Yurni Said-Sirhan and Nina VENKATARAMAN
Centre for English Language Communication (CELC)
yurni.s@nus.edu.sg; nina-v@nus.edu.sg
Said-Sirhan, Y., & Venkataraman, N. (2023). Building a critical self-reflexive authorial voice [Paper presentation]. In Higher Education Campus Conference (HECC) 2023, 7 December, National University of Singapore. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/hecc2023proceedings/building-a-critical-self-reflexive-authorial-voice/
SUB-THEME
Interdisciplinarity and Education
KEYWORDS
Authorial voice, critical self-reflection, literature review
CATEGORY
Paper Presentation
ABSTRACT
Given that different Ideas and Exposition courses in the NUS University Town College Programme (UTCP) encourage students to develop nuanced arguments, it is crucial that students identify and develop their own authorial voice in relation to the literature they read on the specified subject. We adopt a Bakhtinian (1986) orientation towards authorial voice, which is located in the text-mediated interaction between the writer and the reader that not only projects confidence, but also shows ownership over one’s arguments. In doing so, it prevents students from merely reproducing ideas from their reading of academic sources.
Here, we suggest that students incorporate a critical self-reflexive survey of academic literature. We define critical self-reflexivity as the awareness of how students can situate themselves in relation to the texts they read. This is demonstrated through the stances they adopt in reviewing literature and then using it to rationalise their arguments.
According to our proposed framework, students first define their topics, in order to identify the relevant domains and disciplines for conducting a library research review. This enables students to narrow their research focus, as well as identify the goals, purpose, and scope of the review. Next, students identify the relationships or patterns between the works. These patterns reveal the outliers or counterarguments which help them establish the gaps in timeline, scale, methodology, context, or perspective. Subsequently students choose to focus on gaps and patterns that address their research questions feasibly. They then spend time understanding how these patterns and gaps warrant their arguments and counterarguments. Finally, in the critical self-reflexive stage, students develop a set of questions that help them establish new contexts and connections with their core arguments. These questions help students develop their authorial voice by identifying their own contribution to the academic conversation. Following this, students synthesise with intent using relevant discourse markers to put forth their position. These discourse markers are ways by which we understand that students have acquired the ability to read critically and write with a strong authorial stance.
The literature review section in an academic paper can be a challenging task for most first-year students; yet it is “the genre of paper that every researcher looks for when starting a research study” (Rowe, 2014, p. 242). The difficulty that some students face when reading academic literature is not knowing how to use the literature purposefully to develop contexts and connections in their own arguments. To help students transit from critical reading of literature to critical construction of arguments, our framework includes a critical self-reflexive component through key questions. This helps students move away from a simple survey of academic literature to knowledge transformation.
REFERENCES
Bakhtin, M. M. (2010). Speech genres and other late essays. University of Texas Press.
Rowe, F. (2012). Toward a richer diversity of genres in information systems research: New categorization and guidelines. European Journal of Information Systems, 21(5), 469-78. https://doi.org/10.1057/ejis.2012.38
Saeed, M., & Ahmed. I (2021). An analytical review on rethinking service-learning as critical transformative paradigm in higher education. Journal of Humanities, Social and Management Sciences (JHSMS), 2(2), 318-34. https://doi.org/10.47264/idea.jhsms/2.2.23