Hi ALL,
The notion that what ALL centres/units provide is "remedial" support has surfaced, again.

I'm in the process of reading Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson's Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision (London: Routledge, 2006), a new and very influential book, if comments made about it at the last Quality in Postgraduate Research Conference (17-18 April 2008) are anything to go by.

When Kamler and Thomson discuss student writing they refer to the "assistance" provided by "specialist support units" (p.10). Hey, I thought, they're writing about the job I'm in. Then, hang on a minute, they're not writing about the job I'm in because their characterisation of ALL belongs to another time. They suggest a number of things, but the one that made me blanch was the idea that "the help which is available is often framed as remedial work (such as foundation courses for overseas students) and removed from other forms of research education."

Now, as we know, over the past decade various ALL members have written papers decrying the way in which our work is perceived, focusing in particular on the notion that we provide "remedial" support for students. The majority of ALL practitioners would, I think, agree that this notion represents a superficial understanding of our work. At Academic Skills and Learning Centre we have spent a lot of time changing the institution's perception of our work; other centres and units have engaged in the same sort of work, the hard slog of educating others about what it is we do. We've also done a lot of work creating courses and running workshops for research students. Now this idea of our work being "remedial" is being perpetuated in a major publication. Our work of educating other academics is not over, not by a long shot.

Cheers
Stephen
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