In her recent article 'Re-integrating Academic Development and Academic Language and Learning: a Call to Reason' (2014), Alisa Percy describes the historically separate trajectories in universities (in Australia but also more widely) of professional expertise in academic (educational) development and academic language and learning.She argues that this separation (in which, broadly, the former is staff-facing whilst the latter is student-facing) is unhelpful and calls for a reintegration of language and literacy expertise with academic development work in order to 'promote the development of students' language and learning simultaneously' (2014:1203).Percy's analysis and her conclusions are convincing to me.If I'm asked at a party what my job is (groan), I'm never quite sure which professional title to adopteducational developer, writing developer, learning developer, academic developerand, similarly, as its chronic institutional grumblings attest, the university in which I work is also never quite definitively cured of its anxieties about where the work I do should belong (historically over here, logically perhaps over there?).Conveniently sheltering under the nonpindownable, un-institutional, and non-generic name, 'Thinking Writing', the team in which I work has always taken the view that language and learningand knowing and being and doingare intimately connected, and that attention to language (writing specifically) isat least in principleas much the responsibility of disciplinary academics as is the teaching and learning of disciplinary content; the two, that is, can't really be separated.

At the heart of an Academic Literacies approach is a concern with "transformation" and the "transformative."But what does this mean?How is "transformation" to be understood, and what does it look like when using an Academic Literacies lens to investigate and design writing practices in the academy?In this section, the book's editors each offer a perspective on these questions-but without a desire to close them down.We recognize that individual practitioner-researchers will define and work with the notion of transformation somewhat differently depending on their/our particular institutional and/or disciplinary positions and the specific questions they/we ask.An examination and elucidation of this contextual diversity is, indeed, one of the main aims of this volume. thereSa lilliS: toWardS tranSformative deSignAs a teacher, researcher and participant in contemporary academia I am involved in both working with(in) and against powerful conventions for meaning making and knowledge construction.I am committed to exploring what it is that prevailing academic conventions for meaning making have to offer-and to whom-and what it is they constrain or restrict.My concern (based on many years of teaching and researching) is that we-as teachers, researchers, writers, policy makers-may often adopt prevailing conventions, including those surrounding which specific Design rests on a chain of processes of which critique is one: it can, however, no longer be the focal one, or be the major goal of textual practices.Critique leaves the initial definition of the domain of analysis to the past, to past production.(Kress, 2000, p. 160) The question of design-or what I am referring to as "transformative design" in Andrew: So it's an excuse for, like, the government not intervening in causes of ill health, isn't it?Andrew's aha! moment isn't the end of the story however: I observed how much of the argument that had emerged collaboratively and antagonistically through the peer to peer discussion dropped out of the writing the students subsequently did (see Mitchell, 1995).What accounted for this disappearance?Was it control over the medium, the medium itself, the fact that the writing would be read and assessed by the teacher as part of working towards a public exam, a resultant reluctance to take risks?These kinds of question about "translation, how meaning gets moved, or does not …", about "intersubjectivity, how separate individuals come to conceive, or do not, reasonably similar things …" make clear that it was not possible thinking Jacobs, C. (

In this contribution we outline and discuss the work of Thinking Writing at Queen Mary, University of London. Thinking Writing seeks, through a focus on writing, to facilitate professional development and enhanced teaching, assessment and curriculum design. We describe how the initiative has developed over a 10-year period, the range of activities it now encompasses, and the theoretical orientations and resources from which it draws. To explain the negotiated way in which the Thinking Writing team typically works, we give an account of our involvement with processes of change in a single department of the university. We note that our approach does not assume particular models of writing nor measure success in terms of the “written product”; and we consider the potential future impact on our work of new strategic initiatives that articulate “writing” as an explicit goal.

This article was given as a keynote address to the 2009 conference of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW), 30 June to 2 July, at Coventry University, UK. It draws on experiences at Queen Mary, University of London, of developing a 'writing in the disciplines' initiative and of working towards institutional recognition for writing as a key and integral part of student learning. It raises issues about the transition from school to university writing and about such frameworks as 'Graduate Attributes'. Sometimes weaving together others' stories, it argues that, whilst there is great potential for writing development in universities, we also need to be aware of risks that derive from adopting industrialized approaches, governed by a narrow emphasis on form, belief in the possibility and benefits of 'transparency' and an over-reliance on explicit criteria to drive assessment and learning.

This article is an introduction to two other articles in this issue, Catherine Maxwell’s ‘Teaching 19th-century aesthetic prose’ and Kirsteen Anderson’s ‘The whole learner: the role of imagination in developing disciplinary learning’. It highlights the significance of the courses described in Maxwell’s and Anderson’s accounts by discussing how the writing tasks that they engage students in contribute to the development of disciplinary understanding, and how, whilst eschewing reliance on the conventional schooled essay, they enable students to develop writing that is essayistic. It points to the potential that reinvisaging disciplinary writing has for curriculum and assessment design.

This is the second of two articles on Developing Students’ Learning through Mathematical Writing (a Maths, Stats & OR Network (MSOR Network) funded mini-project) at Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL). These articles report on the Mathematical Writing (MW) course at QMUL, devised by Professor Franco Vivaldi. The investigation into student learning on the MW course was carried out by staff in the Thinking Writing (TW) initiative at QMUL which works to develop the teaching and assessment of writing (see http://www.thinkingwriting.qmul.ac.uk/).

You have accessJournal of Urology1 Apr 2009LONG- TERM OUTCOMES OF THE CHAIT TRAP-DOOR CECOSTOMY TUBE IN VIA AN OPEN OR PERCUTANEOUS APPROACH Jennifer Miles-Thomas, Sally Mitchell, and E James Wright Jennifer Miles-ThomasJennifer Miles-Thomas More articles by this author , Sally MitchellSally Mitchell More articles by this author , and E James WrightE James Wright More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5347(09)61152-6AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail "LONG- TERM OUTCOMES OF THE CHAIT TRAP-DOOR CECOSTOMY TUBE IN VIA AN OPEN OR PERCUTANEOUS APPROACH." The Journal of Urology, 181(4S), p. 405 © 2009 by American Urological AssociationFiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 181Issue 4SApril 2009Page: 405 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2009 by American Urological AssociationMetricsAuthor Information Jennifer Miles-Thomas More articles by this author Sally Mitchell More articles by this author E James Wright More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement PDF DownloadLoading ...

Beyond templates: exploring mathematical concepts through writing Volume/Issue Vol 8, Issue 3 Date Wednesday, 1 October, 2008 Journal Name MSOR Connections Author(s) Teresa McConlogue Sally Mitchell Will Clavering Abstract This is the first of two articles on the Developing Students’ Learning through Mathematical Writing project at Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL) funded by the Maths, Stats & OR Network (MSOR Network). This project aims to evaluate the Mathematical Writing (MW) course at QMUL and the postgraduate course for teaching assistants which prepares post graduate teaching assistants (PGTAs) for tutoring and marking on the MW course. The evaluation is being carried out by the staff of the Thinking Writing (TW) initiative which works with academics at QMUL to explore ways of helping students learn through writing and become better writers. In this short piece, we give a brief introduction to the issues we are exploring in the evaluation; the later article will provide a fuller account and make suggestions for the development of the mathematical writing approach in future years. DOI doi: 10.11120/msor.2008.08030029 File upload

As part of an exploratory study at three universities (two in the UK and one in the USA) of how first-year students in three disciplines (biology, electrical engineering and history) learn to argue, we conducted interviews (individual and group) with university faculty and students about the place of argument in their teaching and learning. Here we reflect on the complexity of researching a term that refers both to an abstract concept and process and to diverse actual practices that often appear to be in excess of, or only partially covered by, such abstraction. We found stable, definitive data about argument hard to abstract convincingly from the interviews. The analysis instead drew our attention to how faculty and students inflected the term 'argument' in diverse, nuanced ways; constructed their accounts of 'argument' and of themselves as students or teachers interactively in the interview; and introduced various related terms (e.g. 'analysis', 'interpretation', 'critique'). Reflecting on ways in which the interview can foreclose as well as open up opportunities for sense making around 'argument', we concluded that an approach that anchors talk in detailed accounts of practice is most fruitful in developing our understanding. In this way, interviewing can be a valuable research tool in developing understanding of how 'argument' is used in discourse and manifested in actual practices.

The aberrations of memory have in them this peculiarity: we never remember that our remembrance is habitually, not merely fallible, but faulty. We treat all mistakes as exceptional, rather than instantial. We assume that when error is detected, there is either intentional falsehood or culpable inexactitude—or at the least, some singular accidental lapse.… Over and over again the same result occurs whenever we have occasion to verify any particular recollection by reference to memoranda, or to return to the scene of a past occurrence, or to discuss with another witness the details of any event.… Nevertheless, in the face of such experiences a hundred times repeated, we remark complacently again and again: "How strange that I should have mistaken such a fact! how singular that my memory (generally so accurate) should have made me fancy that house so much larger than it is!"1

terms. Today’s concerns about aging do not overdetermine her agenda, since she shows, for example, that the idea of old age as a time of dependence is not universal. Third, her historical gaze can extend our knowledge of the society in which the aged lived their lives and cut across research boundaries, whether of family history, demographic reconstruction, or literary representation. Adapting Scott’s statement on gender, Ottaway claims that aging is a “useful category of historical analysis” (277).2 She has interesting things to say about the eighteenthcentury poor-relief system, extended family relationships, and sexual difference. At the heart of the book are three quantitative parish studies, which apply the methods of historical demography to a variety of local censuses, administrative records, wills, etc. Ottaway supplements them with qualitative sources, used predominantly to establish the discourses that shaped attitudes to old age. She aims to oesh out our understanding of aging, but her arrangement and interpretation of materials is conventional. From an interdisciplinary perspective, her work opens, but also leaves to one side, questions about subjectivity and the body that closer reading of texts and analysis of social dynamics would illuminate.

"Argument" is perhaps one of the most misunderstood terms in higher education, meaning different things in different disciplines. Yet on one thing most educators agree: it is almost impossible to attain success at the highest levels in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and other language-based disciplines without a command of argumentative skills. Learning to Argue in Higher Education was written to allow for a cross-fertilization of ideas about argument between different disciplines and traditions, and to encourage conversation about their approaches to its teaching and learning. This volume makes a significant contribution to the current thinking about argument, addressing why we teach argument in the first place, how it currently figures in teaching and learning, and how me might think about it in more productive ways. Covering everything from formal discussion in seminars to tutorials and written essays, these authors approach the problem from different angles: critical accounts of practice, classroom pedagogy, as well theoretical models of argument, students’ perspective on learning, and the dynamics involved in teaching and learning. The book represents a range of disciplines, including architecture, law, social science, work-based education, as well as writing and composition.

DESPITE SOME TWENTY YEARS of scholarship in the field, core questions such as “what is a New Woman?” and “what is New Woman fiction?” still remain vexed and all too often need more precise definition. Yet one can say that for all the conflicts of meaning and emphasis between sexual and political, discursive and actual, or caricature and didactic, the feminist rediscovery of the New Woman during the late 1970s has not only opened the canon but has also begun a transformation in the way we understand the entire fin de siècle.

It is often argued that community based health organisations ought to have substantial links with other organisations in their local environment in order to provide integrated, accountable clinical and preventive services. This paper reports results from a study of the links forged by staff working in four community health centres in Victoria, Australia. The pattern of links between organisations is described and their functions explored. The perceptions of community health workers and their network partners in the other organisations are compared and the strategies used by the workers to establish and build their links identified. It can be argued that links with external organisations are important in community health practice and are valued by the organisations with which the centres establish links. They have, however, received very little attention within or without the field of community health. They are taken for granted, rarely discussed, and as often inhibited as facilitated by the structures within which community health centres operate. Consequently, a great deal of valuable community health work remains unacknowledged, potentially underdeveloped and undervalued. It has not been made clear how education can best support community health staff in this aspect of their work.