After a long and varied career teaching in a range of educational contexts with a diverse student population, Dr Amanda French is troubled by our relationship with writing. It’s a task often approached as a neutral operation but trying to teach it in this technical, mechanistic way - with all that potential for seeing it as a skill in deficit - is closing off for students that sense of writing as a social act. It’s a part of who we are and how we think; it allows us to be part of and develop the discourse and to connect to each other. So, while it can act as a vehicle for thought, it’s not (or shouldn’t be) the product in itself. We can think of it as part of a rhizomatic environment, people entangled with their situated writing, and learning developers can be at the centre of that in helping students unpack it and figure out how to express not only what they want to say, but who they are.
The main message is, don’t be scared of writing! Start by writing anything down and write every day. The most sustainable approach is to allow for a slow, gradual accretion of confidence, almost like an artisanal approach, and in doing so you become part of a wide and diverse community.
The resources we mentioned
Julia Molinari (2022) What Makes Writing Academic: Rethinking Theory for Practice
Rowena Murray (2014) Writing in social spaces
Helen Sword https://www.helensword.com/
Pat Thomson https://patthomson.net/
The Thesis Whisperer https://thesiswhisperer.com/
Sara Ahmed (2014) The cultural politics of emotion
And the paper and book we talked about
French, A. 2020. Academic writing as identity-work in higher education: forming a
‘professional writing in higher education habitus’, Studies in Higher Education, 45:8,
1605-1617, DOI:10.1080/03075079.2019.1572735
French, A. 2022. A Philosophical Approach to Perceptions of Academic Writing Practices in Higher Education. Routledge

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