The elusive notion of disciplinary literacy in a cross-disciplinary context: A purloined letter of sorts

Book chapter, 2026

Many established disciplines interact in new complex and shifting contexts in attempts to address dynamic research challenges. In our EME-educational contexts, we need to address this changing reality in needs analyses and help students and faculty navigate the resulting cross-disciplinary contexts to negotiate the resulting discourses and practices. While there are sites of cross-disciplinary education today, traditional academic disciplines remain mainstream. For instance, supervisors of STEM thesis writing across levels express limited interdisciplinary awareness when asked to self-assess supervision practice after a faculty training course for supervising writing processes. Yet, reflexive descriptions of the discursive contexts of 34 PhD students writing for publication indicate that many of them do find themselves in cross-disciplinary contexts. As English-medium education (EME) experts we need to help faculty towards designing collaborative learning environments with dynamic discourse contexts requiring both faculty and students to begin to hone their cross-disciplinary literacy competence and develop the discourse for the environments they enter. To do that, we need to work with faculty and students to scaffold looking beyond any one individual disciplinary discourse and acknowledge the givens and assumptions of other disciplines.