The Academic Imposter

Academic literacy (Paltridge, 2004) is a fundamental aspect of university and an expectation of the OfS as part of the graduate skill set (Quality and Standards, Condition B4:4). Breaks in education, differing previous academic experiences and routes into HE (Peake, 2018) all play a part in both academic expectations and outcomes for our students. This is becoming more varied as the student body becomes increasingly more diverse. Student learning needs such as ADHD, ASD, (Bruck, 1997)Dyslexia and other conditions all increase the diversity of need within the student body and often, academic skills are taught centrally through central services. <br/><br/>Moving beyond the support offered by central services, some faculties and department demand a more flexible approach of supporting academic writing, sometimes because the style of writing is more reflective than ‘standard’ assignments (Ryan, 2011), or because the diversity of assessment type means that it falls outside the expectations of centralised teams. <br/><br/>A practical toolkit for teaching academic writing with proven success in two UK institutions as well as three international institutions has been developed and refined in the School of Social Work and Wellbeing at Edge Hill University. This workshop invites you to take on the role of your students and includes practical tasks to explore, guidance to beak down and use in small bites or as a bespoke day. It has proven effective at MSc, BSc and PGCert levels. Discussion on how to teach, how to adapt and how the process can work using SOLO taxonomy (Chan et al., 2002) to improve grades and feed forward into improved outcomes is included. <br/>