Discourse of transparency

I’m fully immersed in the academic literacies research perspective. Interestingly, I’ve always professed to take an academic literacies perspective, but in recent weeks when confronted by other academic literacies researchers or when in context where the issue of writing in HE was discussed, I didn’t really feel as if I understood or even represented this research perspective. I’ve been reading around the area of writing or academic writing in HE. Mainly because this is the area in which most academic literacies work is located. I’m wanting to see if concepts relevant to writing in HE can be used to understand academic literacy practices in vocational contexts where the written text isn’t the main assessment outcome. So I’ve been looking at notions of learning, meaning making and of course how writing is a means whereby learning and meaning making is mediated or expressed within the university. I’m starting to understand the academic literacies field and I think the diagram I uploaded last week helps to visually illustrate my understanding.

I was struck of course by how ideologically located academic writing is – the many assumptions which underpin particular notions of academic writing – what many researcher in the field refer to as the ‘discourse of transparency’ – the idea that there is a common sense understanding about what constitutes good academic writing, and that typical markers of good academic writing like, structure, clarity, logic of the argument, acknowledgement of sources, correct grammar, are implicit and something which anyone who can read and write English should be able to understand and master. In fact there is nothing implicit about academic writing – for most part these ‘universal’ academic writing conventions are actually located in another socio-historical period where rationalist and empiricist epistemologies reinforced a particular rhetorical ordering. There is also an expectation that students, even though entering university for the first time, should have a grasp of these rhetorical features, which more often than not, are subjected to further stylistic ordering at the hands of individual lecturers (or disciplines) who impose idiosyncratic norms and standard to create their own version of what constitutes ‘appropriate academic language’. So someone new to higher education might be rather overwhelmed when trying to understand and apply these apparent transparent and neutral academic writing conventions, which for many lecturers has probably taken them years to learn anyway.

And this is the point of academic literacies research – the critique of these very taken for granted, seemingly transparent and value free academic conventions – problematising them, questioning the ideological, socio-cultural and historical base of practices that of valued and unpacking the very real power dynamics at play when one convention is held to be more valued than another.

I was reminded, almost ashamedly, of my role in the practice of berating my poor students as being pathetic writers and dishing out, often in rather pejorative ways, this discourse of transparency. I remember doing class after class on how to write an introduction or how to reference – saying how simple it is “all you need to remember is AUTHOR, YEAR:PAGE NUMBER” as if this was a normal, internalised something all students had been told since primary school and everyone in their household was doing. If I was honest now – I adopted this strategy because it was easier to assign the problem to the disempowered student, than acknowledge that the system isn’t really there to accept everyone into its fold. And not only does the problem reside with this big, bad, faceless system – but I was part and parcel of validating that system – and therefore not welcoming anyone not already familiar with norms and conventions valued. Now that I am confronted as a student with this same discourse of transparency, while feeling the outsider, the complexity and almost complete subjectivity associated with the act of writing within the academic context (and of course different academic contexts, demand different norms and values) has become all the more tangible.