English Teaching: Practice and Critique
Reframing academic literacy: Re-examining a short-course for “disadvantaged” tertiary students
Volume 6 Number 2 September 2007
Robyn Henderson (Faculty of Education, University of Southern Queensland)
Elizabeth Hirst (Centre for Applied Language, Literacy & Communication Studies, Griffith University)
This paper revisits a successful short-course in academic literacy
that was conducted for 50 “disadvantaged” students enrolled in the
first year of an education degree at an Australian regional university
(see Hirst, Henderson, Allan, Bode & Kocatepe, 2004). Based on a
sociocultural approach to learning and drawing on a conceptualisation
of tertiary literacy as a social practice, the short-course disrupted
deficit views of individual students and worked to help students expand
their literate repertoires. However, recent discussions about learning
have helped to problematise academic literacy and its place within an
increasingly plural, multicultural, multilingual and textually
multimodal society (Gee, 2003, 2004; Kalantzis & Cope, 2004; The
New London Group, 1996). Rather than accepting academic literacy as the
metaphoric opening of a “significant gate to economic success and
sociopolitical power” (Gee, 2004, p. 91), recent views suggest that a
homogenisation is at work and that courses in academic literacy serve
to enculturate students into particular — and possibly outdated —
social and literacy practices. Gee (2004), for example, argues that
academic language represents a family of “old literacies” and that the
take-up of language “once thought to be central to what counted as a
‘schooled' and ‘intelligent' person is now at best a necessary, but not
sufficient condition for success in society” (p. 94). Drawing on
Gee's (2003, 2004, 2005) discussions of learning principles in
multi-mediated contexts, and his preference for the notion of affinity
spaces over communities of practice, this paper reframes academic
literacy, then considers whether the short-course described above —
which was judged as successful — has the potential to work with the
increasing diversity of tertiary students' learning and life
experiences as well as to prepare them for successful participation in
tertiary education contexts.