Trainee teachers and academic literacy: process, pedagogy and practice

ABSTRACT

This paper examines trainee teachers’ views of academic literacy with a focus on the role of process and the concept of “becoming” in pedagogy. Often associated with Deleuzean philosophy, the practical implications of these ideas, both in teacher education and wider educational settings, are often unclear, and this paper explores their practical applications, taking academic literacy practices in a UK university as an example. Qualitative analysis of accounts selected from a cohort of interviewees (n = 33), suggests three conclusions for literacy pedagogies. First, it links a distinction between process-based and product-based teaching to literacy pedagogies focused on form rather than content. Second, it discusses how process-based approaches offer relevant pedagogical choices for meaningful knowledge creation and student engagement. Third, it shows how teacher professionalism and the management of the student experience are affected by such approaches to practice. Process approaches, on the other hand, better respect growing needs for diversity in educational research and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Literacies
• becoming
• process
• pedagogy

Introduction

Much has been said about the concept of becoming as a way of improving educational research and practice. Drawing on its usage in Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy (e.Deleuze 1969; Deleuze and Guattari 1980), the concept is grounded in a process philosophy whose objects are described as events, singularities or haecceities in continuous processes of dynamic, reciprocal determination. Indeed, precisely because they are not the isolated or identifiable objects of an intentional human mind, they are regularly said to offer creative learning opportunities while challenging inequality. They do this, many claim, by disrupting linear accounts of identity, undermining ingrained injustice and replacing exclusionary practices, fuelling critical, feminist or neo-materialist educational thinking from influential theorists such as Karen Barad (2007), Jane Bennett (2010) and St Pierre (2013). “Post-human” reformulations of identity, social justice and the affective and/or relational nature of educational practices also echo this differential ontology (see also Braidotti 2013; Clark/Keefe 2012; Green and Feldman-Barret 2020; Keij 2022; Kuby and Rowsell 2017; Masny 2013; Murris 2015; Semetsky 2006, 2008; Taylor and Harris-Evans 2018). At bottom, becoming is lauded for offering disruptive epistemological and axiological novelty with “new possibilities for thinking about knowledge creation” (Brooks, Franklin-Phipps, and Rath 2018, 132) and “ways of becoming otherwise” (Strom and Mills 2022, 10).

These ideas, of course, are not themselves new and are traceable to John Dewey (and much further). However, the theoretical kaleidoscope of a “buzzing” processual world (Whitehead 1985, 50) can mask the many difficulties in establishing their pragmatic implications in a convincing way. They have been labelled by some as insufficiently linked to practice, conceptually vague, theoretically contradictory and even complicit with capital’s accelerationism (see, for example Badiou 1997; Franks 2020; Hallward 2006; Isomöttönen 2021; Meillassoux 2014; Strom and Martin 2017).

To address such questions I examine these ideas in a concrete context, specifically examining academic literacy pedagogies in Higher Education (HE). The current importance of doing so lies in the fact that, while academic literacy remains central to HE, concerns for its development persist in institutions across the world (e.g. Botha 2022; Tang, Wong, and Ling Lee 2022; Wollscheid, Lødding, and Aamodt 2021). With literacy practices themselves changing in line with wider societal trends and post-pandemic online pedagogies, some criticise HE’s tendency to “reiterate an overarching narrative” (Gravett 2021, 1507). By misrepresenting transitional experiences, HE mistakes the needs of increasingly diverse, globalised, cohorts, “stifles possibilities for the new” (Chew 2021, 93) and reproduces “essentialist notions of the self-regulating subject” (Healy and Mulcahy 2021, 1). On this view, a shift away from the practices that enshrine such widely -evoked problems is overdue. But, can we make becoming work for education, and if so how? And if becoming is more deserving of pity than of celebration, as Deleuze asserts (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, p. xi), can – and should - researchers simply choose to do it or not?

Academic literacy is central to these questions. As a practice, it escapes reductivist narratives by acting as both vehicle and object of study. As a vehicle, its potential for knowledge creation is inherent. The being of writing is indeed better understood as its becoming – in theory at least, as I show below, linking practical conclusions to this highly abstract theoretical framework. Trainee teachers’ perceptions of academic literacy are analysed to shed light on a product-process division already familiar to literacy educators and its contemporary relevance in the context of the shift towards online learning.

To do so, this paper has four parts. The first briefly situates academic literacy within the context of globalisation and the acceleration of online learning linked to the Coronavirus pandemic and its aftermath.

Part two links pedagogy to these trends through an analytical framework based in process philosophy. While treating literacy as product reflects a human capital model, literacy as becoming implies process pedagogy and a focus on both content and highly diverse forms of student engagement.

Part three presents data from qualitative interviews with students of academic literacy. A concern for form over content, reflected by the wider cohort (n = 33), is discussed, leading to part four’s conclusions about practice, professionalism and the student experience.

First, though, a brief review of the current context for teaching and learning academic literacy in HE will underline the importance of these considerations.

Knowledge co-creation

Globalisation, which treats universities as “factories of knowledge”, favours the production, accumulation and exchange of cognitive capital (Raunig 2013; see also Jessop 2018; Beighton 2023). Shifting from “delivering instruction” to “producing learning” (Felten 2022; see also Barr and Tagg 1995), it prefers fixed notions and their capacity for quantification and redistribution as capital, to those in becoming which undermine it. However, HE massification, a consequence of the desire to co-opt new markets, has also highlighted the needs, motivations and potential of a highly diverse student cohort to co-create knowledge (HESA 2020; UKCISA 2021). Increasingly, these discourses of knowledge co-creation, in which academic writing and research fuel cognitive productivity, are facilitated by data collection systems and by the prosumers they interpellate as customers who simultaneously consume and produce the goods they are buying (Beighton 2017; Cova and Dalli 2009; Harrison and Waite 2015). Prosumption in/of/as educational curriculum and content, assessed for instance by reflection on practice or self-supported research projects, involves the simultaneous production and consumption of practice. Thus, just as we subsidise a restaurant’s infrastructure costs when buying take-away food, learners subsidise educational infrastructure costs (home offices, hardware, software, data packages and so on), becoming content creators as the learner- prosumer acts as both subject and object of education as prosumption (Ritzer, Jandrić, and Hayes 2018).

Thus, while proponents argue that prosumption “encourage[s] students’ involvement so as to achieve a more complete and lasting educational process” (Navio-Marco et al. 2022, 1), critics see it as a “velvet cage”: educationally ineffective, psychologically manipulative or essentially vacuous (e.Ritzer 2014; Ritzer, Jandrić, and Hayes 2018). Normalised by the COVID pandemic and developments in educational digital technologies, such prosumption aggravates economic, social and racial divisions on this view. Indeed, the expansion of “pandemic pedagogy” has already been designated a “pre-eminent mode of economic, social and political control” (Sefton-Green 2021, 11; see also Selwyn et al. 2020; Heffernan 2021; UNESCO 2021). But as a vector of prosumption, it promotes processes that “craft” learning subjects and objects, bringing their creative potential under their administrative purview (Brøgger and Madsen 2022; Beighton 2023). Thus, because novelty fuels cognitive capital development, the potential to produce knowledge is literally essential to academic literacy. The alternative, pedagogies of repetition, (re)transmission and normalisation have long been associated by Freirean critical pedagogy (for instance) with “banking” learning (e.g. Freire 1972; Freire and Macedo 1987), and contemporary critics argue that such “fixity” remains influential in our understanding of learning processes (e.g. Gravett and Ajjaw 2021).

Becoming, as part of process philosophy, applied heuristically, is one response to this persistent problem because stresses relationality within and outwith the human subject. For this to happen, though, educators must take our “existential orientation seriously” (Healy and Mulcahy, 2021,16), and thus make explicit the ethical and political relations that pertain to this kind of research.

Process, becoming and academic literacy

In line with the “ontological turn“in education research (Zembylas 2017; see also Pollard 2015; Carusi and Szkudlarek 2020; Beighton 2020), pedagogies based in process philosophy have deep metaphysical roots. Thinkers such as Spinoza, Nietzsche, Whitehead and Deleuze can be linked in this respect (e.Deleuze 1962, 1969). When Deleuze (1968) likens learning to swimming, it is in order to insist that the stuff of education cannot be atomised, identified and reproduced at will, but rather exists as events in complex series. Such series do not allow reproduction precisely because these events are defined by relations which ipso facto relate, change and develop.

This necessarily frames learning as knowledge creation where the latter is always becoming. An ancient term in philosophy, it is frequently touted by educators seeking to develop pedagogies for non-linear, heterogeneous forms of learning. Literacy studies has, for some time now, offered an example of the attempt to use the idea of becoming (and the philosophy it implies) to tackle then complex relationality of practice(s):

Becoming-literate is therefore a conceptual construction that does not simply involve the change from being illiterate to literate, but is a multi-directional and dimensional notion that is a convergent assemblage of parts that often chaotically collide in language learning spaces (Cole 2012, 33)

Cole’s explicitly Deleuzean tropes identify novelty with writing practices as processual rather than as products. At the heart of such claims is Deleuze’s metaphysical “overturning” ¹ of Platonism. While the Platonic belief in the fixity of identity seeks to limit becoming, the latter’s existence can only be explained by deducing its primacy, for Deleuze (1968, 82). Change doesn’t happen to stuff: it is stuff:

… there is no being beyond becoming, nothing beyond multiplicity (…) neither are there multiple or eternal realities which would be, in turn, like essences beyond appearance

(Deleuze, 1983, pp. 23–24)

However, making becoming and difference the essential, pre-subjective ground of existence (Deleuze 1968, 189, 1969, 9) raises serious problems for education wedded to notions such as agency, identity or the inculcation of ethical givens. If becoming is an affective process with no terms or end point, it expunges imitation, reproduction or conformity because what we are becoming changes as much as we do ourselves in the process. Asking what we are becoming therefore “is particularly stupid” (Deleuze and Parnet, 1997, p. 2).² Thought itself only happens when confronted with difference, and it is not the recognisable products but the processes of development of concepts such as “becoming” that make us think. Only what Deleuze calls “thought without an image” (Deleuze 1968, 217, my emphasis) forms the necessary conditions for creativity and, de jure, thought itself. Simply declaring, labelling or identifying the given (e.g. “it’s becoming”) changes nothing.

Literacy: production and process

The utility of such speculation is of course moot. Educators might well ask how one might actually grasp such “imageless” objects without representing, reproducing or imitating them. How might practitioners discuss, use, or even think them without being dismissed as “stupid”?

One response lies in the well-known process/product distinction in pedagogical practice. While reductive, the latter has long helped demarcate literacy pedagogy approaches. A third approach, sometimes referred to as a “genre approach”, which examines the text types used in different genres, itself often reverts to the performativity of product-based pedagogies (see, for example Badger and White 2000; Graham and Sandmel 2011; Heron and Corradini 2020; McGrath and Kaufhold 2016; White and Arndt 1991).

The latter, at their simplest, enact an input-output model: a task is set and assessed according to its conformity to a desired outcome or product. This outcome and the value of the activity is established before the activity starts, favouring teacher input and control of the outcome. Typically assessed in the form of an object (divers theses, reports, blogs or essays for instance), input may focus on form, content or, ideally, both. However, it can be tempting to focus on form, partly because content requirements, referring to the meaning, message or purpose of the text, are hard to assess objectively: when assessment tasks are personalised and knowledge “co-created”, the factual accuracy of claims, inferences and conclusions can be difficult to determine, notably in a “post-truth” educational context (Kwok, Singh, and Heimans 2023).

The formal requirements of such activity are easier to address. Assuming that the assessor is aware of them, the focus may lie on suprasegmental properties of the text (organisational features of the text as a whole, including cohesion, coherence and deixis) or its subsegmental properties (lexical choice, syntax, referencing and so on). This can lead to an overemphasis on the formal properties of text rather than engagement with ideas, arguments and debates of the field (e.g. Lea and Street 1998; Lillis and Turner 2001; Wingate 2014). Moreover, such formal conventions can be presented as transparent common sense, embodying an institution’s opaque demands on the learner as outsider, with academic literacy defined as “how we do things here”, thus undermining the discourse of academic work as knowledge (co) creation (Tapp 2015, 712–713; see also MacMillan 2014; Lindsay 2015). On this view, product approaches undermine inclusivity, engagement and the construction of knowledge they claim to facilitate and promote.

Process approaches to literacy

Process-based writing, on the other hand, refers to the creative act of producing text through ongoing engagement with other people, texts and practices. In theory, cycles of thinking, planning and drafting are accompanied by sharing, concertation and feedback about the development of the text. Authentic texts, student ownership and self-reflection contribute to a “supportive and nonthreatening writing environment” (Graham and Sandmel, op.cit. pp 396–397). The purpose is to prioritise student input and the creativity of writing rather than production of a single performative outcome.

Process-led teaching therefore focuses on the bifurcations, recursions and overlapping steps taken to produce text. What happens before the final outcome may supersede the outcome itself. Time and positive feedback are also built into the process by a teacher positioned within the writing process rather than an assessor external to it. Ideally, this approach offers the chance to work on both content and form in parallel or at least in a cyclical way. Students’ own ideas, knowledge and experiences can be foregrounded, and a range of activities can be incorporated beyond those normally associated with putting pen to paper. In theory at least, inconsistencies, errors and problems are integral to a process which privileges revision, reflection and participatory feedback loops: the linear time of investment, productivity and outcomes is disrupted.

However, while approaches such as task-based, enquiry-based, and problem-based learning, which use these strategies, are frequently promoted (see for example Hanney 2018; Rodríguez-Bonces and Rodríguez-Bonces 2010; Taylor and Bovill 2018), the widespread adoption of such practices remains unclear. An obvious reason for this is that both approaches have their advantages and drawbacks. In principle, product-based approaches allow greater teacher control, call on familiar pedagogies, and may benefit more experienced, independent or confident students while reassuring less confident writers keen to “get it right”. However, they also rely on the teacher’s ability to know, convey and assess the formal conventions of the text. This might be possible if the latter were indeed in some way static, but the forms represented by convention are both contested and subject to development over time. Although, like any language feature, they have both syntagmatic and diachronic ³ features, pedagogy can become overconcerned with the former: the fact that text’s diachronic dimension renders these conventions redundant over time, and thus provides the basis for creative textual production in the first place, can be overlooked. Conventions become quasi-knowledge, fossilising artificial practices.

The pedagogical point is that literacy is not an individual, reproductive activity, but rather an exercise in co-development. However, this means that one’s own text is an intensive phenomenon in dynamic interaction with other becomings over time, none of which is, strictly speaking, human. Product-based approaches, on the contrary, make the individual responsible for the construction of original ideas and a contribution to knowledge. Meanwhile, their input-output model reflects a conformity to type which puts the teacher in charge, upstream. This increases the risk of reproducing performative writing skills, teacher expectations and institutional norms. While doubtless economically desirable for the institution, and pedagogically desirable for the student as prosumer, this performative model of teaching reconfigures learning as empty repetition.

Process approaches, meanwhile, claim to be more student-centred. They reflect the non-linear, heterogeneous practice(s) and time(s) of academic literacy as co-existing series of knowledge and skills. The whole process is valued, rather than the end product. Drawbacks are largely practical: because knowledge is not delivered, process approaches require an environment where complex interaction can take place and be sustained over time.

Whether the latter is entirely feasible remains moot. While teachers have the freedom to choose the most pedagogically appropriate approach in theory, in practice choices may be limited. Time constraints, available space, or the remit of a given task are material conditions which can’t be ignored. This is an issue which the current expansion of online “pandemic pedagogies” is highlighting. While some applaud the so-called multimodal, asynchronous or non-linear features of online learning, the limitations of screen-based teaching, even when fully functional, have also been underlined. For some the medium represents a significant barrier to learning, either by literally screening out non-linear communication (paralinguistic content, eye contact, turn-taking or proxemics for instance) or by provoking cognitive overload, social inequalities or a superficial “schooling” in binary yes/no responses and form-filling (e.g. Caskurlu et al. 2021; Bailenson 2021; Costley 2020; Gurukkal 2021) On this view, process approaches are made materially more difficult by unsophisticated digitally-mediated environments, leaving the teacher with fewer pedagogical options beyond the default product-based approaches implied by the on/off binary of digital space and the social injustices it perpetuates (Kramm and McKenna 2023).

Choices may also be guided by less material concerns. Fundamental philosophical differences in ontological, epistemological and even axiological assumptions can converge, often tacitly, about what is pedagogically appropriate (Beighton 2021). Ontologically, while product approaches imply that knowledge is an inert substance to be collated and reproduced, process approaches see knowledge as a relational substance to be encountered. Epistemologically, where product approaches encourage the reproduction of knowledge, their processual counterparts pursue knowledge creation by ongoing recombination. Axiologically, while product pedagogy is aligned with normative outcomes, process pedagogy implicates the affective capacity of the student. Affect here refers not just to the emotional aspects of literacy, but also to the way the process of engagement with writing affects the writer themselves and vice versa, embodying a joyful “relation of subjectivity to the outside” (Keij 2022, 5). Thus, even ethical questions about what should be written are part of the mix: if product approaches see ethics as transcendent to the exercise of writing, process approaches see them as immanent to it.

Methods and data

To examine how these rather abstract considerations can inform literacy pedagogy practices, this paper focuses on the accounts of students chosen from a wider cohort (n = 33). Teachers and trainees from a range of UK HE programmes at masters and doctoral level were interviewed, using semi-structured questions to elicit experiences of teaching and learning academic literacy. Following approval by the institution’s ethics committee, recordings were made and transcribed to produce accounts of pedagogical practice that would subsequently inform teaching practices, enhance theoretical understanding of HE pedagogies and, ultimately, generate conceptual understandings and models in a meta-theoretical way.

The transcripts were analysed in detail and then grouped in terms of their implications for these three areas. Such qualitative, process-led approaches demand close analysis of a small number of accounts: attempting to generalise would be counterproductive. Rather than claim to “represent”, “voice” or “reflect” individual experience – terms widely and repeatedly problematised in the literature (see for example Canning 2017; Selwyn et al. 2020) – this choice stresses the difference inherent in the contrasting academic backgrounds and experiences of writing which characterise this field’s well-documented complexity.⁴

The accounts were chosen from interviewees who were following a programme which combined a masters in education leadership and a teaching qualification. Because all three were preparing to take up positions in adult learning, their views and practices of academic literacy can be expected to have disproportionate impact on others and, perhaps, the field. These specific responses were also chosen because they are particularly lucid, candid and explicit about the role of process-and product-based approaches to literacy.

Florence⁵

Florence, a recent graduate in English literature, was typically articulate in demonstrating an awareness of process in writing. Writing, she said, is not just defined as “a process whereby you assimilate lots of ideas” but is one which involves a process of connecting ideas:

Some of [these ideas] will be based on your own interests, but quite often it’s working our what’s out there in the academic field and assimilating those ideas and then coming to your own, erm, conclusion

As a trainee teacher it’s unsurprising that Florence repeatedly uses the term process (“it’s kind of a process whereby you are gathering those ideas”). But when she adds that it’s “an important process actually” (because it works in multiple ways), not only does it “reaffirm ideas that you already have” but, she says, also provides “thinking space”. It also provides, she says, “an opportunity to take some time” in order to go beyond one’s own views, working with a “core body of research that’s out there”. For Florence, writing as a process means much more than simply putting down your ideas or seeking to justify or otherwise validate them. Precisely because it involves connecting with other things as process, it has a positive impact on the writer themselves:

And I do believe that actually the different processes you go through in doing it, albeit sometimes quite painful, are actually really really valuable to help you feel quite confident and reassured.

In Florence’s case the affective impact is the sense of confidence which comes from this engagement. Her approach to developing text also echoes process writing pedagogy by stressing its iterative nature, its challenges and the need for time to write well:

I draft a lot, I find it very difficult and by the time I’ve submitted it I almost don’t want to look at it. And it’s only when I go back and read it that I feel that Ive really taken that time to get into something. And it gives you that opportunity to get, to really do that research and really get stuck into a subject of interest.

This approach can be partly linked to her own experience studying English at undergraduate level. Students followed a specific module was provided, she said, with “quite lengthy” essays and support for researching and reading. Florence noted a significant difference between this experience and her current programme. As an undergraduate, requirements about structure were vague (“quite kind of broad and personal to individuals”), but in the postgraduate programme “it’s a lot more structured”:

so for instance doing the recent action research project that we did, we were given a very definite structure of the way we could to approach it, albeit in a flexible way so that structure was there, which helps to construct er, an essay that could be seen as academic but actually structured your process in approaching the research as well.

In this example, Florence shows how writing parameters are sometimes determined by the programme: research methods and structure were given. Florence’s “but” here seems to indicate a tension between a task that was designed to seem academic (implying the kind of skill needed to make choices about what to include in such work) while at the same time effectively undermining the academic nature of the task by making these choices in the student’s stead. Moreover, Florence felt that other choices had also been made upstream in the form of expectations about how to write. She saw this as a barrier because these expectations are based on unfounded assumptions about how students work and how they will express themselves:

I think that there’s an assumption that you have to use lots of long words, terminology that you’re not necessarily comfortable with, and I think quite often it’s because its assumed that you would have read up on lot of, well for instance with literary theory, so that you’re comfortable with a lot of philosophical terms

Having said that she found the process of writing a helpful way of engaging with knowledge, here Florence critiques a focus on style rather than content and, especially, the assumption that students can and will just comply with expectations. The presentation of writing as a product to be imitated by using predetermined ideas and linguistic forms conflicts somewhat with the processual approaches that Florence mentioned above, hence her genuine discomfort with such experiences.

Maisie

Maisie, who studied Business in her first degree, was keen to make similar points. However, Maisie’s identification of academic writing with a product based on formal requirements is even stronger than Florence’s and indeed suggests quite negative feelings. As an activity, she feels, it makes HE resemble a form of unquestioning routine behaviour:

I think it’s like we said earlier about going through the system and we’ve been put through the system and we’ve been taught that way and that’s just like routine, a regime, that’s just what we do

(my emphasis)

This rather disillusioned view of writing is echoed by Maisie’s equation of academic writing with the reproduction of specific terminology rather than the development of content:

I think mainly it’s using, like, academic terms, so non-colloquial language and using certain terminology to identify what you’re talking about, so for me it’s more the terminology that you use in academic writing that make it academic

Maisie adds that she had been taught academic writing by “mainly going through structure”, to the extent that the aim is “using all sections” such as introduction, methodology, conclusion and so on. “It’s mainly been structure rather than ideas” she says.

This focus on the formal properties of what is expected means that, for Maisie, academic writing has no real advantages as a skill. In fact, unlike Florence, for whom the process of writing offered a chance to develop knowledge, Maisie feels that formal writing about ideas is largely unnecessary because the same aims can be achieved informally. The only reason we feel the need to write “academically” at all is that we have been through “the system”:

I just think because we have gone through that system and school and university and we’ve been taught that way, that’s why we use that way of writing, of academic writing

She regrets this, and feels that in writing “the ideas are more important than the structure”. Maisie understands, however, why teaching can often focus on the latter, suggesting that assessment demands may drive this tendency:

I think it might be because of marking, it’s sort of easy for them to look at, easy for them to go through a structure for marking, otherwise it’s really broad, they can’t measure it, they can’t assess it, there’s no measure of assessment there, as a teacher marking.

These views of academic writing can be put down to the way in which, for Maisie, important things (ideas) are deemed less important by those who assess the work. In fact, given that academic text is defined only by its use of certain (needless) vocabulary, without such assessment, academic text serves no purpose that could not be more easily achieved in other ways.

If we consider these comments from the point of view of process philosophy, we can see that, for Maisie at least, writing is a self-contained object with little or no connection with anything outside itself. There is no sense at all of becoming, either for her as a writer or for the text as writing. This lack of connection and change may well explain why it seems so pointless to her.

Lou

Lou studied biological science as an undergraduate and initially her views of academic writing are similar to those of Maisie. Like Maisie, she used a focus on its form to question its usefulness:

[Academic writing] can be a long or a short piece of writing that is set out in a specific format, usually, for the institution that it’s been requested of.

In Lou’s case, writing is defined by a list of formal properties demanded by the institution. Content, she says, in the form of “theory and knowledge”, equates to a “tick-box” list of standard features:

It has theory in it, it’s underpinned with theory and knowledge and erm case studies and various other things. It has quotes in it from various other people that are seen to be prestigious or of some sort of status in that field. And it has a bibliography at the end to prove that that you haven’t plagiarized

(laughs)

These features are largely formal and serve the purpose of display: quotes advertise one’s recognition of prestigious academics, and the bibliography serves to show that one has not plagiarised. Once again, writing is seen as an activity of displaying one’s ability to conform to formal requirements:

Academic writing for me is erm a way of showing that you’ve learnt something in a specific style … erm. it’s way of showing off all of your knowledge and erm your, maybe your skills and your … academia really, showing off your knowledge

(my emphasis)

Here, writing exists to display the ability to replicate the style, skills and trappings of knowledge. Essentially, it’s about providing visible evidence that one belongs to “academia” and “kind of puts people in a hierarchy”, thus serving as a way of advertising that one knows one’s place. The predominance and consistency of this approach is suggested by the way Lou says she has “never experienced academic writing in any other way” and “never looked at it in another way”.

These comments need to be understood in the context of her (apparent lack of) experience of academic writing pedagogy:

I’ve never been taught how to do academic writing properly, ever, in my degree … I never, I always thought I was bad at it, I always, I was always picked up on certain elements of maybe my grammar and maybe not being critical enough, I always found, repeated throughout my whole degree, my education that I always wrote exactly how I spoke and I didn’t, it didn’t reflect the knowledge that maybe I have on that subject.

The only input she describes focussed on her use of the formal properties of text: “my grammar” and the conventions specific to written text. She thus relied on lessons about writing from school, “famous things like PQE ,⁶ things like that”. Only recently has her writing developed, she says, specifically in order to meet assessment criteria and achieve a higher grade through, she adds, greater criticality. Reading and reflecting on sample essays from past students has helped Lou to see “how they’ve done it” and “how they’ve achieved a certain grade”. Current course criteria, which are more restrictive and detailed than they were on her degree, have been helpful in accentuating “things that you need to include, things that you have to write about”.

Lou’s account emphasises the role of assessment as a driver of academic writing. Unlike Florence, Lou sees writing as a hierarchical assessment tool and little more than an exercise in producing compliance. Assessment and feedback, accordingly, focus on the formal properties of text as product and content, Lou feels, is restricted by assessment criteria which tell the writer what to write and how.

Discussion

Although these accounts offer only a narrow window into academic literacy pedagogy, they suggest several conclusions. Needless to say, they differ significantly. Maisie and Lou see writing as a formalised (and less valuable) product-based activity. Driven by assessment and conformity to standardised procedures, it involves learning how to demonstrate compliance, leading to better grades and reinforcing the social inequalities between those who know the game and those who don’t. Florence, however, seemed less concerned with the formal properties of text and saw writing as a process-based learning activity. This doubtless reflects her “arts” academic background, wherein writing is equated with expanding one’s views and engaging with wider debates. Both time-consuming and enriching, academic literacy practices, for Florence, offer more than a system of reproduction: they are affective, complex, and cannot be reduced to compliance. To learn, we have to believe that we are part of a process of becoming and, in academic literacy terms, that writing can actually foster the co-development of knowledge, even when this requires a quasi-athletic resilience (see Deleuze 1981). This divergence challenges provision, not least in an educational world defined by growth, massification, and internationalisation (see for example Lomer and Mittelmeier 0000; Ryan et al. 2020). When universities actively pursue forms of professionalisation as an international endeavour to “formalise and systematise approaches to teacher development” (Shaw 2018, 145; see also Spowart et al. 2019), how far can they respond to this diversity?

Conclusion

Putting strictly pedagogical concerns aside, the growing technological aptitude for data farming, prosumption, and educational throughput reminds us that focussing on form is, quite simply, safer all round. It is not simply that discourses of knowledge co-creation may imply little more than the farming of “student experience” and institutional risk-aversion. It is also true that practices that reduce literacy and assessment to displays of adherence to convention may be increasingly hard to challenge. Process approaches to writing do not represent a “solution” to this putative “problem” or deficit in education practice. But if modernity is indeed defined by a differential ontology, rather than by some grounded “common sense” reality, it invites us to consider the concrete pedagogical implications of an image of thought which, because it is synonymous with a processual “misosophy” of becoming, encounters and creation, forces us to think (Deleuze 1968, 182–184).

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christian Beighton

Christian Beighton is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts, Education & Humanities at Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent, UK. His research interests include policy and practice in HE, professional, and lifelong learning settings.

Notes

1. Although often translated as “reversing Platonism”, “renverser le Platonisme”, is better rendered as overturning. Just as a popular dessert (crème renversée) can be “turned over” by pouring (verser) it the other way, a system or method can be turned over without being rejected. On the contrary, Deleuze insists that many aspects of Platonism, particularly the way Heraclitan division and becoming lie “growling” within it, are irreplaceable (Deleuze 1968, 83)

2. It is notable that in the original French the noun”becoming” (le devenir) is identical to the verb “to become” (devenir). Their non-finitude is thus explicit, exemplifying the literalism that is characteristic of Deleuze’s work.

3. Saussurean linguistics understands language as operating on complementary axes. The first, the syntagmatic axis of analysis, concerns the way utterances are formed by morphemes in sequence: binary oppositions lie at the heart of language use here, since utterances are formed by choosing between this or that morpheme. These choices, importantly, are not free but paradigmatically defined, offering only synchronically interchangeable morphemes. The second, the diachronic axis, by contrast, describes language change over time. Traditionally, such diachrony signifies longer-term developments (described by etymology for instance), but to remain coherent with process philosophy, the diachronic axis moves from some putative future change to the awareness that diachrony is always at work, constantly othering the text which becomes over time (see, for example, Lagopoulos 2016).

4. All three interviewees were women among a largely female cohort, reminding us that gender may well play a role in this context. Although significant, this issue falls outside the scope of the current paper’s focus on the pre-subjective affordances of process rather than its (gendered) products, which merits separate consideration elsewhere.

5. All details have been anonymised

6. PQE ;(Point, Quote, Evaluate) refers to the requirement to make a point, support it with a quote and then explain how that quote proves your point. It is perhaps significant that this advice explicitly prescribes the use of referencing to display knowledge and use it only as a justification for an idea that the writer already holds. The field or the dialogue around a given topic is subordinated to the writer’s existing beliefs and writing becomes an exercise in displaying the ability to provide justifications for existing presuppositions.