Skrivprocesser på högskolan
Text, plats och materialitet i uppsatsskrivandet av
Sofia Hort
Akademisk avhandling
Avhandling för filosofie doktorsexamen i svenska språket, som kommer att försvaras offentligt
fredagen den 17 januari 2020 kl.13.15, Hörsal P1, Örebro universitet Opponent: Associate professor Gustaf Skar Norges teknisk- naturvitenskapelige universitet
Trondheim, Norge
Örebro universitet
Institutionen för humaniora, utbildnings- och samhällsvetenskap
Abstract
Sofia Hort (2020): Writing Processes in Higher Education. Text, Place and Materiality in Essay Writing. Örebro studies in Swedish Language 16 and Örebro Studies in Educational Sciences with an Emphasis on Didactics 21. The purpose of this study is to explore how students in a higher education context handle the writing of their final essay. Applying a sociomaterial ap-proach, the study offers comprehensive case studies of students’ writing pro-cesses. The thesis attempts to show how student writers handle writing chal-lenges through different technologies and at different places. It does so by implementing the Mobile Technologies Process Logs (MTPL)-method, wherein participating students take an active role to create and gather data on their own writing processes.
The results show that some students’ textual work could be described in terms of being comprehensive, and hence handled through varied writing technologies at various writing places. These students write a lot of texts to move the writing process forward. Other writers take a more product-ori-ented view in their writing, and hence write through fewer technologies, at a few places, and with a wish to finish their final text product directly. Many of the students make explicit how they process the literature through writing texts. The knowledge production, the analysis, which is central to academic writing, seems however more implicit and difficult for the students to han-dle, specifically if having a product oriented view on writing. The results also show how students mobilize different textual actions to meet challenges that writing an (digital) essay implies. This work is clearly emplaced, at di-verse or at more homogenous writing places.
It is significant to make textual strategies as well as the functions of writ-ing technologies and place visible to all students. It seems vital at times where higher education, as well as the students entering this institution, are put in front of a raft of (new) challenges. At the same time as the idea of the bad student writer is prevailing, higher education institutions seem not to teach how an academic writing process could be managed in successful ways. This thesis contributes to this field of inquiry with results on how students’ writing processes can be characterized.
Keywords: Student writing, Academic Writing, University Writing, Writing Processes, Academic Literacies, Digital Literacies, Teacher Education, So-ciomateriality, Higher Education.
Sofia Hort, Institutionen för Humaniora, utbildnings- och samhällsvetenskap. Örebro University, SE-701 82 Örebro, Sweden.
