Accelerating Academic Literacy Development: Issues, Possibilities and Challenges for Integrating Scholarly Writing Development into Mainstream Curriculum in Australian Higher Education.

Abstract

This thesis presents a longitudinal case study of the collaborative integration of a pedagogy for Accelerating Academic Literacy Development (AALD) into a mainstream STEM course at an Australian South Coast University. The distinguishing feature of the pedagogy is a conceptual self-help tool based on principles of genre analysis. The purpose of teaching genre analysis is to empower students to analyse course-specific readings as models for accelerating their own academic literacy development, while a collaborative pedagogy is intended to empower a discipline specialist to adopt the AALD approach and autonomously continue to develop it as her own. This study details the successful and sustained curriculum-integration of the AALD pedagogy into a mainstream semester-length course by two STEM lecturers, each in collaboration with the author. It examines institutional and personal contexts and conditions for possibilities and challenges to a more widespread adoption of a curriculum integrated AALD focus. Findings indicate that the two STEM lecturers derived sufficient confidence from their initial co-teaching, and from their familiarity with the course-specific genre analysis worksheets, to retain, and modify, the AALD module within the same course in subsequent years. Implications of the findings for the scalability of the AALD are discussed in light of current contextual challenges.