Writing to learn: creative LD perspectives for Learning Developers and students

Academic writing is a contested area, even more so in times of large language models and artificial intelligence (AI). This writing is tricky to navigate and master especially for newcomers – staff and students. Learning Developers almost uniquely play with writing as a practice of emergence and discovery. Academic writing is a process: we write to become academic. Students write to join their epistemic communities, and Learning Developers write to give birth to an emergent field. Drawing on recent work by Syska and Buckley (2022) and Abegglen, Burns and Sinfield (2022; 2023), we argue that academic writing is an initiation into and participation in wider professional and academic discourses. We ‘write to learn’ rather than ‘learn to write’. In our practice with students, we know that we need to move beyond the ‘mechanics’ of writing and make the process meaningful, engaging, interactive, and fun. Similarly, Syska and Buckley (2022) have explored what makes Learning Developers ‘tick’ with respect to academic writing – revealing how, counterintuitively perhaps, academic writing can become an inclusive Learning Development space: our ‘happy place’. With this presentation, we opened the discussion on academic writing for building the Learning Development community.