By Jakob Haahr-Pedersen and Camilla Mehlsen (cme@dpu.dk)

Knowledge is not what it used to be. Or rather: The conditions for production and evaluation of knowledge have changed radically in a short time. Universities are no longer the sole producers and assessors of knowledge, but even in the labour market, the situation has changed for knowledge. Work is often done in trans-departmental teams, and so knowledge circulates among all employees. This requires of the employees that they possess a wide range of communication skills when proposals and decisions are to be presented, debated and evaluated.

In the educational institutions, however, traditional communication methods are still in vogue, particularly so in the universities, where the primary means of communication is written text. Universities have been sluggish in responding to society's demands for versatile communication skills, according to professor Brian Street from King's College in London. He was one of the founders of 'New Literacy Studies', which represent an anthropological approach to written text. He has studied text and textuality in further education for many years, and he has taught academic writing to, among others, PhD-students at the Danish University of Education.

Towards a new communicative order
The educational system suffers from a problematic dichotomy, one that Brian Street runs into time and again: "While the educational system is teaching old-fashioned text-decoding, the students are out having fun in cyberspace, where they use a vastly larger range of means of expression in various settings," he says.

Simple decoding of text is hardly in tune with the notion of a 'new communicative order', which, in Brian Street's terminology denotes the emergence of multiple new means of self-expression and communication. One recent example is the verb 'to google'. Children and youths, in particular, express themselves through speech and writing, but also bodily, visually and virtually, and they include computer keyboards, webcams and web logs as means of expression.

The universities are falling behind the new communicative order and maintain the one proper way to communicate, i.e. academic writing. At least, that is the officially stated ideal, but Brian Street's research indicates that we actually have no explicit consensus about what academic writing really means. The students often find that a particular mode of writing leads to high grades in one class and low in another. And to add to the confusion, teachers often find it difficult to put into words exactly what it is that makes a good paper. In the words of one teacher: "I know what a good paper is when I see one, but I can't explain how they should make one." This lack of clarity causes some confusion among students, as exemplified by this statement: "The hardest part is to figure out how to write papers for the different classes. It seems to me like the teachers all have different priorities."

The good paper
Is there really no consensus about what good academic writing is, and about what a good paper is? Brian Street doubts there is. Good practice differs among different disciplines. Each field has its own knowledge resources and ways of treating and evaluating knowledge – and not least its own conflicts about how a researcher ought to go about producing new knowledge. In the field of anthropology, for instance, a feud has been going on for ages about whether or not the researcher is allowed to interact with the surroundings or if he or she should be like the proverbial fly on the wall. These two different approaches to knowledge bear a profound impact on academic communication. Many teachers, however, often have just one kind of knowledge, isolated from other fields, says Brian Street.

According to him, there are three approaches to academic writing, each of which represents a particular attitude to how you should teach the students to write academically:

• The first approach has academic writing as a fixed set of writing skills that emphasise orthographical aspects such as spelling, grammar, punctuation and cohesion. Academic writing is, in short, a skill you acquire in the university's writing centre.
• With the second approach, academic writing is a cultural matter. Each university represents a certain culture, according to this view. In order to master academic writing, the students must embrace and adapt to this culture.
• According to the third approach, academic writing is a social practice. In this view, there is no single university culture, but a host of various fields and disciplines in each university. Each discipline has its own particular communication culture. The good academic paper takes account of the field's particular knowledge and primary textual genres.

Who's to blame?
If you consider academic writing a fixed set of skills, you place the main burden of responsibility on the students. Any blame for a 'failed' text is nearly always put on them. This is due to a tendency among teachers to consider academic texts one specific genre:

"Certain teachers believe that an academic text should be objective and impersonal, should have widespread use of the passive form and abstract expressions and absolutely no 'I' in them. This can be difficult for those students who are used to expressing themselves in other classes and courses."

If, on the other hand, academic writing is considered a social and institutional affair, a text can be evaluated in relation to its context. This is also confirmed by the international comparisons Brian Street has performed as part of his research:

"When you compare the quality control mechanisms for PhD-theses at the universities in Stockholm, Cape Town and London, you will find it glaringly obvious that there are no set standards for The Good Paper. A lot of it is tacit knowledge and varies from one discipline to the next. Academic writing is not just writing in a particular academic style. It depends a lot on both topic and content. The conclusion is that what constitutes a Good Paper depends entirely on the context."

What can the university do?
Since it would seem impossible to establish universal guidelines for good academic writing, how can universities help the students, if at all? According to Brian Street, the primary challenge is to do away with the notion that the students are to blame every time they get it wrong. Academic writing is an institutional matter, one that concerns the entire university. Furthermore, the teachers must recognise the interplay between knowledge and communication, and must accept the fact that different types of knowledge calls for different types of communication. That way, textuality and production of papers can be understood as elements in a larger communicative practice. Universities can also enforce a change in the daily workflow: "Specifically, it is very important to give courses for teachers and students to discuss the various communicative skills. When I give such a course, I never try to force the participants to write in a particular way, but rather to make them see things in a larger perspective. I might, for instance, encourage teachers to experiment a bit, and see what would happen if they were to allow students to adopt a more active voice in, say, a geography assignment."

When Brian Street gives his courses, he avoids using tools such as Five Nifty Tricks?: "I'd never produce such a guide for teachers. The point is to make them interested in these considerations and ways to organise work. I hold a great faith in their academic insight and judgment, and I firmly believe that they do what is best for their particular field. A colleague in London gives a course called 'Writing across disciplines', and that is exactly what they learn: Teachers from various disciplines present their views on academic writing and discuss the differences among disciplines."

His research has demonstrated to Brian Street that the students are far more aware of this issue than the teachers. Therefore, when students attend a course, they need a theoretical foundation in particular, because they combine courses from different disciplines to make up their education, and move freely from one field to the next. It seems evident that students will increasingly not only combine classes and courses at one university, but attend classes abroad as part of their education. This presents a challenge in terms of recognising textuality as both a social and an institutional practice, because in the new communicative order, there is no such thing as THE Good Paper. At least, there is no useful guide to good academic writing.

Literacy and New Literacy Studies
The term 'literacy' is derived from the Greek 'Litera' (letters) and it means to be able to produce and consume signs such as letters and icons. It also denotes the ability to act based on a correct interpretation of the signs. The concept is becoming more and more important as new media calls for new and changing approaches to the concept of reading.

As term, literacy holds a long story of changing meanings. Until the 1970s, the term was largely used in the negative, as illiteracy, in connection with a debate about the possible economic impact of increasing literacy in third-world countries. Since the early 1990s, a number of literacy-researchers, particularly in the fields of ethnography and anthropology, have used the term 'New Literacy Studies' to emphasise literacy as social practice, as opposed to the traditional emphasis on literacy as the acquisition of skills. Brian Street's 'Literacy in Theory and Practice' (1985) is considered a seminal work in New Literacy Studies.
Sources: www.literacies.net and www.wikipedia.org

About Brian Street
Anthropologist and professor of language in education at King's College in London. Widely considered a leading figure in literacy research. Author of a number of books on literacy, including 'Literacy in Theory and Practice' (1985) and 'Social Literacies' (1995).

Visit Brian Street's personal homepage at King's College.

Brian Street

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Punchline

"While the educational system is teaching old-fashioned text-decoding, the students are out having fun in cyberspace, where they use a vastly larger range of means of expression in various settings."
-Brian Street

The author

Contact info for Camilla Mehlsen