Supporting academic literacies: university teachers in collaboration for change

ABSTRACT

This article deals with an action research project, where a group of university teachers from different disciplines reflected on and gradually extended their knowledge about how to support students’ academic literacy development. The project was conducted within a ‘research circle’ [Bergman, L. 2014. “The Research Circle as a Resource in Challenging Academics’ Perceptions of How to Support Students’ Literacy Development in Higher Education.” Canadian Journal of Action Research 15 (2): 3–20], in which the teachers engaged in a continuous dialogue where experience-based and research-based knowledge could meet. The two-year long process was divided into three phases: exchange of experiences and knowledge, small-scale empirical investigations in the participants own teaching, and presentations of the outcome of the research circle work. The main focus in this article is the second phase. The choice of small-scale-investigations, and how they were discussed and developed in the collaborative work, will be foregrounded as well as the changes that occurred in the participants’ teaching practices and how the participants value the outcome of the research circle work.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic literacies
• action research
• collaboration
• critical reflection
• teaching practices

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by generous grants from the Postdoctoral Program for Quality Development in Higher Education at Malmö University, Sweden.