Project Technical Data |
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Problematizing Academic Literacies |
Academic literacies, particularly academic writing, have always been complex endeavors. All of us who do this and participate in this process understand it. However, there is one particular circumstance that adds extra challenges for novice academic writers: the lack of knowledge about the social conventions and practices (Bourdieu, 1990) of academic literacies (Lea & Street, 2006; McKinley, 2015; Street, 2015) as a field (Bourdieu, 1993). Although these social conventions and practices are to an extent obvious to those who have long navigated the field or have access to these knowledge networks (Brammer, 2002; Brook, 2012; Ivanič, 1998), they remain either partially or completely foreign to junior scholars, particularly undergraduate (Pineteh, 2013) and graduate students (Holmes, et al., 2018).
When we look at academic writers who are also, as is the case of this study, mastering academic literacies in English as their second language, these novice scholars have the dual challenge of learning the social conventions of the language itself and the academic communities in which they will participate (Al-Zubaidi, 2012; Tran, 2014). A great deal of instructional practices in second-language writing instruction in schools and higher education seem to focus on the mechanical aspects of writing but overlook the social and organizational elements that are also part of academic literacies. Therefore, we need to create mentoring and support spaces and practices where these junior scholars can appropriate (Engeström, 1999; Grossman, Smagorinsky, & Valencia, 1999; Kain & Wardle, 2014) these academic literacies and their social practices, thus improving their craft as academic writers and scholars. |
Micro-Writing as an Option |
As a way to address the need to learn about the social elements germane to academic literacies, our research lab in Colombia has expanded some ideas about micro-writing in the literature (e.g., Parks, 2021; He & Yang, 2015) as the basis for creating our own web-based publication. The publication serves both as a learning exercise for our junior researchers to improve their academic writing and as a conceptual base that can later support our students’ terminal work and our publications.
This project looks at how the micro-writing experience affected the longer publications and how it helped our researchers improve their writing and overall academic literacy, or as the title suggests, how they "crack the codes." It also shares the lessons our team learned to show other ways to help scholars doing academic work in a second language (Mora, 2013) better understand the social aspects of these academic communities and how to better translate (Mora, 2016) these to our local settings in schools and teacher education programs. |
Micro-Writing as a Conceptual Framework |
The idea of micro-writing has to do with creating small-scale writing exercises that can be applicable to larger writing endeavors or genres (Parks, 2021; He & Yang, 2015). From this initial idea, small-scale yet applicable, we proposed a three-pronged framework to think about the process of academic literacies, in our specific case, when helping scholars writing in their second language master these social conventions and processes. The graphic below shows our initial visualization of what this framework might look like
Graphic visualization from Mora, Tobón-Gallego, Robles-Ortiz, & Gómez-Ramírez (2023)
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Our Research Materials |
We have two main data sets for this study. The larger data set for this study includes our micro-writing publication and all the terminal work and publications our research lab has published between 2014 and 2022. To analyze this data set, we used CDA as a form of textual archaeology (Dressman & Webster, 2001), where we traced all the references to the micro-writing exercises in the larger manuscripts. Our goal was to see how the ideas in the smaller text influenced the larger ones and how micro-writing provides a sense of progression as one moves from smaller to larger texts.
The second data set is focusing on the ongoing work from Andrés, Nathalia, Tatiana, and Shara. This particular set included their micro-writing exercises, their terminal works, and other writing we are developing. For this data set , we are using autoethnographic (Mora, 2021) and diaethnographic (Golovátina-Mora, MacLeod, & MacLeod, 2023; Mora & Chiquito-Gómez, 2024; Mora & Golovátina-Mora, 2024) notes and conversations. We will frame the analysis of the auto- and duoethnographic data sets around conceptual and practical appropriation and understanding of social conventions related to academic literacies. |
Academic Presentations and Publications
Raúl presenting a poster at the WRAB Conference in Trondheim (2023)
Andrés and Tatiana presenting at ASOCOPI 58 in Medellín
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Although the project is still in motion, we have managed to present our work at different international events
2023
In addition to these conferences, we have presented our research to research groups and faculty at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the University of West Bohemia. |