The use of personal experience as a strategy for critical reading and writing. A Practice Report

Ella Kahu,Hannah Gerrard

doi:10.5204/ssj.v9i3.470

Abstract

Increasingly it is recognised that universities are preparing students for an uncertain future. Accordingly, key graduate attributes of Massey University’s redeveloped Bachelor of Arts degree are critical reading and writing skills and engaged citizenship. The authors teach two large first-year courses in these topics. Student engagement is critical in these courses because the student cohort is diverse, the courses are compulsory, and the topics are developmental. Some of the assessments have been designed to engage students with the use of personal experience as a strategy for critical reading and writing. While not without its challenges, this approach has proven to be effective: emotionally engaging students and enabling them to critically reflect on themselves and the world around them through the development of connected skills and dispositions in critical reading and writing.

Highlights

This practice report has been accepted for publication in Student Success
This emerging initiative paper reports on two first-year courses that explicitly draw on student engagement theory to actively engage students through assessments that use personal experience as a strategy for critical reading and writing
By asking students to draw their own experience into dialogue with course texts, we facilitate their practice and development of perspective-taking, by implicitly endorsing their authority to engage in academic conversations and projects, and by asking them to see their experience as material to be interpreted in conversation, rather than as selfevident. They practise selecting and elaborating an example so it can serve as the basis for an emerging claim, a crucial generic writing skill that later assignments ask for with everincreasing complexity and use of multiple source texts; here, students practise with examples from their own experience, bracketing the challenges of multiple source texts for the moment and focusing on issues of pertinence, precision, and detail in representation

Summary

Abstract*

It is recognised that universities are preparing students for an uncertain future. Key graduate attributes of Massey University’s redeveloped Bachelor of Arts degree are critical reading and writing skills and engaged citizenship. Some of the assessments have been designed to engage students with the use of personal experience as a strategy for critical reading and writing. The authors have kindly given their permission to have this paper published as a Practice Report in this special issue of the Journal and it has undergone a further review by the editors to confirm it aligns with the Journal’s standards. This practice report has been accepted for publication in Student Success.

Introduction

Aims