Project Investigator(s): Jaclyn Rea, Senior Instructor, Arts Studies in Research and Writing; Kate Power, Instructor, Arts Studies in Research and Writing
Project Description
This project develops and tests a mechanism for exploring student attitudes towards academic writing, with a view to adding an affective dimension to evidence-based curriculum revision and professional development within Faculty of Arts first-year writing programs. The results of this research will help writing instructors better recognize and respond to barriers to student engagement and learning.
Research Questions
1. What are effective ways to evaluate student attitudes towards, and emotions about, academic writing?
2. What stories, and in what contexts, do students tell one another about academic writing programs and courses?
3. To what extent, and in what ways, do such stories signal and shape student attitudes towards and emotions about academic writing?
4. When discussing their own writing, what affective displays, if any, do students make?
5. How can the Faculty of Arts encourage engagement in its Writing Requirement courses by responding to student attitudes towards and emotions about academic writing?
Impact on teaching and learning at UBC
We believe this study has potential to change students’ attitudes to academic writing, by reframing WRDS 150 on the ASRW website, through Arts Advising, in classes (particularly during the first few weeks), and informally between students. We expect it will equip faculty more fully to:
• recognize and respect students’ affective relationships to academic writing;
• recognize that academic writing itself may assume affective relationships between writer and text
• incorporate class activities and assignments that help students articulate their attitudes more explicitly, and make shifts where needed.
• Incorporate class activities and assignments that tease out possible affective dimensions of research writing genres
This project will not only contribute to lasting curricular changes, but also has the potential to generate more positive representations of WRDS 150 through various communication channels, including informally among students. Indeed, we also believe that – when its findings are shared across UBC – this study could foster greater faculty understanding of, and curricular responses to, students’ affective approaches to other required courses.