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University students face many challenges in the process of becoming fluent in academic reading and writing. Arona Dison, the Writing Centre Coordinator, and Marijke du Toit, the Teaching and Learning Specialist in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), reflect on their experiences of learning academic reading and writing as well as facilitating literacies development over the years.
Arona: When I started out as an undergraduate student at UCT in the 80s, I wrote essays by hand, writing a number of consecutive drafts. Sometimes I changed the order of the sections using arrows flowing from one to the other, or through literally cutting and pasting.
Marijke: I remember that in my third year at Stellenbosch, I used a typewriter to write my essays. Late at night, we would work in a seminar room of what used to be called the BJ Vorster building. I would place all the pages of my draft essay all along the tables, and walk around, cutting up the pages and figuring out a better structure before glueing the essay back together.
Arona: There was a dark, hot dungeon in the university library where all the photocopiers were housed. I would descend the ramp to the dungeon, clutching an assortment of short-loan books and leather-bound journals and wait for ages in the queue to photocopy. Not always knowing what was most relevant to the essay, I emerged with tons of photocopied sheets. Reading involved much underlining of (hopefully) relevant bits, copying onto paper … and then the impossible task of trying to synthesise these bits in an attempt to answer the question.
Marijke: I still have some photocopies from my undergraduate studies. I had adopted a method from the first-year module on Informal Logic that focused a lot on how to analyse arguments, and that involved using different styles of brackets, underlining and so on to identify key concepts, premises, conclusions, etc.
Arona: The advent of personal computers (PCs) was a liberating experience. It was a joy to be able to move chunks of texts around with a click of the mouse. Computer labs were few and unfriendly. I had to compete with friends to get access to the computer of a generous older friend in the neighbourhood. I felt less lonely and tired in the early hours of the morning in the company of the glowing green letters on the screen. A PC at that stage for me was a word processor. The internet was not yet available for personal access.
Marijke: In 1999, when I joined the History Department at what was then the University of Natal, I began teaching with Keith Breckenridge who was launching a new first-year course called ‘Internet Expertise’. Students were learning about the history of networked computers and the changing information economy, and building websites instead of writing traditional essays. What I now find interesting is that already they were learning reading skills relevant to internet-based resources. They had to come to the computer lab every week to complete a multiple choice test. In order to answer the questions, they had to use Google to locate information and texts on the internet. Over time, the courses that we developed included sections about Wikipedia and its practices of authorship. The scaffolding for learning how to do research now included exercises for navigating both the ‘scholarly’ and what I called the ‘wild’ internet, with its social media websites, blogs and citizen journalism and a plethora of propaganda. At UKZN in the early 2000s, our evolving curriculum responded to such changes in technology as the shift from analogue to digital photography, and the impact that this was having on ideas of photographic veracity. So ideas of reading and what reading involved also became increasingly multimodal. In fact, my students learned Photoshop and how to manipulate photographs, as part of the debate on the question of ‘truth and photography’. So one could argue that how they were learning to build arguments was also exceeding the confines of writing. But this happened in a context of relative privilege - in those years my department had a classroom with twenty or so PCs, specifically set up for our tutorials and practicals in History and Internet Studies.
Arona: It has been hard for universities (particularly those with less resources) to provide sufficient and adequate access to students through computer labs, given the cost of technology, the need to maintain and update equipment and for sufficient lab assistants to keep the computers in order and assist students. Since I joined the UWC Writing Centre in 2017, students have increasingly been using mobile phones to engage with their studies, access learning management systems, source materials, and, in many cases, to read articles. Some students are even writing their assignments on mobile phones. Texts that are formatted for reading on mobile phones are easy to read, but PDF documents pose challenges. Even if you use the sideways view and manage to get the whole width of the text on your screen, you can only view small chunks of the text at once. It lends itself to focussing on units of information rather than viewing a section in relation to the text as a whole. When I used to teach reading skills'', before smartphones became ubiquitous, we (academic development practitioners) encouraged students to read the introduction, skim over the article to get a sense of the whole article and look at the headings before embarking on a careful reading of the whole article. We tried to inculcate active reading, engaging with photocopies of text through underlining, circling, making notes and writing questions (similar to what you mentioned about your own reading practice). Working on PCs and laptops, it is possible to underline, bold and annotate on Adobe now, but this is something that could be more widely enabled and taught. Reading on a cell phone makes it more difficult to learn these active reading practices.
Marijke: One repercussion of the Covid-19 crisis and the years of on-line teaching that was forced upon our universities was that it was virtually impossible to make the photocopied ‘readers’, that had been widely used, available to students. I think that one lasting effect of that has been that it has become far more common to upload PDFs of prescribed articles and chapters to our course management system. I also think that there was already an established discussion about how students generally were struggling with focused reading and writing, in the context of the ‘attention economy’ that is also strongly associated with personal mobile devices.The concept dates from the 1960s, but today it is strongly associated with smartphones and social media, in the sense that contemporary digital devices and a range of online platforms are designed to capture and in fact fracture our attention, as part of how profits are made. So even as we sought creative ways to harness multimodal literacies in the context of university learning and teaching, discussions continued about whether and how students were reading less and how social media were contributing to change attention spans.
Arona: In late 2022 at ChatGPT’s global launch, it was presented as a free tool that would (so it was claimed) automate many aspects of reading and writing and revolutionise the world of work. The idea that students would now have access to artificial intelligence sent shock waves through higher education.
Marijke: Early reactions to generative AI’s new availability included articles that tried to predict what impact the availability of AI might have on students’ learning and assessment. One of the most obvious predictions was that the tradition of essay-writing was going to be disrupted “from the ground up”. This was very concerning for academics in the humanities, since the essay has been the centre of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It has been important as part of how students have been taught how to research, think and write. The guidelines and ‘tool box’ documents produced by academic literacy specialists at South African universities have mostly been upbeat about how generative AI can offer ‘opportunities for learning and teaching’. A guide developed by colleagues at Wits early in 2023, for example, references claims that using tools like ChatGPT can help enhance ‘intrinsic learner motivation’ and provide ‘innovative opportunities for students to reproduce existing knowledge in order to enact high order thinking’. More recently however, Wits published an article by Martin Becker of the School of Electrical and Information Engineering. The article, called “How academics can counter, ‘AI thinks, therefore I am’”, recognises the value and power of LLMs at the same time as the potential risks they hold for academic integrity and students' writing development. It’s also telling that an on-line guide from the University of Stellenbosch highlights concerns such as the over-reliance by students on chatbots ‘which could hinder their ability to think critically and independently’, or that students might generate answers without fully ‘understanding the context or reasoning behind the material’. The document discusses ‘creative alternatives’ to ‘vulnerable’ assessments, and also provides a range of examples of getting students to work with or without generative AI.
Arona: What has especially worried lecturers is that copying and pasting could be taken to a whole new level, with the advent of Chat-GPT. For decades in higher education, there has been anxiety about plagiarism which focused on the unethical element of using sources as if they were one’s own without acknowledging the authors of those sources. UWC’s 2011 plagiarism policy stated that “the approach to the problem cannot only be punitive and that developmental practices need to be put in place in order to lessen the incidence of plagiarism”. Nevertheless, I think it’s still not obvious to many academics how difficult it is for many students to integrate ideas from different sources and to grasp the way in which academic knowledge is built up. This often leads to students cobbling together chunks of knowledge in their writing assignments. This can be addressed by scaffolding the development of students’ understanding of authorship, argument in writing, and the idea that knowledge is not homogenous but built up through the interaction of different “voices”. The level of anxiety evoked in universities by plagiarism is notched up even more by the advent of ChatGPT. Much of the concern about students’ use of ChatGPT has been about assessment, authenticity and ethics. Academics have been finding it difficult to know how to respond to the use of AI in assessments, for example, to ascertain to what extent and how it has been used.
Marijke: My sense is that ideas about how lecturers should respond to ChatGPT as an example of generative AI differs to some extent, if one compares the Humanities to other faculties at our universities - because of our explicit and central focus on approaches to reading and writing, integrated with critical thinking, analysis and independent research. For the Humanities it is a huge problem that ChatGPT blends material together without recognising sources, and indeed invents non-existent authors, titles of books and of journal articles as part of its mimicry. ChatGPT flattens the notion of authorship as it rolls out appropriate sounding chunks of text in appropriate sounding structures. Of course, it is going to keep being improved and will potentially introduce more challenges for the assessment of students’ writing as it refines “its grasp” of appropriate genres and comes across as increasingly authentic.
Arona: For young or inexperienced university students, ChatGPT circumvents the process of struggle inherent in learning how to engage with academic reading and writing, which constitutes learning in the university context. This applies strongly in the case of first-year students. However, it will not make undergraduate students’ progress through university easier. Using AI in an acceptable and ethical way will add to the many complex academic literacies that students need to master. Some people have suggested that ChatGPT will make writing centres at universities redundant. However, it is more likely that the accessibility of AI will expand the tasks of writing centres and academic literacy programmes as students need to develop critical digital literacies and lecturers need assistance in using AI in a beneficial way for developing students’ writing and critical thinking. As advances in technologies for writing and research have made the work of academics and students easier over the last forty years, they have also brought their own challenges, especially for students and the academics that need to mediate their learning and development of literacies.
Dr Arona Dison, Coordinator of the UWC Writing Centre, and Learning and Teaching Specialist in the Directorate of Learning, Teaching and Student Success at the University of the Western Cape.
Dr Marijke du Toit is Learning and Teaching Specialist in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of the Western Cape.
The UWC Writing Centre is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
University students face many challenges in the process of becoming fluent in academic reading and writing. Arona Dison, the Writing Centre Coordinator, and Marijke du Toit, the Teaching and Learning Specialist in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), reflect on their experiences of learning academic reading and writing as well as facilitating literacies development over the years.
Arona: When I started out as an undergraduate student at UCT in the 80s, I wrote essays by hand, writing a number of consecutive drafts. Sometimes I changed the order of the sections using arrows flowing from one to the other, or through literally cutting and pasting.
Marijke: I remember that in my third year at Stellenbosch, I used a typewriter to write my essays. Late at night, we would work in a seminar room of what used to be called the BJ Vorster building. I would place all the pages of my draft essay all along the tables, and walk around, cutting up the pages and figuring out a better structure before glueing the essay back together.
Arona: There was a dark, hot dungeon in the university library where all the photocopiers were housed. I would descend the ramp to the dungeon, clutching an assortment of short-loan books and leather-bound journals and wait for ages in the queue to photocopy. Not always knowing what was most relevant to the essay, I emerged with tons of photocopied sheets. Reading involved much underlining of (hopefully) relevant bits, copying onto paper … and then the impossible task of trying to synthesise these bits in an attempt to answer the question.
Marijke: I still have some photocopies from my undergraduate studies. I had adopted a method from the first-year module on Informal Logic that focused a lot on how to analyse arguments, and that involved using different styles of brackets, underlining and so on to identify key concepts, premises, conclusions, etc.
Arona: The advent of personal computers (PCs) was a liberating experience. It was a joy to be able to move chunks of texts around with a click of the mouse. Computer labs were few and unfriendly. I had to compete with friends to get access to the computer of a generous older friend in the neighbourhood. I felt less lonely and tired in the early hours of the morning in the company of the glowing green letters on the screen. A PC at that stage for me was a word processor. The internet was not yet available for personal access.
Marijke: In 1999, when I joined the History Department at what was then the University of Natal, I began teaching with Keith Breckenridge who was launching a new first-year course called ‘Internet Expertise’. Students were learning about the history of networked computers and the changing information economy, and building websites instead of writing traditional essays. What I now find interesting is that already they were learning reading skills relevant to internet-based resources. They had to come to the computer lab every week to complete a multiple choice test. In order to answer the questions, they had to use Google to locate information and texts on the internet. Over time, the courses that we developed included sections about Wikipedia and its practices of authorship. The scaffolding for learning how to do research now included exercises for navigating both the ‘scholarly’ and what I called the ‘wild’ internet, with its social media websites, blogs and citizen journalism and a plethora of propaganda. At UKZN in the early 2000s, our evolving curriculum responded to such changes in technology as the shift from analogue to digital photography, and the impact that this was having on ideas of photographic veracity. So ideas of reading and what reading involved also became increasingly multimodal. In fact, my students learned Photoshop and how to manipulate photographs, as part of the debate on the question of ‘truth and photography’. So one could argue that how they were learning to build arguments was also exceeding the confines of writing. But this happened in a context of relative privilege - in those years my department had a classroom with twenty or so PCs, specifically set up for our tutorials and practicals in History and Internet Studies.
Arona: It has been hard for universities (particularly those with less resources) to provide sufficient and adequate access to students through computer labs, given the cost of technology, the need to maintain and update equipment and for sufficient lab assistants to keep the computers in order and assist students. Since I joined the UWC Writing Centre in 2017, students have increasingly been using mobile phones to engage with their studies, access learning management systems, source materials, and, in many cases, to read articles. Some students are even writing their assignments on mobile phones. Texts that are formatted for reading on mobile phones are easy to read, but PDF documents pose challenges. Even if you use the sideways view and manage to get the whole width of the text on your screen, you can only view small chunks of the text at once. It lends itself to focussing on units of information rather than viewing a section in relation to the text as a whole. When I used to teach reading skills'', before smartphones became ubiquitous, we (academic development practitioners) encouraged students to read the introduction, skim over the article to get a sense of the whole article and look at the headings before embarking on a careful reading of the whole article. We tried to inculcate active reading, engaging with photocopies of text through underlining, circling, making notes and writing questions (similar to what you mentioned about your own reading practice). Working on PCs and laptops, it is possible to underline, bold and annotate on Adobe now, but this is something that could be more widely enabled and taught. Reading on a cell phone makes it more difficult to learn these active reading practices.
Marijke: One repercussion of the Covid-19 crisis and the years of on-line teaching that was forced upon our universities was that it was virtually impossible to make the photocopied ‘readers’, that had been widely used, available to students. I think that one lasting effect of that has been that it has become far more common to upload PDFs of prescribed articles and chapters to our course management system. I also think that there was already an established discussion about how students generally were struggling with focused reading and writing, in the context of the ‘attention economy’ that is also strongly associated with personal mobile devices.The concept dates from the 1960s, but today it is strongly associated with smartphones and social media, in the sense that contemporary digital devices and a range of online platforms are designed to capture and in fact fracture our attention, as part of how profits are made. So even as we sought creative ways to harness multimodal literacies in the context of university learning and teaching, discussions continued about whether and how students were reading less and how social media were contributing to change attention spans.
Arona: In late 2022 at ChatGPT’s global launch, it was presented as a free tool that would (so it was claimed) automate many aspects of reading and writing and revolutionise the world of work. The idea that students would now have access to artificial intelligence sent shock waves through higher education.
Marijke: Early reactions to generative AI’s new availability included articles that tried to predict what impact the availability of AI might have on students’ learning and assessment. One of the most obvious predictions was that the tradition of essay-writing was going to be disrupted “from the ground up”. This was very concerning for academics in the humanities, since the essay has been the centre of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It has been important as part of how students have been taught how to research, think and write. The guidelines and ‘tool box’ documents produced by academic literacy specialists at South African universities have mostly been upbeat about how generative AI can offer ‘opportunities for learning and teaching’. A guide developed by colleagues at Wits early in 2023, for example, references claims that using tools like ChatGPT can help enhance ‘intrinsic learner motivation’ and provide ‘innovative opportunities for students to reproduce existing knowledge in order to enact high order thinking’. More recently however, Wits published an article by Martin Becker of the School of Electrical and Information Engineering. The article, called “How academics can counter, ‘AI thinks, therefore I am’”, recognises the value and power of LLMs at the same time as the potential risks they hold for academic integrity and students' writing development. It’s also telling that an on-line guide from the University of Stellenbosch highlights concerns such as the over-reliance by students on chatbots ‘which could hinder their ability to think critically and independently’, or that students might generate answers without fully ‘understanding the context or reasoning behind the material’. The document discusses ‘creative alternatives’ to ‘vulnerable’ assessments, and also provides a range of examples of getting students to work with or without generative AI.
Arona: What has especially worried lecturers is that copying and pasting could be taken to a whole new level, with the advent of Chat-GPT. For decades in higher education, there has been anxiety about plagiarism which focused on the unethical element of using sources as if they were one’s own without acknowledging the authors of those sources. UWC’s 2011 plagiarism policy stated that “the approach to the problem cannot only be punitive and that developmental practices need to be put in place in order to lessen the incidence of plagiarism”. Nevertheless, I think it’s still not obvious to many academics how difficult it is for many students to integrate ideas from different sources and to grasp the way in which academic knowledge is built up. This often leads to students cobbling together chunks of knowledge in their writing assignments. This can be addressed by scaffolding the development of students’ understanding of authorship, argument in writing, and the idea that knowledge is not homogenous but built up through the interaction of different “voices”. The level of anxiety evoked in universities by plagiarism is notched up even more by the advent of ChatGPT. Much of the concern about students’ use of ChatGPT has been about assessment, authenticity and ethics. Academics have been finding it difficult to know how to respond to the use of AI in assessments, for example, to ascertain to what extent and how it has been used.
Marijke: My sense is that ideas about how lecturers should respond to ChatGPT as an example of generative AI differs to some extent, if one compares the Humanities to other faculties at our universities - because of our explicit and central focus on approaches to reading and writing, integrated with critical thinking, analysis and independent research. For the Humanities it is a huge problem that ChatGPT blends material together without recognising sources, and indeed invents non-existent authors, titles of books and of journal articles as part of its mimicry. ChatGPT flattens the notion of authorship as it rolls out appropriate sounding chunks of text in appropriate sounding structures. Of course, it is going to keep being improved and will potentially introduce more challenges for the assessment of students’ writing as it refines “its grasp” of appropriate genres and comes across as increasingly authentic.
Arona: For young or inexperienced university students, ChatGPT circumvents the process of struggle inherent in learning how to engage with academic reading and writing, which constitutes learning in the university context. This applies strongly in the case of first-year students. However, it will not make undergraduate students’ progress through university easier. Using AI in an acceptable and ethical way will add to the many complex academic literacies that students need to master. Some people have suggested that ChatGPT will make writing centres at universities redundant. However, it is more likely that the accessibility of AI will expand the tasks of writing centres and academic literacy programmes as students need to develop critical digital literacies and lecturers need assistance in using AI in a beneficial way for developing students’ writing and critical thinking. As advances in technologies for writing and research have made the work of academics and students easier over the last forty years, they have also brought their own challenges, especially for students and the academics that need to mediate their learning and development of literacies.
Dr Arona Dison, Coordinator of the UWC Writing Centre, and Learning and Teaching Specialist in the Directorate of Learning, Teaching and Student Success at the University of the Western Cape.
Dr Marijke du Toit is Learning and Teaching Specialist in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of the Western Cape.
The UWC Writing Centre is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
