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South African University education characteristically places writing high on its assessment agenda. Formal examinations are the usual means of student evaluation. Rarely is a student given opportunity to develop writing skill even though it plays a central role in assessment. Schooling at all levels and for all South African groups has often failed to produce student writing free of surface errors, let alone the higher cognitive demands of thinking and writing critically. If university education is to continue to lay stress on written communication skills, students must have opportunity to develop appropriate writing skills in discipline specific-contexts.Using the cooperative action research paradigm, the Rhodes University Writing Centre is currently investigating writing-across-the-curriculum strategies as a means of developing a pedagogy of academic literacy. Student learners are supported through two thrusts of the centre: the Writing Consultancy Project and the Writing Respondent Project. Both projects demand a high level of engagement between academic development practitioners and academics. Those university teachers who contract with the Writing Centre are given detailed analyses of student writing problems related to the tasks they have required of students, within their own disciplines. This information is used to review task and course design. A number of academic departments and students currently make use of the facility on a voluntary basis.
The study is ongoing, and aims to examine the potential a Writing Centre approach has on learning, teaching, curriculum and ultimately institutional transformation.
This paper explores the potential of a writing centre to contribute to the transformation of the rhetorical community of a university campus. The examination is grounded in the case of the East London Division of Rhodes University, South Africa. The Rhodes Writing Centre positions itself, in the context of writing skills, as a change agent in departmental teaching and learning dynamics. The paper examines the particular confluence of agenda embedded in the Rhodes Writing Centre. It also questions the centre's developmental impetus for discipline-specific teaching and learning skills, with respect to writing, which are fundamental to academic literacy education.
North (1984) reports that writing centres have become prominent in the past forty years, especially in the U.S.A. According to Murphey (1995:117) they have reflected educational philosophies and socio-cultural currents shaping that society. In South Africa institutions in the Western Cape are leading their development in that country. The University of Cape Town (UCT), University of the Western Cape, Peninsula Technikon and Cape Town Technikon formulated a regional committee of Writing Centres in 1994 (Parkerson 1994:3). In 1995 the first National Writing Centre Forum was held in Cape Town, in association with the South African Association of Academic Development.
Centrally comments and questions written on the student submission by the respondent represent the reader's voice which the student is encouraged to negotiate within the re-drafting of the writing piece. The writing process was therefore perceived as similar to a spoken conversation in which reader and writer negotiate meaning through dialogue. Dialoguing is particularly important when working cross-culturally, as the South African context almost by definition, requires. The question remains, however, whether process interaction of respondents or consultants sufficiently empowers writers to critique their own work, and whether these learners are at liberty to treat such comments on a selective basis. In theory the key to effective writing is for the writer to appropriately direct writing to a target audience (the reader), which the respondent helps the writer to define. Understanding the needs of such a target audience and writing accordingly, assists writers to develop context-independent language suitable for academic writing (Cummins 1986), but the possibility of the writing centre imposing a world-view on a learner-writer however, is a point for constant evaluation.
There were distinct advantages to the project. A process approach to writing education encourages writers to think more deeply about the implications of what they have written. In this way, writing serves to generate deeper discourse learning. Disadvantaging students, by expecting them to develop writing skills in contexts outside of specific discourse - in writing classes for example - was obviated by the project. Respondents were to varying extents immersed in the disciplines in which students wrote, but interacted with student writing as non-initiates. Writers re-drafted ideas based on clarification, restructuring or analysis issues raised by the reader.
The need to reinforce the difference between context-specific or spoken communication and context-independent or written communication was considered fundamental to the writing process in which respondents engaged with students. This distinction is important for learner-writers since writing in the academic context requires that the para-linguistic support structures, common in spoken language, are substituted by other aids in written expression (Boughey 1995:205). A conferencing or consultation approach, unless focused on written submissions may not establish this distinction, or may reinforce student attempts to use context-dependent language in academic writing. A student's ability to communicate effectively with a writing respondent tests a writer's ability to use context-independent language. Conversely, restricting the process of writer-learning to written codes may seriously disadvantage black African learners whose cultural identity is more comfortably matched to an oral, consultative approach to learning.
The policy has been to work with academic departments prepared to participate in co-operative action research through which the centre evaluates both itself and academic literacy efforts of departments. The modus operandi is to seek involvement with lecturers on three levels: task-design, task-assessment and evaluation of the writing process. In the best scenario the rhetoric of a task is finalised and communicated to students after subject lecturers and writing educators have constructed a topic likely to generate learning, which has been identified by the lecturer as important. Often the writing centre settles for a modus vivendi, having to attempt intervention after the task has been designed and students assigned what can turn out to be an ill-conceived or a poorly structured task. Students nevertheless have the opportunity of submitting multiple drafts and, between each, re-drafting in response to the reader's comments.
At whatever point the writing centre intervenes, personnel not only interact with students on their submitted texts, but also summarise their findings in an additional write-up. Main issues and two additional issues are recorded by a coding system current at UCT's Writing Centre. "Issue Codes" fall into the following categories: (1) Information (IN); Task Analysis (TA); Reading (RE); Organisation (OR); Conceptual (CO); Language (LA); Discourse (DI); External Factors (EF). For example if the main issue emerging out of a consultation was that a student did not understand the elements of essay writing, the consultant would record "INele1". If an additional issue was that referencing was faulty, the code "INref1" would be used. The third issue could be "TAVvoc1" if the student did not grasp the vocabulary or concepts of the topic. Part of the assessment procedure and much of the evaluation process in which the exercise is reviewed will make use of the frequencies with which consultants and respondents record issues in each of the categories. This information, essentially an analysis of the distribution of frequencies across all categories for the group, is relayed back to the subject specialist who expects feedback as part of the contract with the centre. Assessment of performance, modification of future writing tasks and teaching goals can then be informed by this information.
Murphey (1995:117-118) suggests that the conservative, liberal and radical debate over education has produced a rich matrix to which writing centre practice has responded. A conservative perspective pronounces writing centres successful when they contribute to the removal of surface and structural errors in student writing and develop "critical thinking". They are thus remediation centres based on a deficiency paradigm, and operating techno-pragmatically. Behavioural objectives and skill acquisition form the backbone of writing centres in the conservative camp. Murphey summarises this as writing centres reinforcing a "hegemony of educational standards and objectives". The liberal perspective, valuing education as a tool for personal enrichment and therefore empowerment, is based on a liberation paradigm. For the liberal model, writing centres are ideal places for dialogic exchanges and through modelling and apprenticeship teach the craft of writing. Student writers learn from experienced writers. The significant aspect of this model is the emphasis on the uniqueness of the student in the writing process. In valuing the individual, the liberal model succeeds in addressing the student learner whose totality would be left unaddressed by a writing centre operating in the conservative model. The radical view, also making use of a liberation paradigm, sees education in microcosmic terms - serving the interests of the ruling class and calls for a suitable critique against oppressive forces. Writing centres operating in the radical model value multiple literacies rather than enforcing single interpretations of "Literacy". Murphey conceptualises the radical perspective as arguing for a position of counterhegemony.
The importance of the analysis of such opposing views of educational perspective is to illustrate that each in fact supports opposing views of the purpose of knowledge within a culture. Murphey (1995:121) claims that the conservative model makes use of the objectivity usually associated with the empirical sciences. The liberal and radical positions on the other hand brand this as scientism and impose instead an interpretive hermeneutic which rejects the positivist implications of conservatism. In a nut-shell these different cognitive perspectives raise the question of what exactly the critical space is that the writing centre occupies between faculty, academic department and student writer. Wilson (1986 cited in Murphey 1995:122) asks whether the writing centre is concerned primarily with empirical or technical and practical knowledge, or with emancipatory knowledge? Do they operate with "facticity" (Maddi 1988 cited in Murphey 1995:123) or through critique, pursue "possibility" (Giroux 1985). Or is it, in fact, that writing centres lend themselves to the Freirian capacity for transcendence and that what is possible is based on the facts or perceptions of existence, which cannot be ignored, and the possibilities beyond these? Answering these questions will determine exactly the type of developmental impetus operating in the context of any particular writing centre and the literacies it espouses.
Harris (in Mullin and Wallace 1994:96) shares the same concern with respect to students whose difficulties arise from the social and cultural differences inherent in their writing. She argues that student literacies are different and not necessarily deficient. Thus a major part of a writing centre's task is to help student writers see where they fit in or differ from established communication patterns, not because of a primary need to assimilate students into an existing culture of learning, but to help them acculturate to a point where they can function (for change) within that culture. Coles and Wall (1987:313) make the same point:
To present 'academic discourse' to basic readers and writers as if it were a unified body of literacy conventions and procedures to be mastered is to mystify what our students most need to have demystified: how work gets done in the university. For while we speak broadly of the university as a 'discourse community', particular interpretive communities come into existence only when particular students and teachers are gathered there. When this happens, neither students nor teachers leave their histories behind; they bring them to class, to every academic discussion and to every reading and writing assignment.Harris' view supports the idea that writing centres serve to value individual diversity and therefore a central tenet of its pedagogy is affirmed. Reviewing theorists researching the social settings and dynamics of writing consultations, Flynn (1993 in Flynn and King 1993:8) supports this view. Generally, the student controls the direction of learning. The focus is on the student's writing skills, not on the text being studied. The aim is to resolve the immediate difficulty that brought the student to the writing centre. The long-term goal is to foster independence of practice when students are faced with writing tasks at university which in reality will demand their functioning as critical learners. Beyond working with individuals, an important dimension in the writing centre as an agent of change is seen in its relationship with a broader academic community.
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| Author: Dr M R Davidson, Academic Development Coordinator Rhodes University, East London, South Africa Email: mdavid@lark.ru.ac.za Fax: 0431 43 8307 Please cite as: Davidson, M. R. (1996). Personal voice and critical thinking: The potential of the Writing Centre at Rhodes University, in the development of academic literacy and institutional transformation. Different Approaches: Theory and Practice in Higher Education. Proceedings HERDSA Conference 1996. Perth, Western Australia, 8-12 July. http://www.herdsa.org.au/confs/1996/davidson.html |