LLED 565B – Scholarly Discourses in Education: The How and the Why

Date: Term 2 (January – April), Mondays

Time: 4:30-7:30pm

Location: Ponderosa Annex E, room 117

Description:

Chances are you didn’t get many opportunities to engage directly with the research culture of the university during your undergraduate years. But when you embark on post-baccalaureate studies, you are taking a more significant part in that culture, and you may find yourself a little perplexed by its ways of thinking and acting. In particular, you may find its language–the highly abstract terms, densely layered ideas, heavy use of citations, and so on—somewhat bewildering. In this advanced course on scholarly writing, we will unpack these and other formal linguistic features with the aim of helping you to participate in the disciplinary “conversations” of education scholarship.

What will I learn in this course?

You’ll learn not only how to produce scholarly texts in your discipline(s), but—just as importantly—why these texts sound the way they do. The course combines reading and discussion of research about academic discourse with workshops, guest speakers, and hands-on practice using various theories and methods for examining language. In this course, you will

– consider the particularities of academic discourse in relation to cross-cultural, practice-based, and popular perspectives

– draw on conceptual frameworks and discourse analytic strategies to better understand writing practices (and, to a lesser extent, spoken and digitized communicative activities) as they relate to a range of scholarly contexts

– design and carry out a theoretically-informed project on some facet of academic discourse in your own education discipline

– write about the project using scholarly genres AND creatively “translate” your project for users of the Faculty’s proposed new website on scholarly discourse

Is this course for me?

This course is for students from across the Faculty of Education. Indeed, the more varied the disciplines represented by students in the course, the richer our explorations of disciplinary discourse will be. Note that, while anyone curious about scholarly discourse is welcome, the course will likely be of greatest interest to current and prospective graduate students.

This course is cross-listed with LLED 480B

Posted: 10|30|13 at 9:30 am. Filed under: Courses.
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