Research Seminar - Developing Disciplinary Literacies in Hybrid Classes

Developing Disciplinary Literacies in Hybrid Classes

Presented by: Dr Beck Wise

Date: Friday 3 July 2020

Time: 12–1pm

Location: Online via Zoom

Abstract

Around the world, COVID-19 has prompted a new focus on online pedagogy as schools and universities were forced to rapidly adapt their classes to remote delivery. While – in Australia at least – we are no longer teaching under these emergency conditions, demand for effective online classes is likely to remain higher for some time, even as universities’ resources are further constrained. As we transition to a more stable model of hybrid learning, we have an opportunity to develop more sustainable and effective teaching practices that respond to local conditions and benefit from pre-pandemic research in digital and online pedagogy.

The task of helping students develop rigorous, transferable literacies in the face of ever-increasing class sizes and ever-decreasing budgets is a challenge many writing instructors have faced. In our local context, providing discipline-specific skills to a diverse body of students with a wide range of research ambitions is made more complicated by institutional imperatives to deliver academic writing instruction within a single, large, multimajor class.

In this talk, I will discuss the design, implementation and student outcomes of a “Writing About Writing” class, delivered both face-to-face and online at a mid-size regional university. Writing About Writing is a pedagogical approach designed to support community-specific literacy development in first-year writing classes; in my own class, I adapted this approach to support the development of discipline-specific writing skills in an advanced undergraduate / postgraduate class. Rather than designing specific classes to support writing in the disciplines, I suggest, we can help students identify and develop discipline-specific literacies by inviting them to design and implement independent research projects through Writing About Writing – while also supporting students’ development of writerly self-identities and improving writing self-efficacy.

Presenter

Dr Beck Wise is a teacher-scholar of rhetoric and writing studies with a focus on technical communication, medical rhetoric and writing pedagogy. Her current projects investigate the role of medical claims and evidence in public debates about race, gender, ability and human rights, and ways that process-focussed writing pedagogy can be delivered at scale. Her work has appeared in Rhetoric of Health & Medicine and Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory, and is forthcoming in Research in Online Literacy Education and Continuum. Beck lectures in academic, technical and professional communication at the University of Queensland.