by KEN HYLAND
City University of Hong Kong
Thoughts and Reflections by Mikha Mekler
I have made sure my students read and construct knowledge through texts after having been learning in this way myself at the LCF Fashion Business School on the MA Fashion Design Management. I have benefitted from reading hugely during this time and found a solid grounding in my knowledge. I understood that I can rely on my knowledge as I could rely on experts in my field who were scaffolding my arguments. It took away my imposter syndrome and made me secure.
I have since applied the practice of rigorous research and reading in my teaching and know that as a lecturer I can only do so much and there is an element to get to the deep knowledge that my students need to do on their own in the library or nowadays with a laptop wherever they see fit.
The Academic Attribution: Citation and the Construction of Disciplinary Knowledge text has given confirmation of this practice. I had feedback at times that our course is great but the workload and expectations are high, so I am often in doubt if I ask too much. I further have a 100% international students cohort with only two students having English as their mother tongue so I try to be understanding of this. I am however equipped with new ammunition that my practice makes good sense, and that citation is to the benefit of the learner no matter how tedious it can get at the time.
The clarity was achieved by the following train of thought: Citation is central to the social context of persuasion as it can both provide justification for arguments and demonstrate the novelty of one’s position Gilbert 1976; Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995), clarifying that appropriate textual practices are vital to the acceptance of claims.
I enjoyed the excursion in the text when the author describes scientific writers and marketing writers stating that science writers do not produce theory but uncover it and in social sciences, particularly in marketing writers are more inclined to pay higher recognition to ownership of an idea.
In the humanities and social, the established understandings have a wider input field Problem areas and topics are generally more discourse and range over wider academic and historical territory, and there is less assurance that questions can be answered by following a single path and further there might be different truths based on the cultural background of the problem or context around the time of the problem. This may mean that texts date poorly and must be rigorously challenged.
There is a saying though that good theory doesn’t date so I am now on the path to uncovering how to find the best theory for a topic and understanding that I have found it once I come across it.