Developing a critical writing course: A risky business

Academic literacy practices are highly specialised, and developed for a specific audience and for a specific purpose. Everyday literacy practices are, on the other hand, bound up in the dynamic and experiential world of the everyday. Students whose experience of academic culture might be limited are often expected to know already how to produce academic writing, and this expectation raises questions for educators. Consideration might be given to the role of students in contemporary times as co-creators of their own knowledge rather than as regurgitators of someone else's. This chapter seeks to consider another way of viewing the place of academic writing in the creation of new knowledge for the student. Drawing heavily onthe work of Kamler (200 I) and Halasek (1999), it seeks to provide a space for discussing a reframing of the generic struchlres of academic writing and the relocating of students as co-creators of their own knowledge. From this perspective, the focus of academic writing becomes not so much whether a student can adhere to strict conventions of style, but what that writing does to them and their worlds. Academic writing structures can then be used by the students to indicate their creation of new knowledge.