Abstract:
Academic literacy lecturers are increasingly being called upon to contribute to the education of research postgraduates by designing and teaching writing
workshops. However, the literature on this topic rarely addresses the needs
of students writing in their first language, or writing about practice-based
research for scholarly readers. Moreover, such literature rarely presents a
detailed discussion of actual tasks used in writing workshops, or explores
how writing theories can be made accessible to students who have little
familiarity with linguistics. This paper presents and discusses workshop
tasks that we have developed for students undertaking a professional
doctorate degree in nursing at an Australian university. The focus of the
paper is on designing tasks that problematise textual practices, with a
particular emphasis on writer identity in academic discourses. The first part
of the paper describes the teaching context and outlines the theories and
issues that underpin our teaching approach, drawing on literature about
professional doctorates, postgraduate research writing, research writing in the
discipline of nursing, and pedagogic approaches. The second part of the
paper presents several workshop tasks that illustrate how these theories and
issues inform our teaching practices.
