Teaching Academic Literacies in international relations: towards a pedagogy of practice

ABSTRACT

Academic Literacies elucidates how undergraduate students with diverse skillsets can effectively engage with socially constructed and discipline-specific knowledge(s) through writing. Over the last two decades, language specialists and education researchers have developed a robust, student-focused epistemology. However, it remains unclear how lecturers understand and teach Academic Literacies in their courses. This article shifts the focus by exploring how we – a teaching team in International Relations at a Swedish university – translated the knowledge claims and ideological commitments of Academic Literacies into an applied pedagogy. We employ collaborative, reflective practice to investigate how we progressively integrated Academic Literacies in an introductory, bachelor’s level course from 2010–2019. Specifically, we illustrate how we used formative feedback, peer assessment, and reflective journaling to teach International Relations through academic writing. We conclude with a discussion of the best practices and unresolved challenges of our evolving pedagogical design.

KEYWORDS:

• Formative feedback
• lecturers’ perspectives
• peer assessment
• reflective journaling

1. Introduction

How can university lecturers translate the principles of Academic Literacies (AcLits) into pedagogical practice? Scholars developed AcLits in response to the ‘massification’ of Higher Education (HE) (Lea and Street 1998) – a process resulting in the inclusion of students with increasingly diverse backgrounds and skillsets. Over the past two decades, AcLits researchers have argued that academic writing¹ is power-laden, socially negotiated, and discipline-specific (Aiken 2021; Elton 2010; French 2018; Lea 2004; Lea and Street 1998, 2006). Consequently, lecturers must co-opt students as partners in their learning, explicitly teaching them how to access, understand, and produce disciplinary knowledge through writing (Dysthe 2003; French 2018; Ingle 2016; Wingate 2006). Moreover, lectures must embed this instruction into disciplinary courses, rather than regulating it to the composition department (Fernsten and Reda 2011) or the writing centre (French 2018; Ingle 2016; Wingate 2006).

However, integrating AcLits into disciplinary courses presents lecturers with formidable challenges. First, the literature is student-focused (see Aiken 2021; Lillis and Scott 2015), providing insufficient guidance for lecturers seeking to translate AcLits into pedagogical practice (see Wingate, Andon, and Cogo 2011). Relatedly, the research that includes lecturers’ experiences is predominantly conducted by writing and language specialists (see Jonsmoen and Greek 2017; Lea and Street 1998) and education researchers (see Bergman 2014, 2016), obscuring lecturers’ subject-specific positions.

Second, AcLits is primarily researched at universities where English is the medium of instruction (see Canton, Govan, and Zahn 2018; Clarence, Albertus, and Mwambene 2014; Wingate and Tribble 2012), and students are required to take an introductory writing course (see Hendricks and Quinn 2000; Jacobs 2007). This particularity raises questions about how lecturers employ the framework in contexts where instruction is bilingual (see Bolton and Kuteeva 2012; Kuteeva and Airey 2014), and writing courses are the exception rather than the rule. In the absence of research written by lecturers across disciplines and contexts, it is challenging to translate the principles of AcLits into a pedagogy of practice, leaving lecturers uncertain and ambivalent about incorporating AcLits into their courses (Bergman 2014, 2016).

To address these challenges, we – a teaching team in International Relations (IR) at a Swedish university – reflect on how we progressively embedded AcLits in a bachelor’s level course with up to 140 students per term from 2010–2019. We demonstrate how we interpreted and applied AcLits to our context and circumstances, illustrating how we used formative feedback, peer assessment, and reflective journaling to teach IR through academic writing. Additionally, we reflect on the feedback we received from students, discussing how we used that feedback in an evolving course design.

Thus, the article makes three contributions. First, we open up our classroom doors to provide a lecturers’ perspective on teaching AcLits. This behind-the-scenes look at our evolving course design contributes to the burgeoning literature on AcLits as pedagogical practice (see Lea 2004; Lillis et al. 2015; Wingate, Andon, and Cogo 2011). Second, we illustrate how writing instruction can support, rather than distract from, disciplinary content in an introductory course with high enrolment and diverse student needs (see Clarence, Albertus, and Mwambene 2014). This contribution speaks to the AcLits’ commitment to co-opt students as knowledgeable, engaged partners in their learning (see Lea and Street 1998). Third, we offer the best practices we developed over nine years of progressively embedding AcLits into our course as a ‘thinking tool’ (see Dysthe 2003, 152) for pedagogical practice across contexts and disciplines.

The article proceeds with section two, where we review existing AcLits literature and describe the massification of HE in Sweden. We outline our methods and ethical considerations in section three, explaining how we employed ‘reflection-in-practice’ and ‘reflection-on-practice’ (see Pereira 1999; Schön 1983) to progressively understand, apply, and refine our pedagogical approach. Section four introduces our IR course, discussing how we deployed formative feedback, peer review, and reflective journaling to teach disciplinary content. In section five, we discuss the best practices we developed over nine years of course evolution and the challenges we have yet to address. Finally, we summarise our arguments and contributions in section six, concluding with suggestions for future research.

2. Academic Literacies: obstacles and opportunities

This section discusses the obstacles and opportunities of (1) teaching AcLits based on existing literature and (2) the contextual features of Swedish HE affecting how we understood and applied the framework. In doing so, we situate our contributions in the literature and describe the pedagogical challenges that AcLits helped us address.

2.1. Academic Literacies in theory and practice

AcLits suggests that knowledge is mediated and constructed through discipline-specific assumptions, practices, and interactions (Lea and Street 1998, 2006; Lillis and Scott 2015), challenging the notion that reading and writing skills are ‘generic and transferable across the university’ (Lea and Street 1998, 164). Over the last two decades, a consensus has emerged that lecturers can and should incorporate AcLits – helping students read, understand, write about, and produce knowledge – into disciplinary coursework (Elton 2010; French 2018; Lea 2004; Lea and Street 1998, 2006; Wingate 2007). The AcLits approach has also highlighted contemporary students’ diverse needs as universities transition from elite institutions to schools for the masses (Goldingay et al. 2016).

While AcLits research has clarified the epistemological principles of teaching increasingly diverse student populations how to engage with disciplinary content through writing (see Lillis and Scott 2015), this literature has inadequately elucidated how lecturers translate these principles into pedagogical practice (Wingate, Andon, and Cogo 2011). Existing practice-based literature is predominantly written by language specialists and education researchers based on interviews or collaborations with lecturers (see Jonsmoen and Greek 2017; Lillis et al. 2015) rather than lecturers themselves. While this research is useful, the positionality of its authors is ‘integral not only to (the) research (itself) but also to the interpretive process of analysis and representation’ (Sangarasivam 2001, 95). In the absence of contributions by lecturers, it is challenging to develop a pedagogy for lecturers. We contend existing contributions to AcLits pedagogies (see Lea 2004; Wingate, Andon, and Cogo 2011) can be strengthened and extended by lecturers who have received training in the approach or experimented with AcLits independently. We count ourselves among the framework’s self-taught adherents.

Furthermore, the AcLits literature suffers from a language bias (see Bergman 2014, 2016). Once lauded as ‘the most influential conceptual framework for writing practitioners at UK universities’ (Canton, Govan, and Zahn 2018, 668), AcLits is increasingly studied in other contexts where English is the medium of instruction, such as Australia (see Murray and Nallaya 2016) and South Africa (see Clarence, Albertus, and Mwambene 2014; Jacobs 2007). Just as disciplinary standards beguile a one-size-fits-all approach to literacies, so does the language of instruction. As we argue below, Swedish lecturers engage in bilingual instruction (see Bolton and Kuteeva 2012; Kuteeva and Airey 2014) and thus face unique obstacles and opportunities in teaching AcLits.

Finally, there is an instructional bias in the AcLits literature. Many authors refer to and problematise the introductory writing courses students take when they enter university but do not reflect on the challenges of embedding AcLits into contexts where students do not complete compulsory writing courses. We maintain that scholars can and should extend AcLits to include more diverse HE systems (see Bergman 2014, 2016). We contribute to expanding AcLits by considering the contextual features influencing our understanding and use of the approach in Sweden. In doing so, we provide a ‘thinking tool’ (see Dysthe 2003, 152) for other lecturers who must also consider the opportunities and challenges affecting their abilities to embed AcLits in their courses.

2.2. Teaching Academic Literacies in Swedish Higher Education

The university sector’s transition from elite to mass education is a global trend following different trajectories in different contexts (Guri-Rosenblit, Šebková, and Teichler 2007). Swedish HE experienced profound structural transformations in recent decades. Successive governments expanded HE, and from the 1990s to 2010s, the number of students more than doubled (Haikola 2015). Mirroring demographic shifts in the population, the number of students with an immigrant background increased from 17 to 26% between 2009 and 2018. As universities enrolled an increasing number of diverse students, many lecturers struggled to adapt their teaching to students with different expectations, knowledge, and skillsets than earlier generations. Concurrently, the Swedish school system has been decreasingly effective in providing students with equitable education, and Swedish secondary school results have long deteriorated (Böhlmark et al. 2019; Gustafsson et al. 2014; Svensson 2018). Expanded enrolment and school decline mean that students’ qualifications are, on average, lower and more stratified today than a generation ago (Sonnerby 2012).

Unfortunately, Swedish universities have failed to match expanding enrolment with increased funding (Gribbe and Skog 2019) and this failture has had deleterious effects on teaching. Lecturers have a higher teaching load than their colleagues in other Scandinavian countries (Brommesson et al. 2016), yet students receive fewer teaching hours in Sweden than any other European country (Bender 2013; Kolm et al. 2018). Moreover, from 2010 to 2020, the number of students with dyslexia, neuropsychiatric disorders, and disabilities tripled. While lecturers are required to accommodate students with special needs, they are neither trained nor compensated for the extra workload that special pedagogical support entails (see Universitetskanslerämbetet 2021, 42; Thurfjell 2018).

When it comes to writing instruction, many lecturers feel overwhelmed and uncertain. Like academic staff in other HE systems transitioning to mass education, many Swedish lecturers complain that students lack basic literacy skills (e.g. Enefalk et al. 2012; Josefsson and Santesson 2017). According to a recent survey, 46% of lecturers believe that their students have poor writing skills and 69% think that students’ writing skills are insufficient to meet the requirements of university education (Utbildningsradion 2020). While such complaints are neither new (Malmström 2017) nor unique to Sweden (Nightingale 1988, 263), they denote lecturers’ increasing frustration with the deterioration of literacy skills developed in Swedish upper secondary schools.

Besides the challenges resulting from expanded enrolment, declining school results, and insufficient funding, implementing an AcLits approach in Swedish HE faces context-specific obstacles. Few students take an academic writing course, although most enrolled in social science programmes must produce written texts throughout their coursework. While writing centres and writing tutors are increasingly standard at Swedish universities (see Rienecker and Jörgensen 2003, 101), their services often target international students and students with special needs. Moreover, Swedish lecturers typically teach courses in more than one language, using English-language texts and conducting lectures and seminars in Swedish. Bilingual instruction is challenging because academic writing conventions differ by language (see Bolton and Kuteeva 2012; Kuteeva and Airey 2014). In the absence of training and support, many lecturers leave their students to navigate these challenges independently, forcing students to develop bilingual AcLits.

Fortunately, there are constructive ways of addressing these structural challenges. Rather than blaming students or schools or baulking at the sheer scale of the challenges, lecturers can address them, and AcLits suggests a promising way forward. We contend that lecturers can integrate writing instruction into their courses by explicitly communicating the tacit knowledge and underlying assumptions shrouding writing in their disciplines (see Elton 2010). Lecturers can also reflect on the types of feedback they provide and its effects on students’ abilities to learn course content and employ disciplinary standards to express that content in writing (Lea 2004; Lea and Street 1998). Moreover, lecturers can – and, arguably, should – facilitate disciplinary learning through writing (Rienecker and Jörgensen 2003). In the proceeding sections, we discuss how we translated AcLits principles into pedagogical practice.

3. Methods and ethical considerations

The article results from extensive collaborative, reflective practice (see Pereira 1999; Schön 1983) between four members of an IR teaching team. Like Lea and Street (1998, 160), who conducted ‘ethnographic-style research’, we do not claim to fulfil the rigorous protocols of reflective practice described by Pereira (1999, 342). Instead, we employ a looser, more collaborative reflection approach to studying our teaching practices, course modules, and student evaluations. Specifically, we consider how we understood AcLits as social scientists untrained in literacy, linguistics, and writing pedagogies. We also reflect on our best practices and unresolved challenges of integrating AcLits into a bachelor’s level IR course over nine years.

The analytical process that yielded this article began in 2017 when the teaching team received a pedagogical prize for integrating academic writing into the course under investigation. Buoyed by this recognition, the analysis emerged through a series of meetings, email exchanges, literature searches, blog posts, conference papers, and spirited debates. While this analytical process was undeniably ad hoc, it revolved around three questions: 1) How do we teach IR through writing? 2) How do we support our students in this process? 3) How can we use student evaluations to improve writing instruction?

We began writing this article in 2018 when three of us were still teaching the course, allowing us to engage in ‘reflection-in-practice’ and ‘reflection-on-practice’ (see Pereira 1999; Schön 1983). Concurrently, we reviewed the course material we developed over the years, using course guides and the reports we authored after each term to trace course development, the problems we encountered, and the solutions we facilitated. One of the most significant sources of our analysis was student course evaluations written from 2010 to 2019. After noting themes and typical student appraisals, we selected formative feedback, peer assessment, and reflective journaling as the three modules that students found most valuable in learning IR through academic writing.

Throughout our study, we followed the ethical guidelines outlined by the Swedish Research Council (2017). To mitigate harm to our students, we only quote anonymised course evaluations where all identifying details were removed when students completed the evaluation online. We further obscure students’ identities by omitting the year and language in which they provided their feedback. We quote anonymised course evaluations based on the ethical principle that the value of including this material outweighs potential risks (Swedish Research Council 2017, 31). We contend that since AcLits is a student-focused approach, we needed to consider how our students interpreted and influenced our pedagogical practice.

4. Reflections on an evolving pedagogical design

We progressively embedded AcLits into an introductory, bachelor’s level course in IR between 2010 and 2019. The course is the first of four ten-week modules and is taught twice a year. The course has high student enrolment and, from 2013, when the intake drastically increased, enrolment varied between 156 and 219 annually, peaking in 2019. As an introductory course, most of our students are newcomers to academic writing in HE and IR. Additionally, many students speak Swedish as their second or third language and often struggle to understand course content as quickly as students who speak Swedish as a native language. Adding to the group’s diversity, between one-fifth and one-third of students enrol in the course as part of a bachelor’s programme. These students have typically taken university courses before, putting them ahead of their less experienced peers.

Substantively, the course aims to introduce students to world politics and the discipline of IR. We teach our students key concepts and a broad range of IR theories, including how these theories developed with major global events and processes. We rely on several teaching methods, including debates, lectures, seminars, informal discussions, and an ‘IR Café’ where guest lecturers present current events in international politics. We assess our students’ knowledge through mandatory seminars, three reflective journal entries, and four written examinations.

High student enrolment, rigorous course content, and the sheer number of course assignments place significant responsibility on lecturers to support each student’s diverse needs, skills, and interests (see Clarence, Albertus, and Mwambene 2014). When we began our reflections on nine years of progressively integrating writing instruction into the course, it became clear that we initially struggled. In 2010, we inherited a course designed to teach a ‘critical’ and historical understanding of IR through a potpourri of pedagogies and modules. Notably, academic writing was not embedded in the course, and students complained that modules did not adequately prepare them for the in-class written examination administered at the end of the term.

It became clear that the course needed a significant overhaul when the Swedish Higher Education Authority (Universitetskanslerämbetet, UKÄ) evaluated it from 2011–2012. After examining all bachelor’s level IR courses taught in our department, UKÄ found the courses ‘lacked quality’. UKÄ issued their most damning critique after reviewing student essays, saying students demonstrated insufficient knowledge of the classic and predominant research questions explored in IR and struggled to make sound connections between theories and concepts in their essays. The UKÄ evaluation resulted in revisions across the bachelor’s level IR course package, including the introductory course discussed in this text.

Based on student evaluations and an added pressure to rectify the challenges identified by UKÄ, we found it essential to develop practical strategies to teach students how academic writing simultaneously helps them learn course content and present it in evaluated essays. We did not know about AcLits at this time, but we were motivated to find a student-centered approach emphasising disciplinary learning through writing. Two authors explored the academic writing literature while taking a mandatory pedagogical course offered at the University of Gothenburg in 2012. This course (HPE102) required participants to develop an independent pedagogical project, and the authors chose to explore student-centered learning through writing and various forms of feedback. Course coordinators subsequently began an intense reflection process in collaboration with the university’s Unit for Academic Language (ASK). This collaboration ushered in experimentation and incremental modifications grounded in the epistemological principles of AcLits. In recognition of our efforts to successively reform our course by teaching IR through academic writing, the Social Science Faculty at our university awarded us its annual pedagogical prize in 2017.

From critical student evaluations (2010–2012) to the UKÄ report (2012) to pedagogical training (2012) to collaboration with our university’s writing centre (2013–2019) to the Pedagogical Prize (2017), our journey has been both intense and rewarding. The following sections trace our collaborative, reflective practice by anchoring it in the AcLits literature and analysing how it evolved over nine years of course development. In doing so, we highlight how we translated the AcLits framework into a pedagogy of practice through formative feedback, peer assessment, and reflective journaling.

4.1. Formative feedback

Formative feedback is a method of ‘embedded writing support, in which the subject lecturer, peers or the writers themselves provide critical feedback on pieces of course-specific or course-related writing that can be used to enhance the next piece of writing’ (Wingate 2010, 520). The goal of formative feedback is to help students appreciate the ‘gap between their current and desired performance’ (Wingate 2010, 520). Hence, formative feedback is not simply about flagging errors or arriving at a grade but also giving suggestions on text development. Thus, formative feedback supports students in their development as writers, thinkers, and scholars more generally, ‘feed[ing] forward into future assignments, and beyond’ (Van Heerden 2020, 360). Many researchers have lauded formative feedback as a valuable means to promote student engagement because it requires students to read, consider, and employ the feedback they receive to improve their writing (see Harlen and James 1997; Wingate 2010; Van Heerden 2020). Consequently, we moved away from summative feedback – or feedback on completed texts (see Boud and Molloy 2013; Harlen and James 1997) – introducing formative feedback in 2013.

Formative feedback bolstered our work with AcLits for three reasons. First, it demonstrated that academic writing is an ongoing, socially negotiated process (Lea 2004; Lea and Street 1998) rather than a transcription of disciplinary knowledge. Formative feedback gave students both an inside view of this process and an active role in it. Second, formative feedback helped students appreciate how knowledge is drafted, negotiated, refined, and progressively produced through written work, helping them become more effective IR scholars (e.g. Boud and Molloy 2013). Third, formative feedback was a relatively straightforward way for our teaching team to incorporate academic writing into our introductory IR course because it required us to engage our students in the writing process.

It took us several years to finesse our approach to formative feedback. Along the way, we learned two important lessons: First, tone matters. We realised early on that the more we recognised our students’ successes and encouraged them to keep going, the better their texts became. Thus, we avoided criticism and embraced support. Second, like Bean (2011, 316–336), who advocates a feedback ‘hierarchy’, we found that strategic feedback, targeting different levels of text development, provided students with a solid foundation for improvement. Inspired by Bean (2011) and the text triangle (Dysthe, Hertzberg, and Hoel 2011) explained in section 4.2, we developed three levels of strategic feedback: (Level 1) basic writing skills and the assignment, (Level 2) structure and engagement with the literature, including how to employ English-language literature in Swedish-language texts, and (Level 3) argument and style. In practice, we only commented on one level at a time. Thus, if the text did not address the assignment (Level 1), we focused on that. Likewise, if the text addressed the assignment but was poorly structured (Level 2), we limited our feedback to the composition of a clear introduction, body, and conclusion. Providing strategic rather than general feedback was an invaluable time-saving technique that allowed us to home in on a limited number of issues that students needed to address in the next round of revisions.

Students generally engaged with and appreciated the feedback they received, as evidenced in course evaluations and the gradual improvement we saw in their texts. Specifically, students found the progressive writing process facilitated in the course exciting. Asking students to write and then rewrite their assignments enabled them to experiment with IR issues without being evaluated in the initial stages. This academic writing practice helped students take risks, experiment, and develop over time. While some students found the process overwhelming initially, most found it invaluable when the course concluded. As one student wrote, ‘the academic writing exercise is the most rewarding element in the course. […] In the beginning, it felt unnecessary, but eventually, I discovered that it is a fantastic way […] of working constructively with a text. I am pleasantly surprised [by] how helpful I found it!’

Other students commented that formative feedback made writing easier because they did not have to worry about producing the perfect text the first time around. Instead, they experienced writing as a learning process that included a variety of steps. When they engaged in the iterative process of drafting, presenting, reading, discussing, listening, revising, and resubmitting, they developed the confidence they needed to learn IR through writing. In the words of one student, ‘Now, with several submissions behind me, it’s gotten much easier to sit down and write instead of staring at a blank screen. I now feel more prepared and ready for the task, it is much easier to write, and that is fantastic’.

4.2. Peer assessment

A significant feature of our formative feedback module is peer assessment. Students read and comment on each other’s texts in small groups throughout the course, forming peer review communities. Peer assessment – also called peer feedback (see Huisman et al. 2018; Liu and Carless 2006) or peer review (Mulder, Pearce, and Baik 2014) – allows students to receive comments on their work from their classmates and use those comments to improve their texts. During peer assessment, ‘students learn with and from each other without the immediate intervention of a teacher’ (Boud, Cohen, and Sampson 1999, 413) and ‘take an active role in the management of their own learning’ (Liu and Carless 2006, 280). A side effect of peer evaluation is self-reflection (Boud, Cohen, and Sampson 1999; Liu and Carless 2006), as students evaluate their writing against texts produced by their classmates.

We introduced peer assessment in 2013, dividing students into groups of four to six members and instructing groups to meet three times during the course to discuss each other’s written work. Each student was encouraged to read and comment on all papers but only required to produce a written evaluation of one classmate’s text before each seminar. In doing so, we asked students to engage with the text triangle (Dysthe, Hertzberg, and Hoel 2011), moving from the text’s macro- to micro- levels. Consequently, we instructed students to provide feedback on the focus, aim, and research question in session one; the text's structure and argument in session two; and style, syntax, and referencing in session three. These instructions helped students avoid nitpicking on details in their assessment and provided a framework for evaluation. In addition, peer assessment seminars were supervised by course lecturers, writing tutors from ASK, and the students’ writing coach (described in section 4.3). Thus, while students were in charge of peer assessment, a lecturer or writing expert from ASK was always on hand to answer questions and help students develop the skills and confidence they needed to read and respond to their classmates’ texts constructively.

In general, students have been positive about engaging in peer assessment, especially academic beginners and students who struggle with their studies. As one student wrote, ‘It has been very rewarding to do this exercise, especially considering that this is the first time I study at the university […] It feels very nice to get inspiration and ideas from other texts and [receive] comments on my own piece […] To review other texts is a good tool to improve as a writer, and it opens up a whole new ‘world’’. This reflection echoes Mulder, Pearce, and Baik (2014), who argue that peer review primarily benefits students performing below average. In our experience, peer assessment seminars also guided students in comprehending the course literature and taking active roles in engaging with course content. Many students commented that peer assessment seminars were decisive in learning IR because it immersed them in their peers’ multiple and diverse interpretations of the same disciplinary content and helped them read IR in English and write about it in Swedish.

Of course, not all students appreciated peer assessment, and we used their feedback to improve this module. The most significant change we made responded to the common complaint that peer assessment was a waste of time because students did not know how to provide good feedback. Students who raised this complaint wanted a more lecturer-driven education in which the lecturer carefully monitored and facilitated the assessment process. We addressed this complaint by scaffolding peer assessment seminars. In other words, we moved away from a hands-off approach where we told students to read and comment on each other’s texts and, instead, told them how to read and comment on each other’s texts. Thus, we used the text triangle (Dysthe, Hertzberg, and Hoel 2011) to provide topics for each seminar. As the course developed, we also offered guiding questions to assist students in the assessment process. These questions included, Does the author follow the directions for the assignment? How well does the author engage with IR theory? How well does the author utilise course literature?

Once students felt more knowledgeable about reading and responding to their classmate’s texts, they also appeared to better appreciate the feedback they received. As the course developed, more and more students told us that peer assessment helped them take ownership of their learning. These students saw academic writing and peer assessment more as a process, supported by lecturers and peers, than a ‘thing’ to be taught ‘from above.’ Moreover, they appreciated lecturer-light, peer assessment seminars where students were more relaxed and dared to speak without fear of a lecturer’s judgment.

4.3. Reflective journaling

Finally, we used reflective journaling as a learning strategy (see Boud 2001) to help students develop self-awareness (see Fernsten and Reda 2011) by actively engage with their strengths, weaknesses, and needs as academic writers in IR. In doing so, our goal was to facilitate a transformative process where students ‘describe[d] and explore[d] their own [academic writing] practices’ (Watson 2010, 11), actively considering the support and information that they needed to improve their skills. Thus, reflective journaling allowed us to ‘take account of [our] students’ present and previous literacy practices’ (Lea 2004, 744) and nudge our students toward explicit engagement with their academic literacies.

We introduced reflective journaling through a logbook exercise in the spring of 2014. From 2014 to 2017, logbooks were a recommended opportunity for students to reflect on their learning. Since the assignment was not mandatory, lecturers responded to entries with encouragement but did not critically engage with students’ learning needs. Notably, students did not seek advice on how to improve their academic literacies, and lecturers did not provide it. Instead, students used logbooks to assess their performance or criticise the course. At this stage, students gave the logbook module mixed reviews. Some saw logbooks as a great way to communicate with lecturers. Others found the exercise ‘completely meaningless’ since they could not appreciate the connection between reflection and learning.

We made the logbook module mandatory in 2017, requiring students to reflect on their academic writing skills three times during the course. Additionally, we required students to ask one question in each of their entries. The question format provided a platform for a conversation between students and the responding lecturer. It also saved time as the responding lecturer no longer had to search through lengthy and unstructured reflective texts to determine the kinds of help each student required. We also reduced the response time from ten to five days, keeping exchanges timely and relevant. Finally, and most importantly, we decided that the lecturer who responded to logbooks would serve exclusively as the students’ ‘writing coach’ and refrain from evaluating their essays. This alteration helped the newly designated writing coach develop a relationship with students based on empathy and encouragement.

While students were free to ask anything related to academic writing, their questions tended to speak to five common writing dilemmas: 1) time management, 2) disciplinary conventions, 3) structure and argument, 4) referencing, and 5) word economy (Olsson 2018). As a pass/fail assignment, the writing coach listened to students’ struggles, provided them with recognition and support, and pointed them towards relevant resources (Olsson 2019b).

The revised logbook module proved popular among students. Countless students testified that logbooks made them feel more engaged with and in control of their learning. Since 2017, many students have identified logbooks as the most helpful module in learning IR through academic writing. For example, one student wrote, ‘In my opinion, the logbook was the best part of the course. It was invaluable to reflect on my writing process, and the feedback I received was excellent!’ Another stated, ‘I think the logbook has been a great way to think through and write down some thoughts about the work process. It helped me improve my work and better understand my working process.’ Based on student feedback, we found that reflective journaling fostered student-centred learning and engagement with course content, thus fulfilling the AcLits principle of inviting students to become partners in the learning process (see Lea and Street 1998).

5. Discussion: best practices and unresolved challenges

This section looks beyond course design to examine three best practices we cultivated as writing instructors. Employing these best practices in tandem with formative feedback, peer review, and reflective journaling helped us communicate our pedagogical approach, meet students’ needs, and provide instruction students found meaningful in learning IR through academic writing. We believe lecturers can use these practices to embed AcLits into their courses. We end the section by reflecting on three unresolved challenges we encountered during our pedagogical journey.

5.1. Empathetic instruction

Empathetic instruction entails setting aside judgment, looking at a problem from the students’ perspective, appreciating how they are experiencing the situation, and communicating that one understands their experience and feelings (Meyers et al. 2019; Morin n.d.). Empathetic instruction can help lecturers meet and cultivate students’ diverse needs, providing vital information to refine their teaching practices.

We tapped our own experiences as academic writers when teaching this course to empathise with our students’ struggles (see Meyers et al. 2019). We told the students about our diverse backgrounds and the strategies we devised to continuously improve our writing skills: how we develop ‘aims’ and ‘research questions’, how we beat procrastination and maintain writing discipline, how we revise our prose to promote clarity, what we do when we get stuck, and so on. By discussing our struggles and strategies with our students, we helped them see that their experiences are not unique, shameful, or strange but rather the inevitable challenges academic writers face as they hone their crafts (see French 2018). Thus, we sought to help our students put their struggles into perspective and appreciate that academic writing is a craft, not a mysterious art or an innate talent (Rienecker and Jörgensen 2003).

We also listened to our students’ criticisms. Rather than shrugging off student comments as unfounded complaints, we saw them as vital clues for updating our teaching practice. It may not have been what we wanted to hear or packaged in a tone we appreciated, but the critical feedback we received from students was valuable nonetheless. By listening to how our students understand and struggle with writing, we helped them not only complete their assignments but also learn from the experience (see Meyers et al. 2019).

5.2. Explicit instruction

Instructors tell their students to do an awful lot in their courses but sometimes fail to tell them how to do it (see Elton 2010; Lea 2004; Lea and Street 1998). We recognised that assignment instructions often define the desired result without instructing students on how to achieve that result. Therefore, we sought to explicitly discuss our assumptions about essay structure and quality, a key goal of the AcLits framework (see Aiken 2021) and a vital pedagogical strategy when students–like ours– do not complete mandatory writing courses.

We found that the best way to make our assumptions explicit was to tell our students how to accomplish every element of a writing task. Thus, when we asked our students to reference, we also told them how to do it and pointed them towards resources they could use to develop their referencing skills. We spoke to our students about structure and argument. We told them how to conduct a peer review seminar and the kinds of feedback they should provide. In other words, we strove to make our expectations clear to our students. Simultaneously, we gave our students space to try different techniques, learn from their mistakes, and progressively develop as writers.

Of course, that still leaves those perplexing requirements like critical analysis. While many of us are hard-pressed to describe what this means and how academic writers accomplish it (see Lea and Street 1998), virtually all of us know it when we see it. It is instructive to share our implicit knowledge by presenting excerpts from student essays and explicitly discussing how we evaluated them. Such explicit instruction puts students in a better position to develop an implicit understanding of what we mean when we tell them to ‘critically analyse a theory’. It also puts them in a better position to recognise what critical analysis looks like and, by extension, how they can do it (Olsson 2019a).

5.3. Reflective instruction

Lecturers should also ask students to reflect on their approach to coursework since reflection is crucial to any learning process (see Boud and Molloy 2013; Whittock 1997). In our experience, unless we asked our students to reflect on their learning and the skills they needed to develop, they did not do it.

There are several ways lecturers can incorporate reflection into disciplinary courses (see Whittock 1997). As mentioned above, the logbook activity is a simple assignment requiring students to reflect on their strengths, weaknesses, and needs as academic writers. This assignment is worthwhile not because it assists students with concrete writing skills such as referencing and word economy but because it gives them a chance to reflect on what they are doing well and what they need to improve. Course lecturers can use the logbook exercise to listen to what students have to say, validate their concerns, and encourage them to keep going. Based on students’ feedback in logbook entries and course evaluations, we found that mandatory reflection exercises were invaluable to our students' learning (see Quinton and Smallbone 2010; Watson 2010; Whittock 1997).

Another important area of reflection is providing students with formative feedback that they can and will use. It is challenging to ensure that students read, consider, and actively address our input. If we solely provide summative feedback (see Boud and Molloy 2013; Harlen and James 1997), we find that students look for a grade and pay little attention to everything else we write, especially if they believe our comments are unfavourable. While lecturers cannot force their students to read and use their comments, they can integrate opportunities for students to reflect on the feedback they receive throughout their coursework. After all, if we want our students to read and address the problems we identify in their texts, we need to embed ongoing, formative feedback into our courses.

5.4. Unresolved challenges

While our continual experimentation over nine years helped us teach IR through academic writing, our collaborative, reflective practice made us increasingly aware of the challenges we have yet to resolve. We identify three of these challenges below.

First, given the diversity of our students’ knowledge and skills, a key challenge has been creating an equitable, fair, and constructive peer response process. We usually compose peer assessment groups to reflect the class’s diversity, which ideally allows beginner students to learn from their more advanced peers. However, sometimes the more advanced and motivated students complain that they do not receive the feedback they need to develop their writing skills.

Likewise, some students with learning difficulties and disabilities struggle with our fast-paced pedagogical design. These students are entitled to special pedagogical support and typically receive more time to write their essays in other courses. This solution, however, does not work in our course since writing assignments are tied to a tightly scheduled group process. Unfortunately, we have not yet found an adequate solution. Placing students entitled to a time extension in independent peer assessment groups may solve the scheduling problem but can also make these students feel excluded from the class.

Second, we struggle to assess and examine student essays consistently. As many students note in course evaluations, different lecturers provide different feedback on student writing, seemingly subscribing to different evaluation standards. Some students argued that their grades depended more on who evaluated their essays than the quality of their work.

While we cannot guarantee that different lecturers will evaluate student essays consistently, we have made strides in addressing this challenge in several ways. First, we invite the same lecturers to teach the course every term. In our experience, the teaching team’s consistency helps lecturers understand course content, student needs, and evaluation protocols. Additionally, we gather teaching staff to discuss evaluation protocols, articulating our expectations of student coursework and appropriate feedback. Moreover, we promote transparency by circulating exemplary essays from previous terms and providing students and lecturers with explicit evaluation criteria.

The third and most pernicious challenge is time. Working in a ‘publish or perish’ system where research output is valued above teaching competence (Brommesson et al. 2016), how can lecturers make time to read, understand, and translate AcLits into a pedagogy of practice? Like all unresolved challenges, we cannot definitively answer this question. Although we were not compensated for the immense amount of time it took to embed AcLits into our course, we believe this time was well spent. During this process, we realised that if we ask our students to produce knowledge through writing, our job is to teach them how to do it. We hope that in reflecting on the practices we developed in our course, we can help others capitalise on the time they invest in embedding AcLits into their courses.

6. Conclusion

This article has addressed the obstacles and opportunities of translating the Academic Literacies approach into pedagogical practice. In doing so, we presented how we employed formative feedback, peer assessment, and reflective journaling to teach International Relations through academic writing. We then discussed how we met our students’ diverse needs through empathetic, explicit, and reflective instruction. Finally, acknowledging that the HE sector’s structural transformations present lecturers with formidable challenges in Sweden and beyond, we concluded that lecturers could take practical steps to embed academic writing into disciplinary courses. We list several of those steps above, but much work remains. We urge lecturers – especially those working in HE systems where mandatory writing courses are the exception, and bilingual instruction is the rule – to help strengthen and extend the AcLits framework through reflective practice and independent research.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to everyone who provided invaluable feedback on this text, including Jelena Belic, Annica Kronsell, Florian Kühn, Hanna Leonardsson, Heidi Maurer, and two anonymous reviewers. Thank you to the Unit for Academic Writing (ASK), the IR teaching team, and the directors of study at the School of Global Studies for their contributions to course development. Special thanks to the student office staff who did tremendous behind-the-scenes work on this course. Any errors in the text, however, are ours alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This article was partially funded by a pedagogical prize awarded to the authors in 2017 by the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Notes

1 We focus on academic writing as a key element of AcLits (see Lea and Street 1998), acknowledging that the approach also encompasses interrelated skills such as reading, listening, note-taking, and debating.