Ursula Wingate: Bringing genre pedagogies into academic literacies

Although the concept of academic literacies introduced by Lea and Street in 1998 has been transformative in helping us understand the sociostructural context of student writing, it has never put forward a pedagogy. This is where the concept of genre, the signature pedagogy of EAP, can step in, marrying a concrete teaching practice to the theoretical stance of academic literacies. There is a tension between the two approaches yet both aim to be transformative - in the mindsets of those working with students, and in the learning experiences of those students. Yet arguably this transformation has not gone far enough, being limited to those programmes or courses that have successfully worked with a Learning Developer rather than necessarily across the institution. So how can that level of transformation - essentially in how we 'do' higher education - be brought about? Ideally, by expanding the role of the Learning Developer to be embedded in the disciplines and working directly with lecturers to support student-centred teaching and assessment, and to help those lecturers best understand how to develop their students’ writing. You may not agree with this approach, in which case we’d love to hear from you!  The resources we mentioned: Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes https://benjamins.com/catalog/jerpp  The Language Scholar https://languagescholar.leeds.ac.uk/about/  Lea, M. and Street, B. (1998) ‘Student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’, Studies in Higher Education, 23 (2), pp.157–172. Available at: DOI: 10.1080/03075079812331380364 (Accessed: 10 October 2019). Lillis, T. and Scott, M. (2007) 'Defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy', Journal of Applied Linguistics , 4(1) pp.5–32. Available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/17057/ (Accessed: 10 October 2019). And the papers we talked about: Wingate, U. (2019) “Achieving transformation through collaboration: the role of academic literacies”, Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education (15). https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.v0i15.566  Wingate, U., & Tribble, C. (2012). The best of both worlds? Towards an English for Academic Purposes/Academic Literacies writing pedagogy. Studies in Higher Education, 37(4), 481-495. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2010.525630