The ambivalence of academic writing among design teachers

Abstract

In the higher education setting, academic writing is a valid way to produce knowledge. Therefore, the design practices, based on a visual language where writing plays an auxiliary role, could be threatened. Using an academic literacies approach, interested in studying what counts as knowledge and who has the authority to produce, the objective of this article is to analyze if design aligns, adapts or resists the academic writing discourse. Utilizing this approach, this article reports the exploratory study results regarding the representations of eleven university teachers of design in respect to academic writing. Through a case study involving teachers working in architecture, graphic design, industrial design and urban design study programs, interviews were thematically analyzed to identify implicit meaning in three specific relationships: writing/reading, writing/student profile, writing/professional field. Ambivalent positions were discovered among the main findings: sometimes, the teachers aligned themselves with the dominant academic writing discourse, while at other times they expressed an almost complete lack of relevance of writing in acquiring proficiency in design. This ambivalence originates in power and authority discourses: academic writing emphasizes the idea that those who produce knowledge necessarily write and exclude other possibilities within design, where communities of practice determine what counts as knowledge according to processes not based in writing.