Sutton, P (2011) Re-Crafting an Academic Literacies Approach To Pedagogic Communication in HE, published in Learning and Teaching: The International Journal Of Higher Education in the Social Sciences,4(2): 45-61.

Re-Crafting an Academic Literacies Approach To Pedagogic Communication in HE.

“To reduce the pedagogic relation to a purely communicative relation would make it impossible to account for the specific characteristics it owes to the authority of the pedagogic institution” (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990:108-109).

Abstract

My concern in this paper is the often problematic communicative relationship between learners and teachers in Higher Education, particularly as manifested in assessment and feedback. I begin from an Academic Literacies approach that positions pedagogic communication in HE as requiring learners to acquire a complex set of literacy skills and abilities within specific discursive and institutional contexts. Whilst acknowledging the institutional dimension of academic literacy, I argue, this approaches tends to underestimate its significance. This shortcoming can begin to be addressed through the incorporation of aspects of the work of Bourdieu and colleagues. Considering student speaking and writing as genres of communication powerfully constrained by the authority of pedagogic institutions, I contend, can enhance our understanding of the problems experienced by learners in acquiring academic literacy. Using Bourdieu to re-craft an Academic Literacies approach to pedagogic communication, I argue, opens up possibilities for creating a pedagogy ‘in’ and ‘for’ itself: a pedagogy conscious of its reproductive function in the culture of the new capitalismbut able to provide both learners and teachers with critical hope.

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Key Words: learning and teaching, communication, Bourdieu, pedagogy of critical hope.

Introduction

My interest in the Academic Literacies approach to pedagogy in Higher Education (henceforward HE) developed during a C-SAP funded research project “A Comparative study of assessment and feedback practices in two sociology providers”. The research consisted of twenty one student and 8 staff semi-structured interviews from two HEI’s carried out during the 2008/2009 academic year. In this research assessment was construed as a genre of communication. An Academic Literacies approach (hereafter AcLit), as developed in the work of Lea, and Street and (Lea and Street 1998, Lea 2004, Street 2004), that positions academic speaking and writing as a particular form of literacy which must be acquired within specific discursive and institutional contexts was used to frame the production and interpretation of the research data. As the research progressed, it became apparent that the work of Pierre Bourdieu, on institutional authority and pedagogic communication, could make avaluable contribution to strengthening an AcLit approach to pedagogy in HE. In this paper I will first outline the AcLit approach. I will then discuss the ways in which aspects of Bourdieu’s work on pedagogic communication can broaden and deepenour understanding of the institutional constraints upon pedagogiccommunication and the acquisition of academic literacy.

Academic Literacies Approaches to Pedagogy in HE

AcLit approaches to pedagogy in HE emerged from the broader New Literacies Studies (henceforward NLS) (Gee 1990). NLS problematises the idea that general literacy is a simple technical skill: the ability to read and write. Rather, it is a social practice enmeshed in complex relations of power and

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authority (Street 2003). Influenced by the work of Bakhtin and Foucault, NLS conceptualizes literacy as a complex set of social practices powerfully shaped by wider social and cultural forces (Barton et al 2000, Street 2003). As Street (2003) observes, the work of Bourdieu is used in NLS research to explore the how social-historical forces shape “linguistic habitus”. However, what is referred to as “Bourdieu’s theory”, presumably the Theoryof Practice, is then rather prematurely written off by Street as too limited. It is alleged that Bourdieu tends to underestimate the ways in which cultural practices and artifacts act to re-shape the habitus. This is a contentious claim, but one which I do not wish to explore here. What is of more pressing concern to me is that the perceived shortcomings in Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus seem to have occluded the potential of his work on pedagogic communication (explored below) to contribute to NLS in general and AcLit in particular.

AcLit approaches build upon the NLS approach developing the insights that the concepts and practices of literacy are not autonomous from the contexts and cultures in which literacies emerge. Rather, literacies are complex and diverse and are alwaysunderpinned with ideological assumptions. Street’s (2003:77) worktherefore develops an “ideological” rather than an “autonomous” model of literacy. In this model literacy is embedded in: “epistemological principles”; “conceptions of knowledge, identityand being”; “job markets”; and “educational contexts” (Street 2003:78). AcLit approaches deploy the insights of NLS within the specific context of higher education.

The seminal paper in the emergence of AcLit was published by Lea and Street (1998). In this paper the authors argue that an academic literacies perspective attempts to overcome the shortcomings of what they identify as the two other common perspectives in educational research: the study skills, and academic socialization perspectives.

The study skills perspective positions academic literacy in HE asa set of discrete technical and instrumental skills which students must master. This perspective construes problems in student learning as caused by individual skills deficits thereby

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pathologizing students as deficient. The cure for this deficiencylies in students improving their language skills - grammar and spelling etc., and their organizational skills – their ability toconstruct effective introductions, conclusions, and the staging of arguments etc. A consultation, or series of consultations, with an academic study skills advisor can therefore fix technicalproblems students experience in their assessments.

As Lea and Street (1998) argue, the reductionism of the study skills perspective is overcome, in part, in the academic socialization perspective. This perspective positions student learning as part of a broader process of acculturation to the norms and values of academic thinking, reading and writing. Problems in students’ reading and writing emerge from a failure to acquire the culturally appropriate ‘deep’ approach to learning. Those students who become stuck in ‘strategic’ or ‘surface’ approaches are therefore inadequately socialized into academic culture. Becoming more deeply immersed in academic culture (by reading and writing more) will enable students to acquire the correct deep orientation to their assessments.

This perspective also has its limitations. It is premised upon the assumption that academic institutions contain one homogenous culture rather than a constellation of disciplinary, departmentaland administrative cultures. Thus acculturation is a complex ongoing process. Furthermore, the academic socialization approachdoes not explicitly theorize the micro and macro power relations which structure student speaking, reading, and writing; for example the asymmetries of power which exist between academic managers and tutors, and tutors and students.

An AcLit approach both incorporates and transcends the study skills and academic socialization approaches by offering a more comprehensive theorization of student reading and writing in higher education (Lea and Street 1998). AcLit maintains that acquiring academic literacy is a complex process which not only requires students to master new technical skills and adapt to newcultures of learning and teaching, but, crucially, develop new modes of being, making sense of their worlds and themselves, and ways of acting. Drawing upon the work of Barnett and Coate

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(2005), we can say that learning to speak, read and write in academic institutions involves a complex set of ontological, epistemological and practical demands which, unsurprisingly, somestudents experience as problematic.

The problems experienced by students attempting to acquire academic literacy, therefore, are not construed as simply studyskills deficits, or a failure to become adequately socialized into the norms and practices of academic culture. Rather, problems are construed as emerging from the diverse epistemological assumptions of different academic disciplines; tutors’ expectations concerning the nature, representation and organization of knowledge; the relationships between staff and students; staff and student identities; and wider institutional practices, for example, the atomization of knowledge through modularization and the standardization of learning and teaching practice through the demands of quality assurance procedures. Theacquisition of academic literacy, then, has both macro-social andmicro-social dimensions, and takes place upon contested terrains.

From an AcLit perspective, student problems with learning and teaching HE emerge from different staff and student ‘expectations’ and ‘interpretations’ (Lea and Street 1998:157, Street 2004:15), and from the institutional context in which learning and teaching take place. As Lea and Street (1998:159) argue, an AcLit approach ‘views the institutions in which academic practices take place as constituted in, and as sites of discourse and power.’ It s my contention, however, that in the AcLit approach the discursive, particularly the textual tends to overshadow the institutional. The institutional, though acknowledged in the AcLit literature, is often not adequately accounted for. This shortcoming is evident in more recent work onlecturers’ writing practice in the university (see Lea and Stierer 2009).

This hiatus can begin to be filled by the incorporation of insights from Bourdieu’s work on the social dimensions of pedagogic authority and pedagogic communication. As Bourdieu and Passeron (1994:35) state:

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Our concern was to understand and to explain the nature of communication between university teachers and their students – a social phenomenon marked by specific institutional constraints and traditions.

Institutional Constraints upon Academic Literacy

For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on relevant aspects of two texts: Bourdieu et al (1965/1994) Academic Discourse, Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power and Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1970/1990) Reproduction in Education Society and Culture . I am mindful ofthe need to adapt these texts to make them resonate with a different cultural context and a different epoch. Whereas this could be considered a deformation of Bourdieu I think it is consistent with the ethos of his work, that is, to use Bourdieu to go beyond Bourdieu, and to use his work as a set of “thinkingtools” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) which can be used to develop an AcLit approach.

Both Academic Discourse, and Reproduction in Education Society and Culture investigate the ways in which pedagogic communication in universities is shaped by class, culture and institutional power relations. Bourdieu acknowledges the connection of these two texts. The latter, he states, completes the empirical work of theformer by providing “an explicit theory of pedagogic authority asthe social condition of possibility of the relationship of pedagogic communication” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990:130-131 endnote 1). Crucially, pedagogic authority is invested in teachers by virtue of the position they occupy within academic institutions. Communication between teacher and learner is dependent upon “the institutional ends, towards which, objectively, the academic system works” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990: 96).

These texts are also unified by a sartorial metaphor: language isthe uniform or badge of pedagogic authority. This is referred to by Bourdieu et al (1994:3) as “the academic livery of the word” and by Bourdieu and Passeron (1990:125) as “the livery of the

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Word”. It is argued that just as the status and authority of magistrates, cooks, hairdressers, waiters and nurses are signified by their clothing, that of university teachers is signified by institutionally sanctioned modes of language use.

Bourdieu’s use of the term ‘livery’ evokes associations of Universities as academic guilds or livery companies. In England from about the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, the guilds, orCity Livery Companies as they were known in London, had been involved with the organization of craft production. Guilds had a virtual monopoly over their respective crafts through their powerto compel craftsmen to become members through the regulation of the number of apprenticeships and by regulating working conditions. By 1750 the demographic and spatial expansion of London had made the regulation of trade by the Livery Companies impossible. Gradually their economic power and authority declined. Eventually all the Livery Companies would become philanthropic and educational trusts and conduits to local and national political power (Sutton 1994).

The metaphor of the livery of the word then signifies a particular form of institutionally sanctioned pedagogic authoritymade manifest in a particular style of communication. Particular forms of language use clothes university teachers with symbolic authority (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990:125). Indeed, the semantic and syntactical fashion in which teachers communicate functions “to dazzle rather than to enlighten” (Bourdieu et al 1994:3) and to distance teacher from learner. This results in a breakdown in the effectiveness of pedagogic communication in terms of both thequantity and quality of knowledge delivered.

In short, Bourdieu et al (1994:4) state that academic institutions sanction particular forms of language and language use and that this significantly impairs both learning and teaching. Whilst this echoes the AcLit position that problems in acquiring academic literacy reside in the character of academic discourse, it goes further in its explicit acknowledgement of theinstitutional dimension of that discourse. The objective ends of the university system are the “social function of conservation” and the “ideological function of legitimation” (Bourdieu et al

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1990:102). This results in students using a “rhetoric of despair”due to misunderstanding “the code” in which knowledge is transmitted. A “linguistic gap” between learner and teacher then emerges exacerbated by a professorial “ideology of student incapacity”. It is to these matters that I now turn.

The rhetoric of despair

Bourdieu argues that students misunderstand the technical languages used in various university disciplines, but accept their own misunderstanding with resignation. Students also use university language in ritualized ways. In assessments academic discourse is mimicked, caricatured, simplified and corrupted in amanner akin to the creolization of language. Understanding and use of academic discourse is partial and unskilled resulting in ineffective student writing. Assessments are characterised by “a rhetoric of despair” (Bourdieu et al 1994:4). Students make desperateattempts to write as if they have understood and mastered academic language. Use of this rhetoric offers students a degree of reassurance that they have mastered academic speaking and writing. However this use of academic discourse is ritualistic and manifests a hollow performativity. Assessments become an exercise of mimetic magic: “Essay-writing rhetoric at its lowest level turns to magic to exorcise error” (Baudelot 1994:87).

Performance in assessments is underpinned by a “prophylactic logic” that protects students from “the anxiety generated by a teaching relationship in which the possibility of acquiring technical mastery has been denied” (Bourdieu et al 1994: 20). University teachers deny their students mastery of academic language by addressing themselves not to real students but to ‘fictive subjects’ (Bourdieu et al 1994:16): ideal students who understand what is being communicated without being told and without loss or distortion of knowledge. For Bourdieu such a pedagogical relationship is inevitable. Its inevitability is generated by the institutional culture in which pedagogical

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communication takes place. Universities validate a particular type of language use: the formal, detached, measured, and intellectual. Students are expected to master this style of communication without it being explicitly defined or demonstrated. Furthermore, they are expected to do so without being given progressively more skilled opportunities to develop the correct style. They are simply expected to absorb and reproduce academic language and practice through acculturation. Here homologies with the AcLit critique of the academic socialization model of learning and teaching are obvious.

The code of transmission

In addition to addressing fictional not real subjects, universityteachers also deny their students technical mastery of academic discourse through coding knowledge in peculiar and inaccessible ways. Academic literacy problems emerge because students misunderstand “the code of transmission used to convey a particular body of knowledge” (Bourdieu et al 1990:126). Teachers do not make this code explicit, provide clear guidance on how to minimize “code mistakes” (Bourdieu et al 1990:126); anddo not give students opportunities to practice decoding academic discourse. Little wonder then that a ‘deep’ approach to learning is not acquired and that many students are condemned to learn in strategic and surface ways. Furthermore, learning and teaching isenmeshed in the institution of a particular form of pedagogic authority that dazzles and alienates rather than enlightens students. Hence, all but a privileged few are precluded from mastering disciplinary knowledge and from becoming autonomous learners. Pedagogic authority as manifest in the code of transmission engenders what Sennett (2006:58) refers to as “a complex social process of dependency” .

For Bourdieu, the code or style of knowledge transmission positions both teachers and students in a particular relation to language and culture. This relation is significantly shaped by the social need to reproduce dominant cultures. Language does notsimply provide “a collection of words” but a grammar or set of

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linguistic rules which furnish us with “a system of transposable mental dispositions” (Bourdieu & Passeron 1994: 8). Bourdieu would later call this the habitus. Those students from middle class families will possess a more appropriate habitus, in part, because of “the complexity of language transmitted by the family”(Bourdieu et al 1990:73). Students’ social origins then bequeath to them not only a language, but also a disposition towards language and its value within social life.

Since Bourdieu and his colleagues published their work there havebeen significant changes in the way in which pedagogic authority is exercised, and the nature of pedagogic communication in highereducation. For example there has been an explosion of study skills advisors and facilities within the university. There has also been a proliferation of study skills texts which address problems in student learning. Assessment practices have also changed and become more transparent. For example, learning outcomes, grade descriptors and assessment criteria are routinelyprovided in module handbooks (although they maybe coded in ways which students often find inaccessible). Providing students withexemplar essays and exam answers, enabling students to submit drafts before final submission, identifying specific areas for improvement through feedback and making feedback more dialogic has significantly changed the nature of assessment.

With this progressive change in assessment practices, however, comes the danger of ‘teaching to the test’, of collapsing learning into assessment. As Ainley and Canaan (2005) argue, we must strike a balance between making the rules and norms of academic literacy transparent so that students can learn the tricks of the trade, and increasing student instrumentality towards learning.

The linguistic gap

The breakdown in pedagogic communication is not simply a failure of academic socialization, a misunderstanding of “the logic of

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acculturation” (Bourdieu et al 1990:111). Rather, the lack of communicative effectiveness lies in “the gap between the linguistic competences of transmitter and receiver”, and “the social conditions of the production and reproduction of that gap”(Bourdieu et al 1990:127). Once again this is homologous to AcLitapproaches which represent student difficulties in reading, writing and assessments as emerging from “the gaps between faculty expectations and student interpretations” (Street 2004:15). However, the incorporation of Bourdieu’s work into an AcLit approach enables us to have a clearer understanding of the social conditions which create the gap, particularly class and family background, and how these conditions shape linguistic competence.

Bourdieu argues that students’ capacity for receiving what pedagogic communication transmits is a function of the linguisticand cultural capital they command. These capitals are bequeathed to students, firstly, through their families and, secondly, through their schooling. Higher education only addresses those students who possess the right quantity and quality of these capitals and the know-how to invest them properly. The distinction between linguistic capital and cultural capital in Bourdieu’s work is not clear and the former seems to be a sub-category of the latter. Linguistic capital is constituted by legitimate styles of speech and writing; elaborate vocabulary andthe ability to use elaborate classification systems. Cultural capital consists of qualifications and appropriate cultural competencies, one of which must surely be linguistic competency.

Transposing Bourdieu into the current context of HE, the gap in linguistic competencies could also be considered to be produced by the different communicative worlds occupied by of learners andteachers. The former, digital natives inhabiting cultures of Facebook, MSN, and texting: a culture in which the appropriation of information from internet sources and the practice of cutting and pasting from such sources is ubiquitous. In such cultures communication is instant and visual. The latter, academic natives, inhabiting literary cultures of carefully crafted verbaland written communication. The cultural reference points of theseworlds may also diverge. Just as I was mystified by the classical

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Greek and Latin references which littered my university teachers’discourse, so too many of my students seem mystified by my references to Huxley and Orwell.

Other important social conditions which produce and reproduce thegap in linguistic competencies are student fees and the necessityfor many students to work to finance their studies. This results in less time to develop academic literacy (Cannan 2005, Ainsley and Cannan 2005). Such students although enrolled on full time courses are in effect part-time students (Gibbs 2006). The process of academic socialization therefore is less all encompassing, less intense than in previous generations. Being a student therefore, does not necessarily involve participation in a whole way of life, it is rather an aspect of a way of life.

The ideology of student incapacity

It would be fair to say that there is a growing recognition in HEthat failures in pedagogic communication are not simply caused bythe technical skills deficits of students as the study skills approach suggests. However, it is my contention that what Bourdieu et al (1990:111) call the ’professorial ideology of student incapacity’ has not disappeared but become re-inflected. With increasing numbers of non-traditional or widening participation students, who often do not come to university with much linguistic or cultural capital, this ideology is indeed undergoing something of a renaissance.

It is my contention that positioning widening participation student as fragile or vulnerable learners is a contemporary manifestation of this ideology and that it may lead to what Ecclestone and Hayes (2009) refer to as “therapeutic” HE. Drawingheavily on Furedi (2004), they chart the emergence of the tendency to position students as possessing “a diminished academic self” (Ecclestone and Hayes 2009:104). This is the condescending conception that students exist in a perpetual stateof anxiety and vulnerability. The result is that “the normal experiences of feeling ignorant and having to learn and then

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writing up work to be examined (also known as being a student) become potential emotional problems” (Ecclestone and Hayes 2009:88).

Thus, there is a growing tendency within HE to reframe the academic problems experienced by learners as emotional problems requiring therapeutic interventions by lecturers, student counselors, etc. Not only is contemporary academic culture socializing students into accepting a position of emotional vulnerability, which acts to undermine learner autonomy, it also tends to dissuade academics from challenging their students for fear of adding to their emotional traumas.

As Cannan (2005) argues non-traditional students, are easily pathologized as lacking. Helping students with fundamental problems with grammar and punctuation and ensuring that the increasing numbers of students with dyslexia and other specific learning difficulties are not disadvantaged by assessment tools can be onerous and time consuming tasks. Little wonder then that the ideology of student incapacity can be re-appropriated to blame such learners for imposing additional workloads on already overstretched lecturers.

A way to challenging the ideology of student incapacity is through teachers reflecting upon and developing the ways in whichthey assess students. Specifically, reflection upon the learning outcomes teachers require their students to achieve and the ways in which those outcomes are to be achieved (Cannan 2005). Thus, the form and content of assessments and associated feedback have to be adapted in ways which consciously re-align the expectationsof teachers and the interpretations of learners. This requires, Iwould argue, a clear understanding of the cultural context in which learning and teaching takes place.

Academic Literacy in the culture of the new capitalism

Bourdieus’ work not only alerts us to the importance of academic institutions in pedagogic communication but also their function of reproducing the culture of capitalism. However, since the

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publication of Academic Discourse and Reproduction in Education, Culture and Society there have been significant changes in the culture of capitalism. These changes are explored in the work of Sennett (2006).

Sennett’s work enables us to see that the acquisition of academicliteracy now takes place within institutions increasingly dominated by the need to demonstrate the vocational relevance of their programmes of study. This, I argue, implicitly encourages astrategic or instrumental approach to learning by both teacher and learner. Both then are complicit in the formation of pedagogic communication which is characterized by rhetorics of despair, code mistakes and linguistic gaps. This is because the form pedagogic communication takes is powerfully shaped by the logic of an HE system driven by the demands of cultural reproduction, the reproduction of what Sennett (2006) calls the culture of the new capitalism.

The new capitalism is founded upon short-term economic transactions and perpetually changing work tasks. The need for workers to be flexible and adapt to ever-changing conditions renders breadth and depth of knowledge and experience redundant. What is required in the flexible institutions of the new capitalism is just enough knowledge to achieve the task at hand before moving on to the next task. The pressure to produce results quickly enforces an approach to work characterized by skimming the surface rather than in depth engagement. This leads to a “hollowing out of ability” (Sennett 2006:127).

In the culture of the new capitalism the idea of ‘craftsmanship’ becomes an anachronism. Defined as a commitment to “doing something well for its own sake” (Sennett 2006:104), and good work done for its own sake (Sennett 2008), craftsmanship involvesskill, reflection and imagination developed over years. The short-termism of flexible capitalism, the need for quick results,precludes the development of craft skill and the artisanal culture through which it is sustained.

This culture, Sennett (2006:194) argues, has also colonized academic institutions: “The educational system which trains

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people for mobile work favours facility at the expense of diggingdeep.” The brave new world of mass HE which must be flexible enough to respond quickly to the demands of employers and the state militates against the ethos of doing something well for itsown sake. The strategic or instrumental approach of both learnersand teachers to assessment when considered in this context appears rational and coherent.

This said, present within Bourdieu’s work is the seed of an idea which hints at the possibility of cultivating a pedagogy which can perhaps begin to re-imagine pedagogic communication as a craft, as something worth doing for its own sake.

A Pedagogy ‘in’ and ‘for’ itself: cultivating critical hope.

Bourdieu argues that the rhetoric of despair, the code of transmission, the ideology of student incapacity, and the gap in linguistic competence all characterize traditional pedagogy. Traditional pedagogy is characterised by authoritarian styles of teaching, linguistic misunderstanding and a breakdown in the pedagogic relationship. This pedagogy Bourdieu (1990:128) describes as ‘a pedagogy in itself’ but does not explicate or develop this observation. It is to this task that I now turn.

I understand pedagogy ‘in’ itself through the well known distinction made by Marx in the Poverty Of Philosophy (1847) concerning the struggle to resist the domination of the bourgeoisie. Successful political struggle required the proletariat to unite and become both a class ‘in’ and ‘for’ itself (Bottomore and Rubel (1963). Class ‘in’ itself is the ascribed, objective dimension of class relations bequeathed to the proletariat by virtue of its position to the mode of production. Whether the proletariat realizes it or not, it is thesubjugated class. Class ‘for’ itself is the achieved subjective dimension of class. It occurs when the proletariat actually

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realizes and becomes collectively conscious of the appropriation of its’ labour power by the bourgeoisie, that is, their exploitation. Only when the proletariat becomes a class in and for itself can capitalism be consciously transformed.

A pedagogy ‘in’ itself, is the product of the objective position of the university workers within the social relations of academiccapitalism. Just as the proletariat unwittingly reproduces its subjugated position when it remains simply a class ‘in’ itself, so too university teachers, through enacting a pedagogy ‘in’ itself reproduce exploitative dominant cultural relations. Traditional pedagogy reproduces the kind of mobile, flexible workforce needed in the culture of the new capitalism.

Such an un-reflexive pedagogy institutes forms of learning and teaching that preclude both teachers and students from realizing the conservative and reproductive functions of HE. Through the stylized articulation of academic discourse, language ceases simply to communicate and instead becomes a way of making students submit to pedagogical authority.

Disappointingly, Bourdieu et al (1990) do not then discuss what apedagogy ‘for’ itself might be. Perhaps their pessimism as to thepotential to change pedagogy in HE prevents them from imagining this? I will now develop what I think this might look like, drawing on my understanding of related work on the notion of ‘assessment for leaning’.

Bachelor (2006) has some instructive observations on the locutionfor. The word for “indicates openness to the possibility of movement and development ... something to be done … a process to be activated” (Bachelor 2006:789). Thus, a pedagogy for itself isa form of praxis which is transformative, that changes pedagogic authority and communication in ways which empower both learner and teacher. A pedagogy for itself opens up possibilities for thekinds of academic dialogue which offer the promise of a new relationship to and use of academic language: new ways of being, knowing and doing. However, given the institutional context in which learning and teaching takes place, the potential for transformation can not be anything other than limited. The

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possibilities which are opened up are interstitial, are local andare mediated by the quality of the social relationships which exist between learner and teacher (Sutton and Gill 2010).

A pedagogy ‘for’ itself is a pedagogy committed to cultivating the craft of teaching well for its own sake, is committed to opening up possibilities for personal transformation. Conscious of its function within the reproduction of cultural relations, itendeavours to communicate knowledge in ways which seek to expose “the ruse of academic reason” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1994:125), that is, the way in which academic discourse disguises its reproductive functions. Such a pedagogy recognizes that the logic and strategy of academic assessment policy and practice is that of the reproduction of the culture of the new capitalism. Apedagogy for itself aspires toward a criticality which, whilst perhaps incapable of revolutionizing academic mode of production,can at least strive to reconfigure assessment practices in such away that the rhetoric of despair is displaced by a discourse of hope or what Cannan (2005) and Ainsley and Cannan (2005) call a pedagogy of critical hope.

Combing elements of Freirean and Gamscian pedagogy with an Academic Literacies approach, Cannan and Ainsley outline an approach to teaching and learning which is dialogic, situational and transformative. A pedagogy of hope positions learners as “active social agents from particular social groupings” (Cannan 2005:160). This student centered pedagogical approach pays due regard to both the form and content of subject knowledge. Students need explicit guidance concerning the norms and conventions of academic literacy within particular disciplines. They need guidance about what counts as valid knowledge and the ways in which that knowledge must be communicated. Thus, a pedagogy of critical hope must develop assessment strategies thatboth encourage students to use subject knowledge to understand and critically evaluate their worlds, and that explicitly presents opportunities for students to cultivate their academic literacy skills.

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Conclusion

In this paper I have argued that Bourdieu’s work on pedagogic authority and communication can make a significant contribution to re-crafting an AcLit perspective on learning and teaching. Bourdieu provides us with some useful insights into the ways in which the process of acquiring academic literacy is shaped by institutional authority. Firstly, Bourdieu’s work reinforces the AcLit critique of the study skills and academic socialization accounts of the problems in speaking, reading and writing experienced by students. Secondly, Bourdieu’s work strengthens the AcLit position that such problems emerge from the gap in linguistic competencies of teachers and learners. This gap is socially produced, particularly in the family, but it is reproduced in the academic practices of universities. Thirdly, the notions of ‘the rhetoric of despair’ and ‘the code of transmission’ deepen AcLit insights into the operation of pedagogic authority and the actual mechanics of the communicationbreakdowns which characterise learning and teaching. Finally, Bourdieu’s ideas concerning the nature of a pedagogy in itself enable us to imagine a pedagogy for itself. A pedagogy in and foritself, whilst acknowledging that the university is a key site ofthe reproduction of the culture of the new capitalism, seeks to re-craft pedagogic practice and social relations. For example, bymaking assessment and feedback more transparent, dialogical and relevant to the experiences of students, students are given opportunities to change their relation to and use of language, their relation to themselves and their world. In sum, a pedagogy in and for itself is committed to the craft of university teaching as intrinsically worthwhile; and engenders the possibility of a pedagogy of critical hope.

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Street, B. (2003) What’s “new” in New Literacy Studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice, Current Issues in Comparative Education, 5(2): 77-91.

Street, B. (2004) Academic Literacies and the ‘new orders’: implications for research and practice in student writing in higher education, Learning & Teaching in the Social Sciences, 1(1): 9-20.

Sutton, P. (1994) Metropolitan Artisans and the Discourse of the Trade: 1750-1825, unpublished PhD Thesis dept of Sociology, University of Essex.

Sutton, P. And Gill, W. (2010) Engaging Feedback: meaning identity and power, Practitioner Research in Higher Education, 4(1):3-13.

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Dr Paul SuttonSociology Subject GroupFaculty of Education, Health & WelfareUniversity College Plymouth: St Mark & St JohnDerriford RdPlymouth PL68BHEnglandpsutton@marjon.ac.uk01752 636700 x430

Senior Lecturer in Sociology. Current research interests: the scholarship of learning and teaching, particularly assessment, feedback and curriculum design. In my research and scholarly activity I seek to develop imaginative ways of using social theory to develop pedagogic practice.

Re-Crafting an Academic Literacies Approach To Pedagogic Communication in HE.

Article length including references aprox 5,700 words

References to my own work highlighted in bold

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