A socio-cultural approach to higher education students' experiences with academic literacies

The focus of this thesis is an exploration of students' engagement with academic literacies. The study is based on interview data, visual material and objects brought to these interviews by five students on an Education Studies undergraduate degree course. Drawing from the theoretical frame of New Literacy Studies, academic literacies are broadly defined as socially situated literacy practices. The focus is on how and where ‘academic literacies’ happen and how these literacies interact with personal histories and students' broader socio-cultural experience. Three themes: journeying, identity and emotional concerns, have been identified. The themes highlight the complex, nuanced and socially-embedded nature of the participants’ academic lives. In particular, Bakhtin’s notion of chronotopes is drawn on to illuminate the patterning of experiences in time and space. The findings provide insights into students’ broader literacy practices moving beyond the current focus on academic writing within the academic literacies field.