Writing as design: enabling access to academic discourse in a multimodal environment

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in South African Journal of Higher Education in 2012, available online: http://reference.sabinet.co.za/webx/access/electronic_journals/high/high_v26_n3_a2.pdf.This article builds on and contributes to work in writing pedagogy, with a particular focus on multimodality. Research on writing and academic literacies have examined changing texts in higher education, yet there has not been a particular emphasis on how these texts are reconfigured in the multimodal moment. This article examines the implications of a more inclusive view of the representational landscape for writing pedagogies and academic literacies. It explores the visual nature of writing, and some of the ways academic discourse is constructed across images and writing in texts in Higher Education. It also questions the extent to which visual and verbal modes can be used as critical 'metaforms' for reflection. The aim is to create awareness in order to enable student access to a broader multimodal notion of academic discourse

Using multimodal pedagogies in writing centres to improve student writing

This paper focuses on the affordances of multimodal pedagogies in writing centre environments to improve student writing. Writing centres have the potential to  function as change agents, contributing towards changing the dominant attitudes to language and texts. Multimodal pedagogies encourage the use of a range of modes (such as talk, writing, music and images) and a range of resources (including multilingual, experiential, embodied and technology-enriched resources). This paper explores how consultants and students use a range of modes and ensembles of modes to develop thinking and learning in a multilingual and diverse higher  education context. The dual role of consultants, being both ‘reproducers’ and  ‘interrogators’ of academic discourse, is touched upon, and the importance of  ‘recognising’ and drawing on the ‘brought-along’ resources in the training of  consultants is highlighted. The unique nature of one-on-one consultations in the  tertiary environment is explored, as well as the ways in which this pedagogical  space can be enhanced through the use of multimodal pedagogies. To this end, the paper examines talk as an important mode in improving writing. It also interrogates working on the screen versus the page, the affordances of mind mapping, and the balancing of creativity and constraints in the writing consultation. The aim is to theorise a multimodal approach to improving student writing through the  examination of practice. The contention is that multimodal pedagogies can acknowledge consultants and students as agentive, resourceful and creative  meaning-makers. This is particularly relevant in a context in which autonomous and decontextualised models of student support persist and students continue to be constructed as ‘lacking’ in resources.Keywords: higher education, multimodal pedagogies, one-on-one pedagogy, student writing, writing centre

‘The village of my childhood’: nostalgia, narrative and landscape in an engineering course in South Africa

Different views of society, nature and technology inform engineering activity and proposed developmental interventions. This paper examines the discourses that students both draw on and propagate in a course on rural development in a first year engineering foundation programme. Students’ texts reflect and recycle different discourses, some of which may complement each other, and others may compete or represent conflicting interests. A range of modes and media, coupled with the degree of regulation in the classroom space, may enable different discourses to emerge or to be further suppressed. This paper looks at the way rural is often constructed as ‘lack’ and therefore ‘other’, as well as discourses of nostalgia and utopianism and how these feed into notions of development. The agenda underlying this investigation is about facilitating student access to the engineering curriculum and contributing to the theorizing of a pedagogy of diversity that utilizes rather than ignores or devalues diverse subjectivities

A multimodal approach to academic literacy practices: problematising the visual/verbal divide

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Language and Education on 22 December 2008, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.2167/le677.0.There has tended to be an overemphasis on the teaching and analysis of the mode of writing in 'academic literacies' studies, even though changes in the communication landscape have engendered an increasing recognition of the different semiotic dimensions of representation. This paper tackles the logocentrism of academic literacies and argues for an approach which recognises the interconnection between different modes, in other words, a 'multimodal' approach to pedagogy and to theorising communication. It explores multimodal ways of addressing unequal discourse resources within the university with its economically and culturally diverse student body. Utilising a range of modes is a way of harnessing the resources that the students bring with them. However, this paper does not posit multimodality as an alternative way of inducting students into academic writing practices. Rather, it explores what happens when different kinds of 'cultural capital' (Bourdieu, 1991) encounter a range of generic forms, modes and ways of presenting information. It examines how certain functions are distributed across modes in students' texts in a first year engineering course in a South African university (specifically scientific discourse and student affect) and begins to problematise the visual/verbal distinction

Critical Access to higher education: challenges and goals for South African writing centres.

One of the main challenges involved in developing and running writing centres in tertiary contexts in South Africa is the recognition of the role that writing centres need to play in the redress of basic academic literacy competencies. Related to this is the complexity of providing access to academic and disciplinary discourses through making explicit how texts work in a critical manner. This paper examines these key challenges, focusing in particular on the Writing Centre at the University of Cape Town

No goats in the mother city: using symbolic objects to help students talk about diversity and change

This is the accepted version of the following article: Archer. A. 2007. 'No goats in the mother city': using Symbolic Objects to help students talk about diversity and change. English in Education. 41(1): 7-20. DOI: 10.1111/j.1754-8845.2007.tb00806.x., which has been published in final form at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-8845.2007.tb00806.x.This paper reports on a first year project in a South African engineering foundation programme which attempted to bring a cultural studies perspective to teaching academic literacy. Students identify and investigate everyday objects that have symbolic meanings in their communities. Objects are seen as catalysts for enabling student narratives to emerge, and are a way of exploring the tensions between convention and change in cultural practices. A project such as this breaks disciplinary frames, working across diverse contexts such as engineering and cultural studies. The aim is to begin to explore some of the complexities around 'development' in contexts of diversity and change, globalization and relocalization

Dealing with multimodal assignments in writing centres

We can no longer confine literacy pedagogy to the realm of language alone, as we need to take into account the role of images and other modes of meaning-making in texts. Nowadays, the tasks set for students’ assignments in higher education often require complex multimodal competencies (Archer 2006). Many assignments use images as evidence, whilst other assignments are predominantly visual in nature, such as posters, storyboards, or assignments that include CD-roms or other media. New technologies also enable a range of possibilities for individuals creating documents, including variety in layout, image, color, typeface, sound. The challenge for writing centers is to train the tutors to utilize these technologies effectively themselves so that they can deal with the changing nature of assignments

Challenges and potentials for writing centres in South African tertiary institutions

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in South African Journal of Higher Education in 2010, available online: http://reference.sabinet.co.za/webx/access/electronic_journals/high/high_v24_n4_a2.pdf.There are many challenges involved in developing and running Writing Centres in tertiary contexts in South Africa. These challenges include recognizing the role Writing Centres need to play in the redress of basic academic literacies. They also involve emphasizing writing as a mode of learning where higher cognitive functions such as analysis and synthesis are developed through spoken and written language. Academic discourse takes a distinct written form, comprising often unspoken conventions which dictate appropriate uses of lexicogrammatical structures. Each discipline also has its own particular 'dialect'. Acquiring these 'foreign' methods of communication poses a challenge to many students, not only English Additional Language students. One of the main challenges for Writing Centres is to provide access to academic and disciplinary discourses through making explicit how texts work in a critical manner, whilst at the same time inducting students into these discourses. This article examines some key tensions in Writing Centre practices in the South African context, including debates about decontextualization, skills versus practices, process versus genre approaches to writing, the challenges and opportunities of the one-to-one. It explores how the Writing Centre at the University of Cape Town tries to address some of these challenges, and looks at the potentials for Writing Centres in tertiary institutions

Invisible landscapes: Students constructions of the social and the natural in an engineering course in South Africa.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Social Dynamics on 3 August 2009, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/02533950903076220.This paper examines the discourses that students draw on and propagate in a course on rural development in a first‐year engineering foundation programme. It looks at the way 'rural' is often constructed as 'lack' and therefore 'other', the dangers of constructing development as linear, the ways nostalgia and utopianism feed into discourses of development and how 'propriety' serves to maintain boundaries between nature and people, society and individuals. Different modes and media, coupled with the degree of regulation in the classroom, may enable alternate discourses to emerge or to be suppressed. This paper argues that the curriculum needs to engage with students' views in order to understand, interrogate and critique the kinds of realities they feed into

Clip-art or design: exploring the challenges of multimodal texts for writing centres in higher education

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies on 30 January 2012, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.2989/16073614.2011.651938.In higher education, genre theorists and academic literacy practitioners have examined evolving genres, but they have not specifically focused on the multimodal nature of texts that students need to produce for assessment purposes. This paper explores the increasing influence and incorporation of the visual into academic texts, and ways of enabling student access to academic discourse in a multimodal environment. Taking a multimodal perspective on 'academic literacies', it looks at examples from different disciplines and provides guidelines on how writing centres can assist students with the designs of their multimodal texts in a changing representational landscape. In particular, it focuses on helping students with predominantly visual texts, integrating visuals into written assignments, and ways of writing about images