Reframing academic literacy: re-examining a short-course for 'disadvantaged' tertiary students
Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: ABSTRACT: This paper revisits a successful short-course in academic literacy that was conducted for 50 “disadvantaged ” students enrolled in the first year of an education degree at an Australian regional university (see Hirst, Henderson, Allan, Bode & Kocatepe, 2004). Based on a sociocultural approach to learning and drawing on a conceptualisation of tertiary literacy as a social practice, the short-course disrupted deficit views of individual students and worked to help students expand their literate repertoires. However, recent discussions about learning have helped to problematise academic literacy and its place within an increasingly plural, multicultural, multilingual and textually multimodal society (Gee, 2003, 2004; Kalantzis & Cope, 2004; The New London Group, 1996). Rather than accepting academic literacy as the metaphoric opening of a “significant gate to economic success and sociopolitical power ” (Gee, 2004, p. 91), recent views suggest that a homogenisation is at work and that courses in academic literacy serve to enculturate students into particular – and possibly outdated – social and
Authors: Robyn Henderson, Elizabeth Hirst
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2134857491