Beyond alienation: spatial implications of teaching and learning academic writing

ABSTRACT

Despite existing work on the situated and sometimes alienating nature of academic writing practices, the implications of the specifically spatial nature of these practices continue to pose questions for teaching and learning in higher education. This paper addresses these questions through a study of the views and experiences of students and teachers of academic writing in postgraduate teacher education (n = 33). Specifically, it introduces a concept, xenolexia, which complements that of alienation by recognizing the dynamic nature of academic writing, texts and practices without reifying them. Discussing the fundamentally spatial nature of this dynamism, the concept of xenolexia is used to analyse perceptions of academic writing practices as 'foreign'. The features of this 'foreignness' are examined from the point of view of both teaching and learning, and lessons about identity and dynamism in academic writing are drawn for writing pedagogies in postgraduate teacher education contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• academic literacies
• alienation
• space

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to colleagues and students from Canterbury Christ Church University and Bristol University for their support and participation in this project. I would also like to thank reviewers of Teaching in Higher Education for their many insightful suggestions about these ideas.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Universities are asked to exploit ‘significant potential for market expansion’ (CBI 2013, 23–24). The student, similarly, is a recognized part of this nexus of academic decision making (CBI, 2013), reminding us that this is a neoliberal picture of the student as cost-effective producer of their own enhanced employability status (Hillage and Pollard 1998) through processes of self-commodification and speculation (Bauman 2007; Lazzarato and Jordan 2014; Beighton 2016b; Brunila and Siivonen 2016).

2 New materialism, like Bergson, rejects traditional vitalism and its view that some life-force invests things with its ineffable purpose. It is not just that such presuppositions explain nothing, but that the teleological finalism which they imply simply does not exist in nature (Bergson, 2013b). Spatial multiplicities, on the contrary, can do no other than relate and therefore require no immaterial life-force or conceptual lack to explain them