higher education writers

higher education writers

The Evolution of Higher Education Writing: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities

1. Introduction to Higher Education Writing

The consumer component of writing programs includes disciplines, faculties, or schools that offer specialist supports and resources in writing, telesupport helplines, peer tutoring, online writing resources, and even writing majors or concentrations as well as degrees or diplomas in writing. Researchers of writing in higher education have also produced notable work for dissemination amongst scholars and practitioners. The essay is organized as follows. First, we consider how we conceptualize studying writing in higher education and then trace the historical development of scholarship about writing in higher education. Although we have space only for a brief overview, we argue importantly that writing as we experience it is a historical, culturally specific phenomenon. We also discuss key ideas that continue to influence much ongoing work in the field. Finally, we outline the scope of the current study. In the conclusion, we revisit our claim to argue that the study of writing is the study of a historically emerging cultural technology and discuss some of the paradoxes that have been unearthed in a more recent shift in focus.

Writing has always been an essential part of higher education. By virtue of the lecture, institutions of higher learning have relied on writing to perform key ecologies of students’ learning, for purposes of summative and formative assessment, and to facilitate the explanation of viewpoints and outlines of content. Only recently, however, has writing been classified and named within higher education as a subject of pedagogic consideration and conceptualization. As a result, considerable evidence now maps the professional development and life histories of the lecturers and tutors whose work focuses on ‘writing.’ Definitions, in the form of rationales and aims, englobe writing outcomes and elements in degree programs and foundation courses.

2. Current Trends in Higher Education Writing

It seems intuitive to argue that it is the proliferation of digital technology, easily accessible by most writers, that is having one of the most dramatic effects on what is being produced across the educational levels and learning institutions. With a possible major work role in Web 2.0 activity as mothers and fathers, volunteers and employees, young and old community members; everyone could be researching, communicating, experimenting, involving, persuading, negotiating, decision-making, etc.; conducting our daily lives, sharing our cultural astronautics, and creating a more authentic educational experience as holists. Content, structure and approach are constructed face-to-face and online to capitalize and embody student and educator engagement in tertiary education, particularly when the intended audience are not co-participants in the education.

Among the trends influencing the teaching of academic writing at the tertiary level, perhaps none is more immediately impactful than the rise of digital technology and related transformations in higher education pedagogy. With the possibilities for multi-modal composing, digital storytelling, and social media-based writing outside the classroom on the rise in WID, WEC, and ESL/EAP settings, “academic” writing in the U.S. is taking on an array of new literacies, genres, and purposes. Simultaneously, transnational education is further complicating the transient cultural categories of academic, professional, and public writing that faculty in many countries seem to be grappling with today in search of EMI “solutions” and the best ways of preparing their increasingly diverse learners to function as lifelong participants in globally-disbursed social and professional networks. The affordances of the digital and critical postmodern inquiry into the constructedness of language and difference have also culminated in new interdisciplinary collaboration between writing researchers and others from fields as diverse as business, communications, computer science, design, management, marketing, psychology, student affairs, and speech.

3. Challenges Faced by Higher Education Writers

The writing quality of students is also affected by the same forces that affect faculty writing. Educational changes have been proposed and sometimes implemented to improve student writing. These changes serve as best practice strategies regarding faculty writing. However, the impact of such changes upon writing varies from one educational environment to another. Students are also increasingly under pressure from various national goals, requests from the various countries they study in, workload, and economic issues (like paying off loans), as well as pressure from secondary or high schools the students previously studied in. Changes in faculty and student writing result from the adoption of changes to language education policies, faculty practices, and teaching, research demands, the increase of globalized lecturers, and changes in the workplace of knowledge work and the global marketplace. These changes have had an effect upon faculty and student writers.

The craft of writing might appear to be easy, but it is quite challenging to be a higher education writer. Incidents of plagiarism and difficulties regarding academic integrity are some of the critical problems in contemporary academic writing. It is hard for faculty to check the originality of students’ writings when a diverse student population studies in modern universities. Besides, there are significant differences in terms of final examinations, variously designed. Also, there is increased pressure to publish journal articles in reputable journals, which have longer review processes, rejected more often, and read more widely than thirty years ago. Besides the pressure to publish, some universities in various countries have started mid-term standardized assessments regarding the performance of faculty. These institutions establish their own journal databases and regularly check to see whether faculty members are publishing in these journals. The Research Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom, for example, makes it so that faculty could be downgraded, and thereby financially penalized, if two-thirds of their articles are not in reputable journals.

4. Opportunities for Innovation in Higher Education Writing

One area where there are clearly opportunities for pushing various boundaries is at the intersection of writing and convergence: the literacies of convergence and the practices of writing about journalism and media. Here, academic traditions and value structure are well positioned to change; literary journalism is a growing domain of conventional importance, and digital literacy is becoming increasingly important, suggesting natural connections to very current academic and professional debates and practices. As digital media intertwines with transdisciplinary learning, evolving expertise from diverse vantage points converges into innovative expressions of teaching and learning. Eventually, we believe such collaborative innovation will globalize R&W, the first and longest running course at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

There are many obstacles in teaching writing in higher education, and dominant genres and traditions present profound challenges to ensuring that students and early career scholars are well prepared for the complex systems of value, power, and meaning in professional and academic environments, where so much of the evaluation of one’s abilities is communicated in written forms. Nonetheless, there are also many powerful ways to push against the status quo, and in this section, we examine opportunities for innovation in teaching those forms of writing that are held in such high esteem.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

While there have been many challenges to face over the decades, writing structure has moved away from ‘convergent’ models, genre-based and formulaic, and more towards ‘signature’ models, eclectic and contextually bound. In this longitudinal view, uncovering the assumptions and ideologies that underpin all of this is one of the significant directions to move towards. For policymakers in language education to make informed decisions, the field of EAP needs to address—head on—its pedagogical values. Understanding the evolution of thinking in this area is vitally important in mapping out this direction. For teachers, knowledge of writing practices systematised in such a review, and what ideas underpin these practices, have a variety of potential applications. It represents a snapshot of the dominant and/or influential writing theories and practices at any given time. Teachers may use this to consider the theoretical basis behind their practice: what are the pedagogical values and assumptions that prompt the privileged attention to the micro-writing process or to ‘form’ in a product-based approach? More judiciously, the review may be used to identify areas in which we might need new resources, or resources re-designed from a pop-pedagogical perspective.

This study has reviewed the evolution of the peer-reviewed literature on higher education writing. It has discussed in detail the academic genres dealt with by the texts, the most cited, and the duration and size of the publications included in the review. Five features of the evolution of higher education writing have been identified, each with a corresponding set of challenges and opportunities. The implications of these for the future of higher education writing are then considered. One point that must be made is that in considering future directions we have not attempted to respond to the challenges we have outlined. The interpretation, act of naming, or assumption that ‘all fishing students need help to become expert fishermen (rather than, for example, English speakers with shared interests)’ is one of the limitations of the existing literature that we want to move beyond.