DISCURSO DE DÉFICIT NAS PRÁTICAS LETRADAS ACADÊMICAS DE GRADUANDOS EM LETRAS: UMA INVESTIGAÇÃO EM TESES E DISSERTAÇÕES

This article describes a small scale ethnographically oriented research study seeking to contribute to understanding student academic literacy practices in a South African vocational, web design and development course. In this course digital multimodal assessments are the main means whereby students demonstrate their learning. The findings of the study provide insights into the contextualised ways in which student academic literacy practices are shaped by academic and professional contexts where digital and multimodal practices are privileged. The academic literacies perspective used in this study, while useful for exploring the nature of student academic literacy practices, has not paid enough attention to theorising how literacy practices are shaped by broader contextual influences. To address this limitation the paper speculates about how the Bernsteinian concept of knowledge recontextualisation might be used alongside an academic literacies frame. The inclusion of an empirical focus on recontextualisation can provide an opportunity to explore how knowledge construction and transformation processes in the academic and professional domains result in the privileging of particular academic literacy practices.

Drawing on the Academic Literacies perspectives of Lea and Street and key genre theorists, this mixed-methods case study explored multilingual student experiences of academic literacy practices in one postgraduate social-science school in an English-medium university in Kazakhstan. Two questions guided the research: (1) To what extent and in what ways do students develop genre knowledge in their school EMI contexts?; (2) Which pedagogical approaches and strategies do students identify as beneficial in supporting genre knowledge development? The study found students developed genre awareness for research-related literacy practices, involving field-, tenor- and mode-related genre knowledge. The study also found student capacity to apply genre knowledge successfully across a range of text genres. Another finding was that challenge and success in genre knowledge development was a function of the extent of explicit feedback from instructors and peers and explicit assignment expectations. Each of our findings are consistent with the critique and recommendations of Lea and Street (1998; 2006) on the importance of a situated approach to developing student academic literacy practice that accounts for the larger institutional contexts and epistemological traditions in which those practices have meaning. These findings have important value for discussions and debates on student academic literacy learning and practice in higher education in Kazakhstan, across Central Asia and in other countries where policies for internationalization and research universities are rapidly transforming higher education literacy practice in the current era of globalization.

Technologies of Reading and Writing: Transformation and Subjectivation in Digital Times

Background/Context Youth's multiliteracies and musical practices are increasingly considered as taking place beyond school and including community-based educational contexts. Literacy scholars increasingly seek to understand the social and cultural contexts of literacy practices, underscoring youths’ identities as present and future civic participants. Moreover, Small's concept of musicking reframes academic understandings of music to acknowledge the multiplicity of ways youth are inherently musical. Yet less is known about social and cultural contexts of multiliteracies practices and musicking activities of youth of color in community-based education settings. Moreover, less is understood about how youth demonstrate academic literacies and musicking activities, already present and informed by their lived experiences, and the formal curriculum of community-based educational contexts. This article examines the multiliteracies practices and musicking activities of youth of color during open mic at The Verses Project, a community-based literacy-and-songwriting class, to explore how youth demonstrate what Tatum and Muhammad referred to as “literary presence” and what we extend as youth's literary presence and musical presence. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This study1 details ways in which youth of color extended their literary and musical presence as active civic participants through engagement in open mic, in the context of a 15-week community-based literacy-and-songwriting class. In examining experiences of youth participants and teaching artists across open mic, we ask: What academic literacy practices and multifaceted musical activities already-present in youth's lived experiences do youth demonstrate during open-mic? And how do youth demonstrate literary presence and musical presence across literacy practices and musical activities? Setting Data for this study were collected at the Community Music School—Detroit (CMS-D) during an after-school literacy-and-songwriting class for youth age 9 to 15. Research Design Data for this 15-week qualitative study, informed by critical ethnography, were collected using videotaped observations, field notes, focus-group interviews, curriculum-planning meetings, multimodal artifacts, and researcher memos. Conclusions/Recommendations This article shows how youth demonstrated uses of open mic, reflecting sharing as an act of bravery; teaching artists across open mic scaffolded youth's development of literary and musical presence; and youth, in words and music, across open mic, enacted already-present academic literacies and musicking activities. We discuss possibilities for using open mic in formal, school-based, English and music classrooms and extend the possibilities of theory, research, and teaching in literacy studies and music education that attend to the lived experiences of youths’ literate and musical lives.

Investigating First Year Undergraduate EAL Students' Academic Literacy Experiences.

In higher education institutions in South Africa, educators working in the fields of language and academic literacy need to be sensitive and responsive to the linguistic and cultural diversity of the student body, and traditional pedagogical approaches are often inappropriate to meet the needs of students and of the wider call to decolonise higher education. As a group of lecturers working at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Education in Johannesburg, South Africa, we worked to respond to this context by designing a literacies course that was underpinned by a decolonial and social practices approach to literacy. Using critical reflection as a research method, this article traces our theoretical grounding in designing this course, including New Literacies Studies (NLS), community cultural wealth, and theories in indigenous studies, such as cultural interface theory. This article further demonstrates how we applied this theoretical framework through introducing practical activities that could be used to develop situated literacies and that tapped into the community cultural wealth that students bring to the classroom. We discuss four formative and summative assessment elements that were central to the course, namely online assessments, portfolio tasks, an argumentative essay, and what we termed the triad project, to illustrate how the decolonial approach informed our curriculum design and pedagogy. Our approach allowed us to explore new forms of assessment which opened space for students’ home languages, literacy practices, and identities to become valuable elements of teaching and learning.

Although the term academic literacies was originally developed with regard to the study of literacies in higher education and the university, the concept also applies to K–12 education. An academic literacies perspective treats reading and writing as social practices that vary with context, culture, and genre (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Street, 1984, 1995). The literacy practices of academic disciplines can be viewed as varied social practices associated with different communities. In addition, an academic literacies perspective also takes account of literacies not directly associated with subjects and disciplines, but with broader institutional discourses and genres. From the student point of view, a dominant feature of academic literacy practices is the requirement to switch their writing styles and genres between one setting and another, to deploy a repertoire of literacy practices appropriate to each setting, and to handle the social meanings and identities that each evokes.

In my contribution to this symposium, I take up the call of this journal in its mission statement for “new interactions between Literacy and Composition Studies.” From the framework of competing ideologies of literacy, I explore points of intersection as well as divergence between strands of what’s known as “composition studies” and what has come to be identified as the “academic literacies” approach to academic literacy. My focus on “academic literacies” rather than the broader area of literacy studies signals at least three of my biases: first, I wish to counter the tendency to allow the cultural norm for academic literacy to go unchallenged, a tendency that a focus on those literacy practices deemed nonacademic risks maintaining; second, and relatedly, insofar as work in composition studies remains tied by its location in the academy to programs charged with the study and teaching of academic writing, those of us identified with composition cannot allow cultural norms for academic literacy to go unchallenged; and third, some of the most promising work challenging such norms can be found in work taking an academic literacies approach.

Currently most academic literacy (AL) courses in South Africa are decontextualized and generic, suggesting an autonomous view of literacy. This view is challenged by the new literacy studies, which see literacy as social practices embedded in context. Recent developments in AL research emphasize the need to focus on discipline-specific strategies that embed ALs in disciplines of study, rather than approaches which decontextualize AL. At a tertiary institution in SA, a literacy-as-social-practice approach to ALs was implemented through an institution-wide project focusing on integrating language and content in an attempt to transgress the narrow disciplinary boundaries that characterize the tertiary curriculum. This paper explores how 20 AL practitioners and disciplinary specialists integrated AL teaching into various disciplines. The findings suggest that higher education needs to create discursive spaces for the collaboration of AL practitioners and disciplinary specialists, to facilitate the embedding of AL teaching into disciplines of study.

Undergraduate students’ perspectives on digital competence and academic literacy in a Spanish University

Academic literacy practices are increasingly varied, influenced by the diverse education and language backgrounds of students and staff, interdisciplinary approaches, and collaborations with non-university groups such as business partners. Completing a master's dissertation thus requires students to negotiate literacy practices associated with different domains. To enable an investigation of conditions for such negotiations, this article extends the concept of literacy practices by combining insights from Academic Literacies, New Literacy Studies and Schatzki's (1996) social practice ontology. The resulting framework is applied in a case study of a student who negotiates academic requirements and entrepreneurial goals in completing a master's dissertation.

This thesis explores curriculum construction and the production of assignments in two courses at a vocational higher education institution in South Africa, namely Film and Video Technology and Graphic Design. The influence of the vocational curriculum context on student and lecturer practices is examined through two analytical frameworks, literacy as social practice and Bernstein's concept of recontextualisation. An ethnographic methodology was used to investigate the broader curriculum context and literacy practices engaged in by students and lecturers. Fieldwork was carried out over a six-month period, while generating and collecting fieldnote, interview, documentary and photographic data. The analysis is presented as two separate case studies, one in each department. The study's interpretive approach is used to bring together the Bernstein focus on recontextualisation and curriculum with the Academic Literacies notion of literacy practice. The significant role of the curriculum context in the patterning of the literacy practices students engage in when producing their assignments is therefore recognised. The findings highlight the way the university of technology sectoral domain operates as a third aspect in the recontextualisation process alongside the professional and disciplinary domains, resulting in conflicting messages. Primacy is given to texts and literacy practices that resemble those in the professional domains. However, essayist literacies are also foregrounded and reflect generic and decontextualized understandings of writing that function as an important mechanism through which the sectoral domain asserts its position in the academy. The research demonstrates that the Academic Literacies and Bernsteinian frames can successfully be combined in empirical research, allowing the individual students' experiences to be located within broader institutional and sectoral structures in a way that challenges deficit views of the student. A further conclusion drawn is how an Academic Literacies lens can help to identify the workings of the sectoral domain thus broadening the analytical frame beyond individual institutional conditions.

I provide an overview of approaches to writing referred to as 'academic literacies' building on broader traditions, such as New Literacy Studies, and I draw out the relevance of such traditions for the ways in which lecturers provide support to their students with regard to the writing requirements of the University. I offer three case studies of the application of academic literacies approaches to programmes concerned with supporting student writing, in the UK and the USA. I briefly conclude by asking how far these accounts and this work can be seen to bring together many of the themes raised at SIGET conferences - including academic literacies and its relation to genre theories - and express the hope that it opens up trajectories for future research and collaboration of the kind they were founded to develop.

The concept of epistemological access, formulated by Morrow (1994; 2007), has been highly influential in higher education. It has been widely used in the sense of moving beyond physical or formal access to meaningful access to the “goods” of the university. An academic literacy approach acknowledges the complexity of literacy practices at university level. According to this approach, students need to master disciplinary literacies in order to learn and engage with knowledge (Lea and Street 1998; 2006). Epistemological access, social justice and academic literacies have been widely researched in the South African higher education field. This conceptual article explores the relationship between epistemological access and the development of students’ academic literacies to enhance social justice within the South African higher education context. We draw on related literature and our current experiences as academics to critique current institutional practices aimed at addressing the development of academic literacies and promoting student success. We argue for greater attention to be paid at institutional and faculty level to enhancing epistemological access and social justice. This article ends by putting forward a number of propositions towards strengthening student epistemological access and academic literacies development in higher education from a social justice perspective.

Reviewed by: Cultural Practices of Literacy: Case Studies of Language, Literacy, Social Practice, and Power ed. by Victoria Purcell-Gates Kelly A. Concannon Mannise Cultural Practices of Literacy: Case Studies of Language, Literacy, Social Practice, and Power Purcell-Gates, Victoria, ed. Mahwah, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007. Print. $46.95 In Cultural Practices of Literacy Victoria Purcell-Gates argues that school-based literacy instruction does not necessarily transfer into the literacy practices in individuals’ everyday lives. Drawing from a theoretical framework that reveals how literacy is a social practice, Purcell-Gates constructs an edited collection where contributors to this volume are part of the Cultural Practices of the Literacy Studies (CPLS) team. The collection disrupts an assumed correlation between direct English-based literacy instruction in schools and the literacies practiced by members of traditionally marginalized groups in everyday contexts. Contributors to this collection employ ethnographic methodologies to provide a careful and detailed account of participants’ uses of literacy within and outside of the classroom. They present complex accounts of individuals’ literacy practices, indicating how power is always embedded in the use of reading, writing, and speaking, as many scholars invested in “non-traditional” literacies have long explored (See Albright, Ball; Cushman; Barton and Hamilton; Brandt; Brodkey; Gee). The first chapter affords readers with the theoretical and methodological basis for the Cultural Practices of Literacy Studies (CPLS) study. In “Complicating the Complex,” Purcell-Gates discusses how each chapter follows a standard protocol that explicitly reveals contributors’ locations and relationships to participants. This move serves as a general introduction to each chapter, which is followed by a description of the historical and/or cultural contexts where literacy practices emerge. The framework informs all studies in the collection; Purcell-Gates intends to encourage readers to identify patterns across studies and make more generalized claims about the relationships amongst schooling, literacy, and literacy development. To that end, Purcell-Gates gathers information about the material conditions through which individuals participate in literacy events—emphasizing the extent to which literacy is a social practice—while presenting substantial evidence for an understanding of how hegemony, power, and domination affect the uses and representations of literacies (15-17). [End Page 121] The collection is invested in changing the ways that certain literacy practices are valued over others. Purcell-Gates argues that this collection responds to a need to “paint a picture of literacy as multiple and social”; therefore, she optimistically positions this project as one that presents a global range of the ways individuals use literacy practices (ix). Contributors seek to provide a more global understanding of contested uses of literacy in spaces not fully explored by researchers; however, their commitment to these outcomes and their use of an ethnographic methodology may limit this outcome. The collection falls short in providing a full account of the most valued literacy practices of participants. Because of the large scope of this project, it is difficult to make substantial claims about patterns in literacy use in such different populations. The collection provides snapshots of school-based literacy practices as well as those performed outside of the traditional classroom, where a small number of individuals serve as representatives of a particular group. This need for consistency across chapters in the CLPS study—along with multiple exigencies to establish historical and cultural contexts of particular rhetorical situations where literacy practices are employed— makes it more difficult for contributors to create substantial claims about the social nature of literacy of a more global range of participants. The collection is broken down into four sections. The beginning of the collection discusses how linguistic hegemony in the context of imperialism is demonstrated through the lives of both Puerto Rican farmers and Botswana students. In this first portion, “Language, Literacy, and Hegemony,” participants reflect on their literacy practices and produce detailed accounts of how they use English and their respective native languages at work, in schools, and in the home. Contributors address the larger cultural attitude that English is needed for access into a global economy because they highlight how participants are rhetorically savvy in gaining access to information and resources while not fully assimilating into the dominant culture. For example, in chapter 3 “Language and Literacy Issues...