Contents: Writing In Academia (Issue 50)
Contents: Writing In Academia (Issue 50)
Posts tagged ‘Academia’
Jun 24
1 Comment
Dedication: Aniket Jaaware (1960-2018)
We dedicate this special issue on Writing in Academia to Aniket Jaaware – scholar, teacher, colleague and, most importantly, our friend in reading and writing. Aniket’s words and ideas from his published works, his classes or informal conversations are throughlines in several essays in this collection. His vast range in scholarly and literary writing remains an inspiration to us.
Guest-Editorial – Building the Boat While Sailing it: Writing Pedagogy in India
By Anannya Dasgupta and Madhura Lohokare
Writing pedagogy may be new in the Indian higher education scene, but if this issue of Café Dissensus is any evidence, the kind of work that is already being done and the number of people it is attracting to join-in, indicates that it may be time to graduate its presence as not mere figment of our imagination, and draw encouragement from the beginning of its visible presence in some universities.
Regional, national, international: graded hierarchies of academic practice
By Savitha Suresh Babu
I use the phrase writing capital to allude not only to caste, class and other forms of structural advantage, but also, some forms of training and support in understanding the grammar of academic writing. I refer here to processes that help understand how best to lay out succinctly what others in the field have written, what is most helpful for you from that writing, and how to articulate one’s own work in conversation with that scholarship.
Taking Academic Writing Back to School
By Payal Singh
this course on academic writing I was taking as an MA student had, as one of its fundamental premises, the idea of helping us write without the fear of being graded. Here, I will elaborate on the grading criteria of this course which did not seem like evaluation in the sense we understand in educational institutions. For evaluation, we were asked to maintain a journal at the very outset of the course to record our reflections about writing.
Towards Breathing New Life into Writing Practices in School Classrooms
By Rajashree Gandhi
The question “Can you even teach writing?” continues to be asked. This question either arises from a distrust in pedagogical progress or from an arrogant belief that writing is something we either have it in us or don’t. Those of us who believe in a growth mindset know that writing can be learned through practice, and that nurturing a young writer’s confidence will motivate them to work through the process of writing with patience and grit.
Assessing to Teach: Writing in an ESL Classroom
By Nupur Samuel
Why are the policy documents silent on the pedagogy and assessment of writing? Why is there no discussion on how to teach writing, which is crucial since it is through writing that students’ learning is assessed? Since Vivian Zamel introduced the idea of writing as a process in second language studies in 1976, highlighting similarities between writing in first and second languages, emphasis has shifted from a text-oriented approach to writer-oriented research.
Languages → ← Realities: Some Thoughts on the Writing Courses Indian Universities Need
By Anuj Gupta
We need to start paying a lot more attention to how students like Dheeraj are shaping writing pedagogy in India. I am immensely grateful to him, who apart from giving me the permission to use his writing and his name for this paper, has also taught me a lot of what I know about writing pedagogy. As I realized while writing this paper, it is primarily by closely reading his words, as well as those of my other students, that I am beginning to find the critical vocabulary to think about writing and its teaching in a whole new way.
Bridge-Books in Malayalam: The Transformative Potential of Social Sciences Writing
By J. Devika
For humanities, the question is equally crucial: what kind of teaching can activate the transformative potential of literature or art or cinema? Perhaps the issue here is not so much the use of a highly-specialized and technical vocabulary in literary, art, and cinema criticism, but its fetishization, which is also one of the reasons why it rarely enters the critical imagination outside the academy.
Translating (Gender) Trouble
By Sameer Abraham Thomas
I believe that Simple Writer is of great use from a pedagogic standpoint. Asking a student to translate a passage into Simple Writer would force them to break each concept down to what they feel is its most crucial elements, thereby both encouraging them to think harder about the words they think they know and allowing any teacher reading their translation an insight into the way they imagine certain concepts.
Café Dissensus 