’We do not have a writing culture’: exploring the nature of ‘academic drift’ through a study of lecturer perspectives on student writing in a vocational university

ABSTRACT

Vocational universities are increasingly becoming susceptible to pressures associated with the phenomenon known as ‘academic drift’. Yet the specific influence of such pressures is experienced differently at various institutional levels and by different stakeholders in such universities. Exploring lecturers’ understanding and perceptions of student academic writing can make visible the ways in which these pressures are realised, for example, in the types of writing given value and writing pedagogies deemed suitable in the context of the vocational university. In this paper, we report on an ethnographically shaped study exploring lecturers’ writing pedagogies and perceptions of students as academic writers at a South African vocational university. The study analytically illustrated how wider socio-political, regulatory and ideological framings of these universities were implicated in lecturers’ writing practices and pedagogies. The study found that lecturers and students were generally constricted by narrow vocationalist agendas, which reinforced negative conceptions of students as academic writers. Our findings suggest that while the explicit impact of academic drift drivers was minimally felt at the undergraduate diploma level of study in our research site, this appeared to close off the potential for writing to act as a means to facilitate students’ epistemic access to their disciplines.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocational university
• academic drift
• student academic writing
• writing pedagogies
• South Africa

Acknowledgments

Moeain Arend is thanked for his assistance with data collection and the initial data analysis activities associated with the broader research project on which this paper is based.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Technikons represented the vocational education and training segment of the HE system during the apartheid era in South Africa. They had a similar mandate as the Polytechnics in the UK and institutes of technology in Australia and offered primarily undergraduate vocational diploma courses. By 2005 all technikons were rebranded as universities of technology as part of the post-apartheid government’s attempts to transform the university sector.

2. In order to ensure a reasonable degree of privacy for our participants but without compromising the importance of the specific professional and disciplinary location linked to the insights and findings of our study, we use pseudonyms for all participants, a generalised description of their teaching area instead of the actual subject names and changed the name of the departments to mask their identity.