We need to talk about AL: has academic literacies designed the pedagogy out of Learning Development?
Dhillon, S. and White, S. (2024) We need to talk about AL: has academic literacies designed the pedagogy out of Learning Development? Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. ISSN 1759-667X
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Abstract
Academic literacies (AL) research has made significant contributions in both scope and depth to understandings of student writing and the meaning of literacy across higher education. It has been particularly impactful on thinking in Learning Development. However, researchers and practitioners both within and external to the AL movement have struggled to clarify the relationship between AL and pedagogy. English for Academic Purposes (EAP) researchers have highlighted the lack of a workable AL pedagogy, whilst AL researchers maintain that the model represents a design space or heuristic for thinking about practice in context, rather than a source of pedagogic prescriptions. In this theoretical discussion, we elaborate concerns with the structural coherence of the AL model, its social constructivist underpinnings and evidence base, and the impact of its ideological orientation on the pedagogy we derive from it. Underpinning these critiques is a suspicion that the social constructivist epistemology which AL uses to pinpoint weaknesses in the models of literacy/writing which it subsumes cannot generate a practical pedagogy. We argue that these structural and ideological tensions in the AL model help to explain confusion over its interpretation and implementation. We speculate that a singular focus on social constructivist derived theory, though well-intentioned, does more to reinforce a particular ideological commitment than to enhance student learning.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Additional Information: | This is the author accepted manuscript of an article published on 30th September 2024 by the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education and shared under a CC-CY 3.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en |
| Keywords: | Learning development, academic literacies, social constructivism, critical realism |
| Divisions: | School of Social Science |
| Depositing User: | Sunny Dhillon |
| Date Deposited: | 14 Aug 2024 10:21 |
| Last Modified: | 30 Sep 2024 09:54 |
| URI: | https://bgro.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/1154 |
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