Crafting claims about sustainability assessment: The situated practice of guiding university students into producing and presenting conclusions
Journal article, 2015

Following sociocultural and dialogical traditions, this empirical study investigates the textual presentation of conclusions as ongoing practice related to historically grounded, disciplinary traditions. From using interaction analytical means to scrutinize supervision sessions around a report assignment in engineering education, the article illuminates communicative challenges that emerge and are dealt with as student writers explore and formulate an argumentation in the context of Sustainability Assessment. Analyzing mediated action and participants’ communicative activities on the micro-level makes details in the work of producing, accounting for and formulating conclusions in alignment with a disciplinary field observable. By means of two illustrative episodes selected from an analyzed corpus of 33 video-recorded sessions, the results demonstrate how close attention to textual formulations in students’ report drafts provided important access points to epistemic practices. Such attention was a significant means for taking an argumentative orientation where specific forms of discourse and intratextual work were essential ingredients.

discourse

disciplinarity

academic writing

Higher education

communication

interaction

Author

Ann-Marie Eriksson

Chalmers, Applied Information Technology (Chalmers), Language and Communication

University of Gothenburg

Linguistics and Education

0898-5898 (ISSN)

Vol. 30 June 97-113

Subject Categories

Educational Sciences

Pedagogical Work

Pedagogy

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Learning and teaching

Pedagogical work

DOI

10.1016/j.linged.2015.03.011

More information

Created

10/7/2017