Narrative means towards literacy understandings: exploring transformations within literacies and migrating identities
Last week I attended a short seminar by Dr. Catherine Hutchings from UCT, who presented some of the results of her PhD study looking at academic literacy and student identity. Here are some notes I took during the seminar.
How do students develop new means of constructing identity as they move from high school into higher education?
Repositioning identities → have personal / social / professional identities outside university, but on moving into HE can feel lost and disorientated. Participants in this study had broken formal educational journeys, no writing background. They had established social and professional identities but lowly academic identities
Their education history was transmissive, rather than constructive
Journals can be a pedagogic method, but became data capture owing to richness of reflections. The journal started as an access route into academic spaces, incorporating their experiences, attempting to promote the development of reflective and critical thinking
Students were afraid of writing
Narratives: the stories we tell about our lives changes our perspectives on them
Referencing, language, technology, the library are “pillars of the great hall of alienation”. They serve as barriers to the transition into HE
How does “agency” become apparent? How is it evident? Referencing, use of authority, engagement with readings, argument…but before HE, agency is not directly evident…it is not voiced
Through using the voice of others, we come to know our own voices
Can take a lot of discussion before students see referencing as an asset
- Old voices – wisdom of other
- Odd voices – referencing
- Own voices – thinking about ideas
Transition, move through, deconstruction, renegotiation, reconstruction
Referencing as feeling of alienation, of not belonging
Plagiarism as a “trapping stone”, already sets them up as outcasts / criminals. Knowledge is “owned” and “guarded”, and doesn’t belong to students
Students used “referencing” and “plagiarism” interchangeably
Few understand the purpose of referencing, nor do they understand it’s language. They often lacked the vocabulary to paraphrase
“Seeing is not knowing”…just because it’s been shown to them doesn’t mean they understand it
“Plagiarism was the only out for me at the time”…a sense of being overwhelmed and not able to cope
Loss of identity in the transformation to HE. The “good learner” in HE is expected to sound like the authoritative voice. Previous identity and experience is often not valued
Students memorise content as a successful strategy in school, then they come here and are punished when they reproduce content
“I felt like a puppet on a string”
“Any sense of self is shackled or constrained”
Referencing is about judgement i.e. it helps the marker determine how much of the students’ work is their own. It can instil fear
Students don’t always understand the purpose of referencing, only that there is a punishment. A sense of belonging comes with understanding, not with doing
Referencing can be thought of as a conversation, not as a list of points from the viewpoint of others. “Must my voice be unique?” “What is my own voice in this conversation?”
“Referencing sets the writer free in using other peoples ideas”
Professional development in HE, finding a voice, can alienate people when they return to their social and professional lives
Referencing as structure and referencing as being voices in a conversation