ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the participants' working routines where they perceived solutions to students' writing problems to be beyond their remit. It argues that decisions to pass work with student writing on because it is "somebody else's issue" encourage a notion of writing itself as a decontextualised skill, which in turn promotes unhelpful divisions of labour around student writing. The attraction of the type of "outsourcing" of labour around student writing is predicated on a notion of writing as skills and work with writing as something which can be "efficiently" "delivered" outside disciplinary pedagogic interaction. In some participants' contexts, there were established arrangements linking work around student writing with pastoral care within the department or school. The chapter shows that even when individual academic teachers take responsibility for student writing, it often remains conceptually and in practical pedagogical terms separate from disciplinary learning, knowledge and 'content'.