and how we make sense of the ways in which both peer tutors and students experience writing centre input.

Writing centres and transformation: Pushing our boundaries furtherSince May 2015, there have been rolling student protests across our campuses in South Africa under the broad coalition of #FeesMustFall. These protests call for a diverse range of changes to be made within the university and society as a whole. Basically, students want ‘business as usual’ to be disrupted to the extent that universities start asking difficult and painful questions about students’ access, success and participation in higher education. Through honest reection, universities need to begin to see the gaps, problems and shortcomings of the system and make change a reality in a range of ways. This is an umbrella notion of transformation at a systemic level, and it is necessary and urgent within the South African context, although calls for transformation and ‘decolonisation’ of education systems have echoed in other contexts as well, such as New Zealand (Reid & Jones 2014), Canada (Lamb 2015), the UK (NUSConnect 2016; Rhoden-Paul 2015), and India (Menon 2016).

Writing centres, as an established part of many universities within South Africa, are part of this system, yet cannot be immune to students’ calls for change given the social realities regarding prejudice and violations of human rights. The book as a whole challenges normative writing and assessment practices and it proposes that we reect deeply on curriculum transformation within our different institutional contexts. We need to reconsider what role we play in ensuring that we are using our inuence, research, “practice wisdom” (Bamber 2014:np), and skill to the best effect in creating and sustaining greater social and academic justice on our campuses.

Our central focus is arguably the students – our writing consultants/peer tutors and the students they work with on a daily basis – and providing them with “free” (chapter two

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this volume) spaces in which they can be met as peers grappling with an assignment or writing task, and supported with integrity and care. Writing centres have a clear and valuable mission and vision related to specific goals around literacy development and support within the larger academic teaching project of the university. We can assist in the development of students’ capacity to become more confident and proficient in their own writing practices. In addition, we can give their struggles to become academically literate in their disciplinary contexts a voice, a face, and necessary recognition as we foreground the relationship between writing and thinking. Our role is located primarily within the formative space – where students are given tools to reect critically on their own outputs in a non-judgemental environment (see especially chapters five; seven; ten; twelve, this volume).

Writing centre work has grown in reach in the last decade, and many more writing centre practitioners are extending their pedagogic approaches into disciplinary collaborations and partnerships that are bearing fruit (see Part II of this volume). These show that subject specialists have become more aware of the nature of macro and micro level writing processes in their disciplines. Furthermore, writing centre practitioners have begun making inroads in disciplinary assessment practices in terms of the formulation of assessment tasks, the extent to which assessment criteria are made explicit, and how feedback is mediated and implemented2. As discussed earlier in this introduction, recent writing centre work tends to be underpinned by an ‘academic literacies’ ideology of transformation, and an epistemology of literacy as a social practice (Lillis & Scott 2007), inuenced by social, cultural, political and disciplinary concerns and factors.

Nevertheless, we are also there for the university. Writing centres, even those with private or donor funding, are housed within universities, and are staffed, supported and funded to varying degrees by university management. We cannot, therefore, ignore the wider institutional contexts in which we work, and the political, cultural and economic pushes and pulls within these contexts. Thus, in the current climate around higher education in South Africa, and globally, where students are asking for different kinds of change, writing centres need to consider the implications of transformation. They need to grapple with how the changes that are beginning to occur in the wake of student protests will affect them.

Writing centres are in a unique position, through the feedback, conversations, and evaluations they elicit, to give students a clear and present voice in conversations on their campuses about proposed changes to assessment, evaluation, curriculum and pedagogy that are currently taking place in a range of fora. We can continue to challenge and change deficit discourses about students and their learning needs that persist in many of these conversations by showing, through the work we do across and within the disciplines and within our own spaces, that all students need time and support in becoming academically literate in both generic and discipline-embedded ways. We can continue to challenge ‘content versus skills’ dichotomies through the partnerships we create with disciplinary lecturers and tutors that enable them to take on their students’ writing development with greater confidence and ability. We can, through scholarly research, contribute to larger conversations about the kinds of literacy development and support needed to facilitate

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Introduction

students’ ongoing lifelong engagement with new and emerging forms of text, so that they can contribute to their eventual professions and fields in meaningful ways.

As this edited collection illustrates, context is key in determining the kinds of work a writing centre can and should do in a university. To represent students well, we need to know who we are working with, what their learning needs are, and how we can adapt and grow our resources to meet these needs. Not all writing centres can work in the same ways within their differing contexts, and some are able to push their boundaries harder and further than others, as the collected chapters illustrate. We believe, however, that we can agree on the valued and vital role writing centres can play in providing spaces for slower, thoughtful and research-led conversations about writing in order to build comprehensive writing provision for all students. Moving into the future, writing centres will need to increasingly venture beyond their four walls into other spaces – within and across the disciplines – to challenge their own pedagogical approaches and those of others. In doing so, writing centres can continue to play an invaluable role in articulating the role of writing development in turning student access into mastery and success.

ReferencesBamber, R. 2014. Think global, act local in Masters scholarship. Keynote presentation at Higher Education

Close-Up 7, Lancaster, United Kingdom. [Accessed 17 June 2016] http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/events/hecu7/docs/ThinkPieces/bamber.pdf

Boughey, C. 2010. Academic development for improved efficiency in the higher education and training system in South Africa. Development Bank of South Africa publication.

Bourdieu, P. 2011. The forms of capital (1986). In Szeman, I and Kaposy, T. (eds). Cultural theory: An anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 81-93.

Carter, S. 2009. The writing center paradox: Talk about legitimacy and the problem of institutional change. College Composition and Communication, 61(1): 133-52.

Curtis, E, Reid, P and Jones, R. 2014. Decolonising the academy: The process of re-presenting indigenous health in tertiary teaching and learning. In Cram, F, Phillips, H, Sauni, P and Tuagalu, C. (eds). Maori and Pasifika higher education horizons (Diversity in Higher Education, Volume 15). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 147-65.

Gourlay, L. 2009. Threshold practices: Becoming a student through academic literacies. London Review of Education 7(2): 181-192. DOI:10.1080/14748460903003626.

Hathaway, J. 2015. Developing that voice: locating academic writing tuition in the mainstream of higher education, Teaching in Higher Education, 20(5): 506-517. DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2015.1026891.

Jacobs, C. 2014. Academic literacies and the question of knowledge. Journal for Language Teaching, 47(2): 127-140. DOI: 10.4314/jlt.v47i2.7.

Lamb, C. 2015. (Neo)Liberal scripts: settler colonialism and the British Columbia school curriculum. Unpublished MA Queen’s University, Canada.

Lave, J and Wenger, E. 1991. Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511815355.

Lea, M and Street, BV. 1998. Student writing in higher education: An academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education, 23(2): 157-173. DOI: 10.1080/03075079812331380364.

Lillis, TM and Turner, J. 2001. Student writing in higher education: contemporary confusion, traditional concerns. Teaching in Higher Education, 6(1): 57-67. DOI: 10.1080/13562510020029608.

Lillis, TM and Scott, M. 2007. Defining academic literacies research: Issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 4(1): 5-32.

McKenna, S. 2004. The intersection between academic literacies and student identities. South African Journal of Higher Education, 18(3): 269-280.

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Menon, N. 2015. Why our universities are in ferment. The Hindu. [Accessed 17 June 2016] http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/why-our-universities-are-in-ferment/article8238512.ece

NUSConnect. 2016. Why is my curriculum white? NUSConnect. [Accessed 17 June 2016] http://www.nusconnect.org.uk/articles/why-is-my-curriculum-white-decolonising-the-academy

Rhoden-Paul, A. 2015. Oxford Uni must decolonise its campus and curriculum, say students. The Guardian. [Accessed 17 June 2016] http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/18/oxford-uni-must-decolonise-its-campus-and-curriculum-say-students.

Swales, JM. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. PMCid:PMC1664324.

Thesen, L. 2015. Reections 6. “With writing you are not expected to come from your home”: Dilemmas of Belonging. In Lillis, T, Harrington, K, Lea, M and Mitchell, S. Working with Academic Literacies: Case Studies Towards Transformative Practice. Colorado: WAC Clearinghouse.

Notes1 Both terms are used in South African writing centres and throughout the book. Certain writing

centres have retained the terms ‘student client’ and ‘writing consultant’ while others have rejected these in favour of ‘student writer’ and ‘peer writing tutor’. These terms may indicate uncomfortable connections for some authors between the notion of consultants and clients and the ‘managerialist’ discourse pervasive in global higher education at present, or pressures to comply with funding requirements. We use both terms here, and authors will use and explain their preferred terms in the context of their chapters.

2 One of the key demands in the transformation negotiations with students at the universities of the Witwatersrand and Cape Town, for example, has been around the implementation of fair and unbiased marking and feedback practices. The writing centre can play a role in making lecturers aware of the impact of their approaches in inhibiting or facilitating learning, thinking and writing.

PART ITheorisinG anD exTenDinG WriTinG cenTre pracTice

in The universiTy

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The place of education theories in writing centres

Why this makes for significant research

Fatima Slemming

1

This chapter sets out to convey an idea about how research can facilitate improvements in the quality of teaching and learning. I argue that research should be deliberately conceptualised as significant in the broader context of the South African higher education environment. For the purpose of this chapter, however, the discussion about research will be confined to the contexts in which writing centres function.

I concur with the idea that research into writing centres as “alternate pedagogical spaces” is necessary for building the body of knowledge about writing centres in the higher education environment (Archer & Richards 2011:5). However, I argue that significant and relevant research into writing centre practices should be concerned with achieving three aims. One of these aims is to contextualise writing centre work in South Africa, theoretically and conceptually, as being part of a clearly identified field of academic scholarship and/or as connected to multiple fields of academic enquiry. In turn, this contextualisation attempts to engage constructively with broader social transformation issues outlined in national planning documents and discourses. The first sections of this paper attempt to provide briey this contextualisation.

The second aim that I highlight is a need to develop a consensual research agenda and research typology that motivates for, and builds, the teaching and research capacity