Sally Mitchell

Now you don’t see it; now you do Writing made visible in the university

This article was given as a keynote address to the 2009 conference of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW), 30 June to 2 July, at Coventry University, UK. It draws on experiences at Queen Mary, University of London, of developing a ‘writing in the disciplines’ initiative and of working towards institutional recognition for writing as a key and integral part of student learning. It raises issues about the transition from school to university writing and about such frameworks as ‘Graduate Attributes’. Sometimes weaving together others’ stories, it argues that, whilst there is great potential for writing development in universities, we also need to be aware of risks that derive from adopting industrialized approaches, governed by a narrow emphasis on form, belief in the possibility and benefits of ‘transparency’ and an over-reliance on explicit criteria to drive assessment and learning.

A reflexive approach to interview data in an investigation of argument

As part of an exploratory study at three universities (two in the UK and one in the USA) of how first‐year students in three disciplines (biology, electrical engineering and history) learn to argue, we conducted interviews (individual and group) with university faculty and students about the place of argument in their teaching and learning. Here we reflect on the complexity of researching a term that refers both to an abstract concept and process and to diverse actual practices that often appear to be in excess of, or only partially covered by, such abstraction. We found stable, definitive data about argument hard to abstract convincingly from the interviews. The analysis instead drew our attention to how faculty and students inflected the term ‘argument’ in diverse, nuanced ways; constructed their accounts of ‘argument’ and of themselves as students or teachers interactively in the interview; and introduced various related terms (e.g. ‘analysis’, ‘interpretation’, ‘critique’). Reflecting on ways in which the interview can foreclose as well as open up opportunities for sense making around ‘argument’, we concluded that an approach that anchors talk in detailed accounts of practice is most fruitful in developing our understanding. In this way, interviewing can be a valuable research tool in developing understanding of how ‘argument’ is used in discourse and manifested in actual practices.

Beyond the Schooled Form and into the Discipline: An Introduction to Writing-Intensive Courses in UK Humanities.

This article is an introduction to two other articles in this issue, Catherine Maxwell’s ‘Teaching 19th-century aesthetic prose’ and Kirsteen Anderson’s ‘The whole learner: the role of imagination in developing disciplinary learning’. It highlights the significance of the courses described in Maxwell’s and Anderson’s accounts by discussing how the writing tasks that they engage students in contribute to the development of disciplinary understanding, and how, whilst eschewing reliance on the conventional schooled essay, they enable students to develop writing that is essayistic. It points to the potential that reinvisaging disciplinary writing has for curriculum and assessment design.