Learning through doing: the potential of a collective editing pedagogy

ABSTRACT

For postgraduate students and early career academics, the pressure to publish can be acute because gaining, and keeping, an academic job depends on producing publishable writing. As these pressures affect more scholars globally, there is increased demand for innovative pedagogies to support writers’ development. In this study, students from a ‘writing for publication’ course identified a collective editing pedagogy as innovative and effective. In Vygotsky’s terms, the process of collectively editing while viewing the consequences on a big screen, provided opportunities for students to observe each other’s mental processes as they articulated and externalised their thinking to clarify meaning. The public and collective nature of the pedagogy is examined from students’ perspectives, gathered primarily via interviews. Key principles and practices are identified to inform adaptation of the pedagogy for other sociocultural contexts. The collective editing pedagogy supports postgraduates and early career staff in the challenging task of crafting publishable writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic writing
• publishing
• writing pedagogies
• collective editing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Associate Professor Alex Gunn, Associate Professor Susan Sandretto, and the two anonymous referees for their constructive feedback.