| Description: |
This presentation reports on the process of developing and implementing a workshop series for PhD students at the Academic Resource Centre, Umeå University, launched for the first time during the spring term 2017. Adopting an academic literacies model (Lea & Street, 1998, 2006) as the framework for the course's underlying principles, its design and instruction, we propose that literacy in a university setting and especially at doctoral level can be understood not only as the individual, transferable cognitive skills of writing and reading. Rather, it is an interrelated, dynamic, and situated set of knowledge, skills, and personal attributes that support PhD students to acculturate themselves into their disciplinary discourses, as well as the academic community and wider social contexts. Lea and Street's (2006) academic literacies model draws from both the surface features of language form (the study skills model) and students' acculturation into a disciplinary and subject area community (the academic socialisation model). However, the academic literacies model moves beyond the academic socialisation model by considering social processes (such as power, identity, and authority). This model has been used in different higher education contexts, enabling the conceptualising and reconceptualising of the knowledge students should learn and do with regards to academic writing and reading (e.g. Wingate, 2012; Castanheira, Street, & Carvalho, 2015; Guzmán-Simón, García-Jiménez, & López-Cobo, 2017). In the particular setting of Umeå University, the Academic Resource Centre, University Library is the unit who provides academic support to students at all levels, including PhD students. From our experience as academic tutors, academic librarians and researchers working with the University's doctoral students, we were able to identify their need for support not only with thesis texts written in English but also a range of capabilities such as article reading, research communicating, information searching, and ... |