Opening up The Curriculum: Moving from The Normative to The Transformative in Teachers' Understandings of Disciplinary Literacy Practices

What counts as disciplinary literacy instructional approaches in teacher education?

“…There are two approaches to disciplinary literacy instruction, namely normative and transformative (Jacobs 2016). From the literature, it would appear that the approaches are rarely applied in understanding the preparation practices of student teachers for disciplinary literacies instruction.…”

“…The transformative approach provides a useful epistemological context to alternative strategies for framing disciplinary literacy. Jacobs (2016) states that there is a need to reorient the discussion on literacies from a focus on the mere academic socialisation of students to a transformative approach 'where the literacy practices of disciplines might be critiqued and contested'. (140).…”

“…This approach allows us to see literacies development as a dialogic interplay of content, students, cultural norms, social practices and institutional ethos. This means that there is a need to understand the institutional discourses and how they are moulded and interpreted through transforming the situated ways of knowing (Jacobs 2016). This suggests that disciplinary literacies cannot be thought of as a phenomenon that is fixed; rather, they should be regarded as unstable as a result of what students bring to the learning environment and how they interact and reconstruct valued forms of knowledge in their field.…”

“…Realising the nuanced nature of literacy, academia has in recent years refocused the debate on academic literacy from being a mere medium of communication to an emphasis on dialogic classroom activities performed using discursive practices specific to the target knowledge area so that students are provided with the most effective platform for constructing meaning (Clarance & Mckenna 2017;Jacobs 2016). Boughey and McKenna (2016) indicate that language is a debatable issue in institutions of higher learning.…”

Textography as a needs analysis and research tool for English for Academic Purposes and learning development practitioners

“…However, much of the focus was on journal articles and other texts by academics with a notable absence of texts from students (Swales, 1998). This would seem to perpetuate the deficit model, in which the academics are experts and students are novices, and journal articles are writing models for students to emulate ( Lillis and Scott, 2007;Jacobs, 2015;Lillis et al, 2015;Lillis and Tuck, 2016;). Other textographies focussed more on texts for and by students rather than academics within the context.…”