Building Capacity
University literacies are the foundational capacities required by students for them to be effective and successful at university. Programme teams are responsible for ensuring that students either meet the expected level of capacity before they commence a programme of study, or start a new level of study, or that they are explicitly developed as part of the enacted curriculum. We suggest that embedding literacies requires a holistic approach at programme level. None of the four literacies and their constituent parts should be an optional bolt on. What is important is that they are embedded in a way that’s most appropriate for your programme of study and your institution. There is no one model that is suitable for every university, or every programme. Within the same institution different approaches will probably need to be used for different disciplines. The academic literacies model views these practices not as a set of generic transferable skills, but as social and cultural practices that differ across disciplines.
We suggest that programme teams engage with your institution’s support services in doing this so that you don’t replicate centrally provided services/provision such as: Careers service, Skills development teams, student support, library services staff, learning developers.
It’s also important to be aware of the potential ‘hidden curriculum’. Remember that some students have less cultural capital than others in terms of expectations about and knowledge of university and expectations, norms and practices.
Institutional literacy
Navigating the institutional environment, procedures, expectations, requirements and the ‘rules of the game’ necessary so that students can make the most of the resources available to them. This includes institutional and departmental assessment policy and practice, for example: how and in what format to submit work, what type and level of feedback can be expected about draft work, timescales for marking, what happens if they fail, how quickly work is marked. Support services such as careers, finance, mental health. Digital and physical libraries and how to navigate them successful to find and use resources. Expectations about professional behaviour, and so on.
Attitudinal literacy
nderstanding the difference between prior education and Higher Education (or changes in the level of HE study, such as moving from first-year to second-year). This relates to the student’s level of personal autonomy and responsibility, and their shift from more descriptive surface learning of a subject to a more critical, deep engagement with the discipline. It also includes student capacity to regulate their motivation, self-esteem, and confidence. For many first-year students whose previous compulsory education experience has rewarded them for providing ‘correct’ answers there’s often a need to educate them about the contested nature of knowledge studied at university.
Academic literacy
This refers to the wide range of skills and attitudes students need to maximise learning gain and attainment; e.g. assessment literacy, feedback literacy, finding and evaluating academically suitable sources of information, academic integrity, critical engagement (reading, thinking, writing), independent learning, as well as disciplinary-specific competences.
Educational literacy
The basic educational expectations we have of the skills and knowledge that students possess when starting the programme, or commencing a new level of study within the programme; e.g. literacy, language fluency, written and verbal communication skills, digital literacy, disciplinary knowledge acquired from previous study, etc. It’s important to not make assumptions about the pre-existing knowledge, skills and cultural capital that students already have, particularly in respect of widening participation students.
A checklist to help the process.
To help with this process we have provided a set of checklist questions as an ‘academic checklist’ that programme teams may use to identify where and how academic literacies are embedded. It may be possible to incorporate this checklist, or elements of it, into your universities’ institutional review processes, but, if doing so, we strongly suggest that it is not used as a managerial compliance tool but as a developmental set of questions to help you reflect on how, where and when you do things and what you are able to do to improve those things within the specific situation of your programme within your institution.
Academic checklist resource – How have you embedded student literacies into your programme?
Reflect on each of the checklist questions and consider where and when these are included within the delivery of the curriculum. Also consider what support is available from the broader institution to most efficiently build student capacity. At the programme level, you should additionally consider how these are revisited at each level of study in line with a scaffolded curriculum. The most effective way to build capacity is through coherent programme-level strategies, however, this checklist should also serve as a useful reflective resource for individual teaching teams. Try to avoid simple yes, no or, it depends, type answers and look for actual evidence. After all, if you don’t have the evidence…how do you really know?
We suggest you don’t try to go through all the checklist in one go, but instead to select a few of the questions and use them as starting discussion points to reflect and identify your good practice and what you could improve. It may be useful to ask colleagues from a different programme or discipline to act as ‘critical friends’ when using it.
But do remember, no programme of study is ever going to be perfect, and there may be many things you want to do that are not possible due to funding, staff resource, or time constraints.
For simplicity most of the checklist questions are phrased in a ‘How do you…’ format, but they could equally well be phrased as ‘How, when and where do you…’. or as ‘How effectively do you…’. It’s up to programme teams to decide what type of questions works best for them to stimulate reflection and action.
You will notice that the majority of questions are broadly about assessment, as C-BAss focuses programme design on developing and assessing the competencies essential to student aspirational futures.
The checklist questions
- How do you advise students about how much time they should be spending on the course, and what they should be doing when not in taught sessions?
- How do you prepare students for effectively taking responsibility for their own learning?
- How do you make it clear to students that it is their responsibility to ask for support and where they can find that support? Additionally – How do you make sure that students feel entitled to seek support when they need it?
- How do you explain how students will be assessed throughout the programme? Why those assignments have been chosen and how they will receive feedback (particularly how this might be different to their pre-university experiences)?
- Is there an explanation of what assignments are summative and which are formative? And what are the purpose(s) and value of the formative assessments?
- How do you articulate to the student what competencies are being assessed, and what they need to do to do well (briefings and criteria)
- How do you help students to understand and effectively utilise marking/grading criteria / rubrics to improve their work? – e.g. peer-review of exemplars, working with the grading scheme to evaluate their own work.
- Are students provided with a toolkit and/or guidance to help them do each of the specific assignment types well? Additionally – how are students guided to use these toolkits at the specific points in time that they need to use them?
- Are students provided with a toolkit and/or guidance to help them find, understand, and utilise the feedback they will receive throughout the course?
- How do you embed opportunities for self-reflection into your course so students can build this capacity?
- How do you structure feedback to maximise its impact?
- How do you know what the career aspirations of your students are? How do you support students in building awareness of what their options are and how they may best achieve them?
- How do you work with wider institutional support (e.g. careers services) to ensure that students are aware of the advice that is available to them and build student career management literacy?
- How do you help students reflect on how they have developed as both learners and young professionals? What opportunities do they have to develop and have confidence in their ability to articulate their competencies, skills, knowledge to prospective employers?
- Is academic literacy development effectively embedded throughout the curriculum?
Action
Programme teams work collaboratively, and with stakeholders, to develop a set of programme competencies that enhance student futures. Engagement with students and relevant industries as stakeholders is an essential aspect of ensuring that the curriculum is Meaningful, Relevant, and Valuable.Further Reading
Lea, M.R. & Street, B.V. (2006) ‘The “Academic Literacies” model: Theory and applications’, Theory into practice, 45 (4): 368–377
Maldoni, M. (2017) A cross-disciplinary approach to embedding: A pedagogy for developing academic literacies, Journal of Academic Language and Learning, 11(1)
Miller, A. and Schulz, S. (2014). University literacy: A multi-literacies model. English in Australia, 49(3), pp.78-87.
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