Voices from the margins: narratives of learning development in a Digital Age

Abstract

This paper explores how to facilitate the ‘bedding in’ and ‘becoming of’ undergraduate students who come from non-traditional backgrounds and struggle with what is, for them, the often alien world of academic writing and assessment.  To achieve their aims, the authors set up a partnership between the students of a second-year Peer Mentoring module and those of a first-year Becoming an Educationalist one.  By means of this creative partnering, and via reflective blog entries, they worked to harness quasi-academic writing to help such first-year students to become familiar with, and powerful within, the exclusionary practices (in particular, the written conventions of academic essays) of Higher Education.  They argue that this innovative ‘teaming-up’ of second- and first-year students not only models collaborative learning and writing practice, but also facilitates the ‘bedding-in’ of newcomers.  The paper itself models the partnership and creative writing methods used to help students find their ‘voice’ by being ‘co-produced’ by the people teaching across the two modules concerned.