INTERDEPENDENT ACADEMIC IDENTITIES: LANGUAGE AND LEARNING PRACTITIONERS AND THE SUBJECT WHO WRITES.

Starting with questions of how a language and learning practitioner might assist a student to write in ways demanded of them by a university, we argue that writing pedagogies at an undergraduate and postgraduate level must take account of and work with the complex of informing and transforming conditions of student identity and subjectivity. The identities-in-practice of language and learning practitioners have an interdependent relation to the identities-in-practice of the students with whom they work. In exploring this interdependence and its implications for writing pedagogy, we draw a distinction between the writing subject (a self that writes like an academic) and the subject who writes (an idea of self which exceeds the notion of the writing subject through a recognition of the subject’s embodied, affective and gendered history). We argue that consideration of the pedagogical interdependence needs to be seen through the experience of students as more than simply writing subjects. To do this, we work with an idea of the subject who writes. A crucial question in our consideration is, are new and developing subjectivities, as produced in and through the university context seamless and replicable or do they embody and challenge traces of the emotional, cognitive and experiential history of the individuals learning to be academics? We take an approach which allows us to explore the ways in which institutions attempt to 'discipline ' students into their disciplines and we make the claim that this experience of being ‘disciplined ’ is one which (for the subject who writes) exceeds linguistic, cognitive and textual competence