Academic Writing: Anxiety, Confusion and the Affective Domain: Why Should Subject Lecturers Acknowledge the Social and Emotional Aspects of Writing Development Processes?

Having worked in FE and HE in the United Kingdom for over thirty years it and written a PhD on the subject of lecturers’ perceptions on academic writing in higher education (French, 2014), it became very clear to me that many students (and lecturers, although that is a subject of another paper), experience the processes of producing academic writing in very physical and emotional ways. In this paper I will be discussing how my students often articulated the intensity and emotional nature of their academic writing experiences using words like ‘fear’, ‘frustration’, ‘outrage’ ‘exhaustion’ and ‘yearning’. This emotion and strength of feeling drew me to consider the relationship between the development of a positive writing identity and the affective domain. Subsequently, in my practice as a tutor in higher education I have incorporated the affective domain on such earlier work and seeks to stimulate debate with subject lecturers about how important emotions, even negative emotions like confusion and anxiety, can be to the development of a positive academic writing identity for students. Finally, I argue that using the affective domain as a pedagogic springboard, subject lecturers can formulate more collaborative, supportive and emotionally sensitive communities of writing practice. (200

Writing matters

For the last three years a team of researchers based in Wolverhampton University’s School of Education have been working on a research project which focuses on developing secure writing identities in first year Early Years students. The Early Childhood Studies degree is vocationally based and underpinned with relevant academic theory. Many of the students are qualified, experienced practitioners who entered higher education because workforce development initiatives in early years’ educare have encouraged them to study for a degree. Others have worked with children either in a voluntary capacity or in placement or as employment. Many continue to work in early childhood settings whilst completing their degrees. For this reason their entry into higher education often represents a shift from the utilisation of largely practical knowledge in the workplace to a primarily theoretical knowledge base operating in academia. This shift may account for the fact that many students report experiencing anxiety and difficulty around academic writing, especially in their first year.HEFC

Time outdoors and the prevention of myopia

Recent epidemiological evidence suggests that children who spend more time outdoors are less likely to be, or to become myopic, irrespective of how much near work they do, or whether their parents are myopic. It is currently uncertain if time outdoors also blocks progression of myopia. It has been suggested that the mechanism of the protective effect of time outdoors involves light-stimulated release of dopamine from the retina, since increased dopamine release appears to inhibit increased axial elongation, which is the structural basis of myopia. This hypothesis has been supported by animal experiments which have replicated the protective effects of bright light against the development of myopia under laboratory conditions, and have shown that the effect is, at least in part, mediated by dopamine, since the D2-dopamine antagonist spiperone reduces the protective effect. There are some inconsistencies in the evidence, most notably the limited inhibition by bright light under laboratory conditions of lens-induced myopia in monkeys, but other proposed mechanisms possibly associated with time outdoors such as relaxed accommodation, more uniform dioptric space, increased pupil constriction, exposure to UV light, changes in the spectral composition of visible light, or increased physical activity have little epidemiological or experimental support. Irrespective of the mechanisms involved, clinical trials are now underway to reduce the development of myopia in children by increasing the amount of time they spend outdoors. These trials would benefit from more precise definition of thresholds for protection in terms of intensity and duration of light exposures. These can be investigated in animal experiments in appropriate models, and can also be determined in epidemiological studies, although more precise measurement of exposures than those currently provided by questionnaires is desirable

Good transitions : lessons from the ‘Transitions West Midlands’ project

Transitions West Midlands (TWM) is a collaborative project, funded by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), that brings together staff and students from a group of institutions (further and higher education) who have been working together for the past four years through the West Midlands Post '92 Research Forum. TWM aims to offer new insights into the first-hand experiences of students making the move or preparing to make the move from Further Education (FE) to Higher Education (HE) within the West Midlands region. The case study approach has enabled us to explore students' expectations of, and reflections on, transition as they move within and between the four participating institutions. The project was driven by three key questions: How do prospective students from under-represented groups in HE understand/perceive their support needs prior to transition? How do HE students from under-represented groups self-define the enablers and barriers to effective transition? How do HE and FE institutions best support students from under-represented groups as they progress through the various stages of transition from FE to HE

‘Fail better’: Reconsidering the role of struggle and failure in academic writing development in higher education

‘Fail Better’ is an approach which supports first year students’ successful transition to higher education academic writing practices. ‘Fail Better’ uses a broadly academic literacies model of development to address students’ failure and struggle with writing. Rather than blaming students for ‘poor writing’, ‘Fail Better’ maintains that experiences of struggle and failure with academic writing are part of an inevitable and necessary process as students ‘write themselves’ into new disciplinary-based academic writing communities. The final part of the paper explores how subject lecturers, who are often not confident or willing writing developers, can, through the application of “Fail Better’ principles, offer their students a time-efficient, proactive and supportive model of writing development. It argues, moreover, that universities must reject deficit discourses around students’ struggles with academic writing and radically reconceptualise the issue of academic writing support in order to support students more effectively through their struggles and failures. Key words: Academic writing development, student identity and transition to higher educatio

Scattering for nonlinear waves on hyperbolic space

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the asymptotic behavior of solutions to the nonlinear wave equation on hyperbolic space of dimension n, where n is greater than or equal to 3. We will assume the nonlinearity to be of power type; that is, Box u = F(u), where F(u) is approximately equal to a|u| superscriptb. Small data global well-posedness for this equation in dimension n=3 was explored... and in dimensions greater than 3... With their results in hand, we then ask what happens to solutions... Answers to this type of question are phrased in terms of the existence of wave operators and scattering, which have been demonstrated in the Euclidean case... and for the nonlinear Schrodinger equation on hyperbolic space... In this thesis we will demonstrate the existence of scattering and wave operators for the nonlinear wave equation on hyperbolic space of dimension n is greater than or equal to 3 when [equasion] and of dimension 3 is less than or equal to n is less than or equal to 5 when [equasion]

Through a glass darkly: a post-qualitative case study into perceptions of academic writing practices in higher education

This thesis shifts the traditional emphasis around academic writing and writing development from students’ shortcomings as writers to an exploration of an under-researched aspect of the debate, namely lecturers’ perspectives of academic writing (their own and students). It draws on a New Literacy Studies (NLS) approach that locates academic writing and writing development in higher education, within a critical and situated theory of practice. The research is located within a postmodern, post-structural paradigm and involves a deliberate deconstruction of methodologies involved in traditional qualitative research (Stronach and MacLure, 1997). Foucault’s concept of ‘disciplinary power’, Lather’s suspicion of scientism (1986) and the work of feminist theorists like Pillow (2000), and Richardson (1997) are used to challenge traditional notions around qualitative research. Post-qualitative research methods and ideas (St. Pierre, 2011) are used to deterritorialise and reterritorialise traditional qualitative methodologies, with forms and ideas that speak in new ways about qualitative research practices and how researchers might handle qualitative data differently. Lecturers’ statements in the research setting are used to explore dominant epistemes and discourses circulating around academic writing practices. The thesis proposes that lecturers and students are engaged in an inherently tense and problematic relationship around academic writing, described by Baynham and Prinsloo (2008) as a process of constant ‘recontextualisation’. Alongside the statements from research participants, autoethnography passages appear throughout the thesis (Ellis and Bochner, 2000). These passages reflect the multiplicity of relational and dynamic discourses that inform academic writing practices in higher education. The assemblages and imaginaries offered in the final chapter are exercises in educational philosophy and reflection. They represent an attempt to write out/up/through my own subjectivity and respond to the statements made by the research participants which reflected how they lived, thought and worked with academic writing practices in higher education

Refrain, Again: The Return of the Villanelle

Poets and scholars are all wrong about the villanelle. While most reference texts teach that the villanelle's nineteen-line alternating-refrain form was codified in the Renaissance, the scholar Julie Kane has conclusively shown that Jean Passerat's "Villanelle" ("J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle"), written in 1574 and first published in 1606, is the only Renaissance example of this form. My own research has discovered that the nineteenth-century "revival" of the villanelle stems from an 1844 treatise by a little- known French Romantic poet-critic named Wilhelm Ténint. My study traces the villanelle first from its highly mythologized origin in the humanism of Renaissance France to its deployment in French post-Romantic and English Parnassian and Decadent verse, then from its bare survival in the period of high modernism to its minor revival by mid-century modernists, concluding with its prominence in the polyvocal culture wars of Anglophone poetry ever since Elizabeth Bishop’s "One Art" (1976). The villanelle might justly be called the only fixed form of contemporary invention in English; contemporary poets may be attracted to the form because it connotes tradition without bearing the burden of tradition. Poets and scholars have neither wanted nor needed to know that the villanelle is not an archaic, foreign form. The introduction documents the current popularity of the nineteen-line fixed-form villanelle in Anglophone poetry and its absence in Francophone poetry. The first chapter focuses on Jean Passerat's "J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle," offering a history, collation, interpretation, and new translation of this ignored original villanelle. The second chapter describes the highly politicized aesthetic context of nineteenth-century French and English post-Romanticism, when professional poet-critics Théodore de Banville and Edmund Gosse claimed a false history for the villanelle. The third chapter examines the low status of the French forms in the period of high modernism and the Great War, discussing works by Joyce and Pound as well as patriotic poems. The fourth chapter explores the sources of Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" and its influence on later poets, especially Elizabeth Bishop. The conclusion places the villanelle firmly within the context of contemporary professional poetry culture

Alcott's "Rigmarole": The Composition and Publication History of Little Women

_Little Women_ is a work composed piecemeal and narrated in more than one generic mode. Alcott's complete financial dependence on what she could earn from her writing, her ambivalence toward conventional narratives for women, and, most importantly, her alternating submission to and rebellion against the demands (real and imagined) of her readers and her editor/publisher, Thomas Niles--all these factors made Little Women a veritable piece of patchwork. Picking apart its seams through a close attention to the history of its composition and publication suggests that it is these very contradictions, both formal and thematic, that have helped the story achieve the mythic escape velocity it still enjoys