"Hidden Features" and "Overt Instruction" in Academic Literacy Practices: A Case Study in Engineering

Abstract

At the heart of an Academic Literacies approach is a concern with "transformation" and the "transformative."But what does this mean?How is "transformation" to be understood, and what does it look like when using an Academic Literacies lens to investigate and design writing practices in the academy?In this section, the book's editors each offer a perspective on these questions-but without a desire to close them down.We recognize that individual practitioner-researchers will define and work with the notion of transformation somewhat differently depending on their/our particular institutional and/or disciplinary positions and the specific questions they/we ask.An examination and elucidation of this contextual diversity is, indeed, one of the main aims of this volume. thereSa lilliS: toWardS tranSformative deSignAs a teacher, researcher and participant in contemporary academia I am involved in both working with(in) and against powerful conventions for meaning making and knowledge construction.I am committed to exploring what it is that prevailing academic conventions for meaning making have to offer-and to whom-and what it is they constrain or restrict.My concern (based on many years of teaching and researching) is that we-as teachers, researchers, writers, policy makers-may often adopt prevailing conventions, including those surrounding which specific Design rests on a chain of processes of which critique is one: it can, however, no longer be the focal one, or be the major goal of textual practices.Critique leaves the initial definition of the domain of analysis to the past, to past production.(Kress, 2000, p. 160) The question of design-or what I am referring to as "transformative design" in Andrew: So it's an excuse for, like, the government not intervening in causes of ill health, isn't it?Andrew's aha! moment isn't the end of the story however: I observed how much of the argument that had emerged collaboratively and antagonistically through the peer to peer discussion dropped out of the writing the students subsequently did (see Mitchell, 1995).What accounted for this disappearance?Was it control over the medium, the medium itself, the fact that the writing would be read and assessed by the teacher as part of working towards a public exam, a resultant reluctance to take risks?These kinds of question about "translation, how meaning gets moved, or does not …", about "intersubjectivity, how separate individuals come to conceive, or do not, reasonably similar things …" make clear that it was not possible thinking Jacobs, C. (

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