A review of „Writing about Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Creating and Contributing to Scholarly Conversations across a Range of Genres“ by Mick Healy, Kelly E. Matthews, and Alison Cook-Sather

[This review was written for the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, JLDHE initially; but then we couldn’t agree on issues that I considered too important to give up, especially when reviewing a book like this one, and criticising it the way I do. So I withdrew my submission, and decided to go with the blog-post alone.]

What does a book on academic writing need to deliver? That depends on what we want academic writing to be. Academic progress happens not only because we think: it happens because we are all different, we work differently, we think differently; and if we manage to draw on each other’s experiences, insights, and questions, we can think further than before, sometimes even further than we had ever imagined. For that to happen, we need to write. For that to happen as widely and as well as possible, we need to write in a certain way: so that others will read what we have written, understand what we mean to tell them, and get engaged to think about it. Could this book help with that? Yes – and no. There is a lot that is remarkably good about this book; but in other aspects it really disappoints. Weiterlesen →