ABSTRACT
Assessment in higher education places a premium for success on students’ ability to work out the kinds of literacy practices lecturers require them to enact, and respond in specialized ways. Yet, literacy practices such as reading, writing and thinking are too often considered to be outside the remit of disciplinary teaching and learning. Chapter 5 uses the dimension of Semantics from Legitimation Code Theory to explore the connections between disciplinary literacy practices, specialized knowledge and ways of knowing, and the social (disciplinary) contexts in which meanings are made. This chapter uses examples of assessment tasks from the natural and social sciences to unpack the ways in which students’ thinking and writing work in response to assignments is specialized by the knowledge they are working with, and by the ways of knowing, doing and being that specialize knowers in the discipline. The argument here is that whether they are able to do so on their own, or are able to work with academic developers, disciplinary lecturers need to make the ways of thinking and writing about knowledge an overt part of their curriculum and teaching practice. This chapter shows you how to develop a more complex and nuanced understanding of success for your students as related to the success acquisition and enactment of their disciplinary literacy practices.
