Persistent differential outcomes based on characteristics such as class, ethnicity and disability are a regulatory concern for higher education institutions (HEIs) in England. Curriculum development is currently the most popular way for institutions to seek to address this problem. However, adopted interventions often involve popular strategies with little or no consideration for the specific contextual needs of learners or institutions.
In this study, I aim to challenge the prevalence of what are known as ‘drag and drop’ enhancement interventions by taking an in-depth look at a specific site of academic failure and success, namely, academic writing. I provide a close-up analysis of student academic writing viewed as an important site of interaction between students and institutions.
Academic writing research is a contested space with competing views of students’ academic writing development in the literature. I write from the perspective of a subject, rather than language, specialist and seek to straddle conceptual divides by taking a novel approach to the textual analysis of student writing whilst also engaging with student perspectives on academic writing through analysis of in-depth student interviews.
The textual analysis indicates a nuanced interaction between epistemological access and the grammatical and syntactical features of texts in determining academic outcomes. This highlights the need for academics to be aware of potential linguistic bias during marking. However, the prevalence of positive epistemological features in successful texts highlights the importance of student engagement with disciplinary content in academic writing development. This finding is considered in the context of themes from the qualitative data that point to wider contextual and biopsychosocial issues that either help or hinder students’ capacities to engage with subject knowledge and thus to produce ‘successful’ writing.
The narrative representations of student stories highlight the importance of individual factors that are bounded and shaped by students’ socio-cultural backgrounds as well as the institutional context. Students’ capacities for disciplinary self-authorship are attributed to personal engagement with academic reading and with informal peer support. However, understanding the importance of subject knowledge engagement is a key developmental step that occurs late in the day for some non-traditional learners. Furthermore, meaningful engagement is framed as a costly personal struggle, as students seek to navigate the developmental, familial, financial, and emotional challenges of being at university.
In this study, I contribute to the domains of academic writing research and educational research methods by using novel analytical methods and by situating the findings within an emancipatory biopsychosocial framework. I seek to raise awareness of the importance of student contextual factors in the learning process and, by doing so, raise ethical questions about the feasibility of narrowing persistent differential outcomes in the current HE policy climate.
