Modes and affordances for cultivating content faculty in their work to enhance learning through writing

Paper i proceeding, 2017

This presentation offers a European example of how the landscape of English-medium instruction (EMI) in combination with a European WID-like approach referred to as ‘integrating content and language in higher education’ (ICLHE) provide additional ways of working with faculty to cultivate their work with student writing development and enhanced learning. The paper draws on the one hand on our long-standing collaborative ICLHE work and research and, on the other hand, on research conducted in a sub-project of a three-university project investigating the alleged incidental effects on English professional literacy in EMI-education. The main focus of our ICLHE-endeavor is to promote student writing and learning with the help of genre-based writing instruction with an academic literacies approach. The main focus of the research project is proficiency in terms of vocabulary but in the sub-project we also study how writing assignments provide progression and scaffolding for learning and writing in the disciplines. An area to improve in ICLHE- as well as EMI-contexts is to systematize efforts to scaffold content faculty and their design and supervision of student writing. The purpose being to arrive at assignments and supervision that do more than merely offer writing training but also for students to work on and display disciplinary literacy. Given our ICLHE-context and the EMI-research project, we are in a position to report on three different types of interventions with faculty. In the task of mapping writing assignment development in two of the engineering education programs we study, we have observed four courses, two in each program, and analysed the writing in them. In addition to these four courses, we have also been instrumental in faculty and student writing development and helped re-design supervision as well as feedback practices in view of aligning content as well as writing learning outcomes over the full progression of a program. Our efforts have been enabled by our integrated context and the ways in the that team-teaching with content faculty provides; by being able to provide faculty training through university-wide pedagogy certification courses for faculty; and through the interventions in the research project. After accounting for the observations and interventions and the effects on students’ writing development with the help of the cultivation of faculty in them, the presentation focuses on discussing the affordances of the different modes of cultivation and argue for the need to adapt to the situatedness of EMI- and ICLHE-context and design faculty and program development accordingly.