Gartland, Sarah;
(2023)
Diligent student, caring practitioner or expert scientist? How context and identity influence writing practices on a postgraduate health sciences programme.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
The expansion of the UK higher education sector over recent decades has led to greater diversity in terms of educational and linguistic backgrounds, resulting in a ‘deficit’ view of some students in terms of academic writing. However, this view has been challenged by work in New Literacy Studies which regards literacy as socially-situated practice. Research into Academic Literacies has taken an ethnographic view of writers’ identities and life experiences, focused predominantly on the undergraduate experience. However, somewhat less attention has been paid to Masters students, particularly those from professional or vocational backgrounds. This thesis presents a small-scale qualitative study exploring how students on a Health Sciences master’s programme at a post-1992 university in the South-East of England approached the writing of a critical scientific review article for a named journal as part of their module assessment. This study investigates factors in the participants’ context which influence their approach to writing a review article, leading to the following research questions: • How does context influence the student participants’ approach to the writing of a critical review article, particularly their expression of critical evaluation? • How do participants negotiate the tension between writing (in theory) for an academic journal whilst (in practice) producing an assessed piece of work for their lecturer? • What identity positions do participants construct for themselves in the interviews and in their writing? • What are the lecturers’ perspectives on the students’ execution of the review article assignment? An ethnographically oriented approach was employed, using observations, collection of documents, including the module handbook, Powerpoint presentations, and assignment drafts, and semi-structured interviews with students and Health Sciences lecturers. The conclusions explore the complexities of students’ identities, previous practitioner contexts, and how these influence the writing process. The conclusions raise critical questions about writing task ‘authenticity’, genre, and audience, ending with recommendations for practice.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Diligent student, caring practitioner or expert scientist? How context and identity influence writing practices on a postgraduate health sciences programme |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2023. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10165230 |
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