Abstract
This article explores how course design and assessment in a first year pre-service teacher education course for English students can be imbued with academic depth and rigour in ways that enable students to take intellectual and textual risks. We argue for a conceptualisation of risky writing in which we open up student critical engagement with sociolinguistic issues by juxtaposing academic and creative genres in curriculum course material and assessment. Academic writing in its current form is problematised and questions are raised about the extent to which academic courses provide students with an apprenticeship into compliance, conformity and silence. We present the possibilities of using a heteroglossic pedagogy (Blackledge & Creese, 2014) for learning, teaching and writing. The principles underpinning the course (linguistic diversity as a resource, the value of lived experience and the interrelation of epistemological access and academic rigour) constitute a heteroglossic pedagogy. We illustrate these principles using two examples, one from student performance during the course and the second from independent writing for an assignment. Together, the two data snapshots illustrate the pedagogic possibilities of fluid movements between distantiation and appropriation using flexible genres, which ultimately facilitate deeper student engagement and understanding of disciplinary knowledge. The two data snapshots are not mere descriptions or anecdotes detached from principles (Slonimsky & Shalem, 2004: 92). They facilitate academic depth and rigour because of the carefully staged moves between the strange and the familiar in a context that encourages students to take creative and intellectual risks.
Highlights
In this article we explore how course design and assessment in pre-service teacher education can be imbued with academic depth and rigour in ways that enable students to take intellectual and textual risks
We argue for a conceptualisation of risky writing in which we open up student critical engagement with sociolinguistic issues by juxtaposing academic and creative genres in both the
One is drawn from interaction and performances in the lecture, which illustrates a heteroglossic pedagogy in action, while the second form of data is drawn from a student assignment to show the end product of risky writing, what risky writing looks like and how it demonstrates a synthesis of academic depth, rigour and creativity
Summary
In this article we explore how course design and assessment in pre-service teacher education can be imbued with academic depth and rigour in ways that enable students to take intellectual and textual risks. Doeke, Kostogriz, and Charles (2004) and Cartwright and Noone (2006) raise critical questions about the way pre-service teachers are positioned by academic discourse as novices required to display and reproduce dominant knowledge through their writing What this does is raise questions about the academic rigour of courses where students may get superficial access to disciplinary knowledge without substantive depth. Having outlined the problems and challenges of erasure of voice through trying too hard to “play it safe,” Thesen (2014: 12) offers a “warm and productive notion of risk” that emerges from the lived experiences of researchers – allowing for uncertainty, emergent meanings and possibilities for tracing ideas that are realised in writing and those that are lost She conceptualises risk as follows: Our concept of risk is that it is an analytical space for bringing into focus the tilting point between self and other, where the other refers to ideas, places, relationships, audiences and forms. We adapt Thesen’s (2014) notion of risk, voice and erasure to an undergraduate first year course and explore the relationship between academic depth, rigour and risk
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