..and hear hear from me too! Let's have no more of this 'students these
days, eh?' - the complaint is thousands of years old, and formal
education is still alive and kicking.
Anyway, are we all so sure that we were all reading diligently and
enthusiastically form the very start and throughout OUR degrees? I
reckon that being a student is a strategic business for most people, and
that means doing mostly - though not exclusively - only what is
absolutely necessary. Does that matter all that much?
Martin Hampton
>>> Janet Godwin <[log in to unmask]> 28/02/2007 10:37 >>>
Hear, hear, Colin.
Hope that is brief enough!
Janet Godwin
Upgrade and Dyslexia tutor
Oxford Brookes
C Neville wrote:
>When I came back into education as a mature student in the
>1970s, I remember feeling thoroughly intimidated,
>frustrated and angry at the academic texts I was expected
>to read in the social sciences and arts.
>
>It seemed to me then - and still does - that too much
>academic writing was dry and lifeless, obtuse and
>unfathomable, exclusive, rather than inclusive.
>
>However, I persevered with it, resentfully.
>
>Later I discovered Hudson's 1978 book 'The Jargon of the
>Professions', which argued that the less secure a
>profession feels about itself, the more excluding jargon it
>spouts; Hudson singled out education, business & social
>sciences at that time as the main culprits!
>
>From my work in learner support I know that many students
>still feel thoroughly intimidated by the set reading, and
>some disengage from it, or serve it back undigested and
>unintelligible in assignments - a link with another
>discussion on plagiarism is here, perhaps.
>
>I spend time with students now in workshops encouraging
>them not to be intimidated by extracts like the one,
>immediately below, taken from an academic text book:
>
>"Garfinkel argues that the relationship between the act of
>representation and represented object is dialectical not
>unidirectional.
>The character of the representation changes in the attempt
>to explain the perceived nature of underlying reality while
>the object 'changes', in turn, to accommodate the language
>employed to represent it. Representation, in other words,
>is a dynamic, interactive process in which the 'actor', and
>the form of representation, that is language, 'constructs'
>some at least of the reality under investigation"
>
>
>In the workshop students try and work out what the author is
>saying. Eventually, and together, they crack the codes and
>work out that this particular writer is trying to say that
>it can be difficult to explain the nature of <LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION
MARK>reality<RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK>,as
>it depends who is talking about it, how they perceive it,
>and the words they use to explain its meaning.
>
>They will then usually comment as to why the author did not
>simply say that in the first place.
>
>Motivating students to read? Let's mount a LDHEN campaign
>to encourage more clarity, less pretension, and better
>communication, in academic writing.
>
>Colin Neville
>Bradford
>
>---------------------------------
>C Neville
>[log in to unmask]
>
>
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