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- Eriksson, Andreas, 1973, et al.
(författare)
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Enhancing the development of students’ disciplinary discourse and content learning in science and engineering through a focus on writing: a comparison between approaches at a Swedish and a UK university.
- 2017
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Ingår i: 9th Conference of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW).
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- An Erasmus funded collaboration between Chalmers University and Queen Mary University of London in2016, involving a one‐week visit by Queen Mary disciplinary and Learning Development/Thinking Writingstaff to Chalmers, enabled us to share practices and approaches in how we support the development ofstudents’ disciplinary discourse in science and engineering.In Queen Mary, a funded project known as The Whole Programme Approach to Writing Development hasbeen focusing on two degree programmes, Mechanical Engineering and Electronic Engineering andComputer Science. The objective of the project is to investigate writing development across the three yearsof the programmes and support innovations that build engineering discourse along a more coherenttrajectory. At Chalmers, there is a long tradition of developing disciplinary discourse at the level of entireeducational programmes. Given that many students start on a BSc‐programme and continue onto anassociated MSc, the ‘programme’ at Chalmers allows for a five‐year sequenced progression for a majority ofthe students. There are also a number of students (25%) who enter at the level of the MSc and consequentlyexperience less of the sequenced progression. Since the BSc section of the programmes is delivered inSwedish and the MSc is delivered in English, the whole programme approach at Chalmers also needs tonegotiate issues of transferring from L1 to ESL or EFL. The different engineering programmes, therefore,exemplify different degrees of EMI and some provide more integrated disciplinary discourse developmentthan others.The symposium will be organised in the form of a dialogue between the two universities to draw outsignificant parallels and differences, and how these have been addressed. The dialogue is framed by threeinterrelated conceptual configurations: disciplinary practices, contexts, and multimodal texts. Ourengagement with these configurations is influenced by our educational philosophies or theories; thepedagogical approaches we encounter or use and find to be effective with specialists or students; and themultimodal artefacts and practices of students and specialists we encounter in the various programmes.Drawing on experience in our respective contexts and using joint concept mapping to visualise our activities,we will offer some of the approaches we have adopted (e.g. social semiotics; constructive alignment;research‐based learning, genre‐based writing instruction; writing‐to‐learn; and concept mapping) to explorehow they are used in strategic mixes within the various programmes. In our practices, we find our focusshifting between the three configurations of practices, contexts and texts, sometimes emphasising artefacts,sometimes practices, sometimes students, sometimes specialists/lecturers, and sometimes the developmentof educational material and resources.We hope to be able to present the audience possible ways towards implementing a whole programmeapproach at their respective institutions. However, we also want to highlight the challenges we face and howwe are currently addressing them.Discussion questions:How do your experiences of developing students’ disciplinary discourses and content learning compare withthe ones you have heard about in the presentations?Do the three broad perspectives of practices, contexts, and texts and the theories and approaches referredto help in articulating your experience?
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