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/

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