Fostering subject lecturers’ commitment and capacity to engage with students’ academic literacies development [Oral Presentation]

Abstract

The academic literacies students require for success are specific to their disciplinary contexts. This means that subject specialists are best placed to induct students into the specific genres and discourses of their communities. Yet students’ literacy development is often ‘outsourced’ to generic skills centre or English for Academic Purposes (EAP) provision, with subject lecturers remaining chiefly preoccupied with content knowledge development. Academic literacies specialists have long argued for a collaborative approach, yet university structures impede such collaboration; some subject lecturers are unaware of their value in this process; for some, academic literacies knowledge is tacit, meaning they struggle to articulate their expectations; and others lack the pedagogical tools. To address these issues, we draw on an adaptive process advocated by Benzie et al. (2017), instigating a collaboration between an EAP specialist, an academic developer and subject lecturers with the aim of supporting the subject lecturers to reach an understanding of the academic literacies required by their discipline and to plan how these can be taught and developed in a contextualised way that suits them and their students. Through analysis of interviews and planning meetings with the subject lecturers, teaching materials they developed, and their reflections on the process, we provide insights into subject lecturers' conceptualisations of academic literacies, their teaching practices in relation to academic literacies and their experiences of the collaboration. The project thereby illuminates subject lecturers' relationship to students' academic literacies development and makes recommendations for future collaborations.