When arts meets enterprise: Transdisciplinarity, student identities, and EAP

Stella Harvey,Paul Stocks

doi:10.18546/lre.15.1.05

Abstract

This paper reports on a qualitative study investigating the experience and perspectives of students using English as an international language studying transdisciplinary master's degrees related to culture industries at Goldsmiths, University of London. The particular focus of this paper concerns their experiences of writing several different genres on their degree programmes, including a category of written assessment that, in keeping with the transdisciplinary project of opening up disciplinary borders, transgresses typical genre parameters. We argue that (increasingly popular) transdisciplinary programmes of this kind challenge preconceived expectations about academic writing and require a high tolerance of ambiguity on the part of both students and EAP lecturers: established genre conventions may be destabilized and writing become a precarious yet inherently creative process. Our findings highlight the significance of students' identities with regard to negotiating these written assessments; they support the view that academic literacies' emphasis on student perspectives enriches text-oriented EAP pedagogy, and that insights gleaned from small-scale ethnographic studies of this kind enhance the embedding of subject-specific EAP academic writing development.

Highlights

Recent years have seen the rise of a new category of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary master’s programme in UK universities with titles such as ‘Arts Management’ or ‘The Cultural Industries’
In order to better understand this complex situation, it seemed important to obtain an insider, emic view of these issues, and to this end we carried out an exploratory qualitative study with a group of students studying on these two degree programmes.A key question for us concerned how they understood and negotiated the different genres they were required to write, and how they experienced the multiple, shifting subject positions these implied.We interviewed the MA Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship (MA CCE) programme leader in order to gain a deeper understanding of the rationale and expectations for that degree, and discussed key findings from our discussion with the students
Creative workers will often have portfolio careers with multiple revenue streams and high levels of insecurity, requiring flexibility and tolerance of unpredictable and precarious circumstances. (When we presented some of our findings on this research project at the 2014 Norwegian Forum on English for Academic Purposes (NFEAP) conference, a connection between the concept of precariousness and English for academic purposes (EAP)’s ‘Cinderella’ institutional status was made in the Q&A and subsequent informal conversations with other delegates.) In our interview with her, the MA CCE programme leader confirmed that the degree programme did have a performative aspect, the ambition being to model the life of the creative entrepreneur who has to cope with constant change and the inherent precariousness of work in the creative industries

Summary

Introduction

Recent years have seen the rise of a new category of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary master’s programme in UK universities with titles such as ‘Arts Management’ or ‘The Cultural Industries’. They exemplify the disruption of the academic/vocational divide within higher education (HE) institutions, challenging the traditional boundaries between the domains of arts and enterprise. This development is significant for us as English for academic purposes (EAP) lecturers at Goldsmiths, University of London, for two interrelated reasons These degree programmes recruit large numbers of students using English as an international language from diverse cultural, academic, and professional backgrounds.

Results

Discussion

Conclusion