UCDG – University Capacity Development Grant (2021–current)

– Project leader, content designer and content developer

Academic acculturation refers to the ability (and motivation) to assimilate, understand, embrace, interact and engage with academic discourse in all its diversity. This is an essential condition for academic integration, and it is often difficult to accomplish. It therefore entails growing to become a member of the academic community by becoming aware of how to use (and indeed conform to) the academic community’s communicative currency: norms and practices, values and expectations and linguistic conventions that constitute academic discourse. The success of academic acculturation, in essence, lies within students’ ability to express themselves appropriately and adequately through academic writing. Academic writing ability, among others, includes acquiring complex terminology (general and discipline-specific), scientific rhetoric, knowledge of technical structures in terms of academic argumentation, metacognition strategies, critical thinking skills, and academic integrity, all of which are of particular importance at postgraduate level. The purpose with this UCDG-project is to:

• provide opportunities for the enhancement of academic writing development of postgraduate students at North-West University;
• create practical and relevant academic writing support resources to empower students, lecturers and supervisors across campuses, faculties and different year levels; and
• offer the prospect of tailor-made/entity-specific academic writing development opportunities in a combination of synchronous and asynchronous offerings.

A complete workshop series with educational videos, readers, exercises and summary sheets has been developed. The instructional design allows for it to be used as a complete stand alone, or different thematically focused modules in contact, online or hybrid modes.