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Preface

This book focuses on the nexus of language, disciplinary content and knowledge communication specifically at taught post-graduate (TPG) or Masters level. It aims to consider this nexus from the perspective of the multiple actors who are enmeshed in the consequences of the economic, cultural and ideological forces of Higher Education’s current push for internationalisation. In addressing this interplay, I suggest the need for a greater synergy between language and content experts. I also suggest that change needs to be implemented through policy rather than on an ad hoc basis by individual teachers and that this involves a change to institutional educational and academic cultures. Therefore, it is a call to action for English for Academic practitioners to find a way out of the silo of their own centres and work to assert influence over the wider context in which they work.

The book emerged as the result of a scholarship project that was funded by the Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence (LITE). The focus of the project was around exploring the significant roles language plays in shaping discipline specific knowledge and understanding. The specific ‘research’ question then became: How do taught postgraduate tutors and students experience the intersection of language and disciplinary knowledge communication. What impact does this have on their identity?

As an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) practitioner ‘operating on the edge of Academia’ (Ding & Bruce, 2017) the time and space to engage in scholarship around teaching and learning afforded by a Fellowship in LITE was an unprecedented opportunity. It enabled me to investigate questions that had troubled both myself and my colleagues for several years and to move from a place of guessing and knowing experientially to being able to gather evidence and a deeper understanding of what EAP should, or at least could, look like within my own context. It also placed me in the often uncomfortable position of being a somewhat accidental scholar, finding myself drawn into a different field of academic endeavour whilst trying to maintain my own strong identity as an EAP teacher.

This is a book that begins and ends, therefore, in practice. The focus throughout is on the practice of teaching and learning, on understanding the barriers and enablers to that practice within a particular context. Any theorising around this works to feed into future practice within the same context but can also be extended out from the specific to the general. As such, the outline of the project and introduction of the case study and participants comes prior to any theoretical review. I draw on multiple theories to then help explain the themes I see arising from the data and understand how this might be usefully used to impact on future teaching and learning practices. EAP practice, by its very nature, crosses numerous disciplinary and theoretical thresholds, depending to some extent on the students we are working with. By necessity, then, the EAP practitioner needs to have a broad working knowledge of a range of epistemological and ontological paradigms. Some of this is to enhance, develop and explain our own practice; some is to enable us to work within and across the disciplines of our students with a degree of confidence. This is what makes our work both challenging but endlessly fascinating. It is what makes our work shift from an epistemological to a praxiographic reality in which our knowledge becomes practically enacted in our interactions with students and colleagues.

As an EAP practitioner, the main theories I draw on as I work to understand the role that language plays in the taught postgraduate curriculum are from the broad field of language teaching and Applied Linguistics. I thus view some of the data through the lens of genre and discourse analysis, of Academic Literacies and Critical EAP. However, I extend beyond EAP, and consider whether the issues raised can be understood in terms of Threshold Concepts (Meyer & Land, 2003, 2005) and of curriculum design more broadly. I also draw on sociological theories of structure, identity and agency, considering the power structures and their impact on the social, cultural and intellectual spheres through a Critical Realist lens. In this way I hope to establish a symbiotic relationship between practice and theory that provides explanatory power rather than working to frame evidence within one theoretical framework and then suggest the implications for practice.

By making this project public, I am aiming to meet Shulman’s definition of scholarship of learning and teaching that we

develop a scholarship of teaching when our work as teachers becomes public, peer-reviewed and critiqued. And exchanged with members of our professional communities so they, in turn, can build on our work. (Shulman, 2000: 49)

While the project I draw on for this book was on a larger scale than many other scholarship of teaching and learning projects, which tend to focus on questions local to an individual practitioner’s teaching, I am not making any claims that the experiences I outline or conclusions I draw here are fully generalisable beyond the participants and situations involved. However, I do hope that readers will be able to relate to and recognise similar experiences and patterns within their own educational context, and then make slightly better-informed decisions as to what to do in their own teaching and learning practices and that these local experiences will have global resonance. I also hope that those involved in curricular and policy decisions might also be able to draw some value from the heuristic for a language embedded curriculum that I propose (see Figure 1 here and discussed in detail in Chapter 7). This heuristic also provides some organisational logic for the rest of the book.

Figure 1 A heuristic for a language connected curriculum

Organisation of the Book

This book is primarily for EAP practitioners. However, it is also aimed at others who work in Higher Education and have an interest in teaching and supporting international students. As it focuses on the taught post-graduate curriculum within the United Kingdom, it will be of most obvious relevance to those working within this context and teaching that level of students. However, my intention is that many of the questions raised and issues discussed will resonate with and can be applied to those teaching in other contexts and at other levels of study. At the end of most chapters, as part of the conclusion, I include a short summary that draws out the ‘practical lessons learned’ from the ground covered within each chapter. My final chapter also focuses on recommendations for policy and practice development at both institutional and local level. These, I suggest, are where EAP practice should position itself and work with university leadership to effect real change to teaching and learning in Higher Education.

The introduction to this book defines the conceptual and contextual parameters around which the rest of the book is built – considering what is meant by inclusive education and internationalisation in Higher Education, and how the work of English for Academic Purposes currently sits within this context. I then aim to provide a purposeful progression from specific to general; local to global throughout the rest of the book. In this way my own contextualised project becomes relevant to wider Higher Education practices.

Chapter 1 should be of interest to those who are developing their own scholarship project. As Ding and Bruce (2017) have already argued, scholarship is key to establishing a more equal status for EAP within the academy. In this Chapter I describe my own accidental and messy journey into the Scholarship of Learning and Teaching (SoTL), positioning myself and my work within a developing definition of SoTL. I focus on the complex ethical considerations that a SoTL project requires as well as the professional difficulties and benefits and institutional gains that arise from SoTL work. The methodological process is also described, positioning the project and the participants within a Critical Realist paradigm of methodological pluralism (Porpora, 2015).

The following four chapters provide a rich and complex portrait of the interweaving factors and themes that rhizomatically or interconnectedly create the experience of those involved in learning and teaching on a taught post-graduate programme. Each section begins with a brief focus on an (eclectic) theoretical theme, which then provides the basis for analysis of the data, practice and literature in order to demonstrate how they are consecutively interconnected and disparate. Building on expressions of identity, agency, temporality and trust, I consider how language is then perceived, understood, learned and taught as part of the curriculum, drawing on a range of theories and concepts to describe a structure that is undergoing elaboration as a diversified population interact within it.

In Chapter 6 I move towards a focus on English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and the role that EAP practitioners currently, and possibly could, play in supporting a more language aware TPG curriculum.

In Chapter 7 I present a heuristic that draws together the rhizomatic threads and can be used when considering where language might impact on the TPG experience for all those involved.

Finally, I suggest that it is only through strategic change and institutional policy that is then supported in practice that the required change to conceptions of language within the content curriculum can take place. I outline the various aspects of policy that need to be considered and make some suggestions for developing local practice in order to enable the development of a more inclusive, language-connected curriculum. It is here that EAP practitioners really need to begin to move beyond their teaching centres and establish networks and spheres of influence; in this way they will go further towards ‘shortening the gap between what (EAP) is and what ought to be’ (Ding, 2016: 13)