Writing in LD

Canton argues that writing is crucial in HE as a learning and assessment tool. Learning Developers teach students how to use writing for learning purposes. This chapter advocates for a conceptual approach that considers writing as a social interaction and cognitive process. As outsiders to many of the disciples their students study, Learning Developers must navigate academic discourses and teach how rather than what, using examples which are applicable to specific disciplinary practices.

This opinion piece utilises the authors’ scholarship journeys to inspire others to write. The authors view scholarship as a vehicle which can enable those in third space roles to contribute to the theoretical and epistemological foundations of their praxis. Such contributions can in turn offer practitioners higher levels of institutional and professional visibility. The authors finish the article with a call to action, to encourage others operating across boundaries to engage with scholarly endeavours in their respective professions.

The chapter discusses LD as a hybrid profession in HE. Due to their professional hybridity, Learning Developers’ involvement in scholarship is limited and more often than not, not contractually prescribed. The chapter presents an LD Scholarship Manifesto, developed collaboratively with the LD community, to outline LD scholarship’s distinctive features and encourage more Learning Developers to expand the field’s knowledge base.

This article uses conversation analysis of 17 one-to-one writing tutorials to explore how learning development happens in practice. The analysis revealed a 3 part structure to writing tutorials, as well as specific techniques to highlight problems with writing to develop students’ skills and autonomy. The findings from this article have been used in a number of training initiatives across the LD community, to help practitioners reflect on their one-to-one practice.

This book review provides an overview of What Makes Writing Academic: Rethinking Theory for Practice by Julia Molinari (2022). Molinari’s purpose for writing the book, as she says herself, was: (1) to provide students, teachers and supervisors with reasons (and a license) to re-imagine academic texts; (2) to extend established academic writing scholarship by introducing critical realism as a conceptual framework for justifying plural, democratized, multimodal, diverse and inclusive forms of academic writing; and (3) to develop a philosophy of change that lays a foundation for diversifying writing pedagogies.

Taking an autoethnographic approach, the authors seek to encourage more learning developers to engage in the process of writing in order to co-create the field of learning development. Whilst acknowledging the particular complexities of writing within learning development, they take a perspective that writing can act as liberatory practice – liberation from self-explanation, self-justification and self-doubt. The authors argue that seeing writing as a form of liberatory practice helps reduce the fear around writing, gives practitioners the courage to publish and gives learning developers the freedom to shape the future of their field.