Kirstin Dianne WilmotRhodes University | RU · Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL)
Kirstin Dianne Wilmot
Doctor of Philosophy (University of Sydney) MPhil (Cantab) MA (UCT)
About
13
Publications
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Introduction
I currently work as a senior lecturer in the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) at Rhodes University, where I also coordinate the Higher Education Studies doctoral programme.
My research focuses on disciplinary literacy practices, particularly at the postgraduate level. I combine my background in linguistics and sociology of education to analyse knowledge practices in academic writing and findings more effective ways to teach doctoral writing more explicitly.
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (13)
In the context of rapid change in higher education, there is a great demand for powerful theory and methods to address key issues, particularly related to teaching and learning. This chapter traces the uptake of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) in higher education studies in South Africa to make sense of how and why this theory has become so popular....
This part-reflective, part-conceptual article focuses on the issue of supervision models and the need to move away from the dominance of the traditional master-apprentice model which continues to persist in many social sciences and humanities contexts. Drawing on communities of practice theory, I critically reflect on my own PhD supervision experie...
The use of theory to analyse and interpret empirical data is a valued practice in much social science doctoral research. A crucial aspect of this practice involves generating sophisticated theoretical understandings and critiques of phenomena in our social world. Despite the importance of theory, however, few concrete ‘...
Doctoral writing is an elusive research practice. Given their size, individuality and disciplinary complexity, analysing doctoral dissertations is a complex task – one that makes defining exact rules for students to follow difficult, if not impossible. In order to open up access to increasingly diverse students, there is a need to make this tacit w...
Universities are grappling with multiple shifts that have made the processes of supporting student learning and enabling the professional development of academic staff ever more challenging. Common sense approaches abound but do little to address the complexities of the issues being faced in our institutions. This book brings together a rich collec...
There is little consensus on how to theorise. Most studies tend to adopt a focus on the importance of using theory in research, but don't provide much guidance on how to actually apply theory to data. This post describes how 'semantic gravity' from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) can be used to better understand the theorising process in doctoral wr...
Curriculum transformation is a central concern for higher education in response to rapidly expanding technologies, globalisation and the widening diversity of the student and staff body. This is particularly true for South Africa, which is still grappling with inequalities and pressure for social redress in its universities. Early responses to supp...
Utilising new LCT tools, this paper unpacks the process involved in doctoral writing whereby students develop their data chapters from raw data description to theorized analysis, and gives insights into how this might be taught more explicitly. Tacit knowledge-building practices in academic writing, while often inherently ‘known’ by masters in the...
This paper reports on a writing group pilot programme implemented at a South African university. Drawing on literature, anonymous student evaluations and facilitator observations, it discusses the use of writing groups for supporting postgraduate academic writing practices. Developed within a broader postgraduate academic writing support programme,...
This paper describes and justifies the conceptualisation and adoption of a socio-cultural approach to academic writing support which was part of the inception of a broader orientation programme in a newly established Centre for Postgraduate Studies at a research intensive South African university. The role of writing support is considered in relati...
Higher education institutions around the world are experiencing the problem of PhD scholars not being able to make the transition from ‘student’ to ‘intellectual-in-training’. High attrition rates, common at the PhD level, create educational (growth of a new generation of academics), social (access and exclusion) and economic (wasted resources) pro...
This paper presents a sociolinguistic investigation of language use in the South African context. It focuses on socio-cultural and subsequent phonetic change in two prestigious secondary school environments in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Adopting a poststructuralist lens, it considers how female isiXhosa mother tongue speakers, who attend priva...
Projects
Project (1)
This thesis addresses the practical problem of developing effective writing pedagogy to support doctoral candidates. It does this by focusing on the ways knowledge is organised in dissertations and the strategies used to enact these practices in writing. In doing so, the thesis offers an alternative perspective on knowledge practices in doctoral dissertations that goes beyond distinguishing between knowledge ‘types’ and simple descriptive categories of disciplines (e.g. ‘hard’ vs. ‘soft’). The study shows how this alternative perspective can see knowledge, analyse knowledge and, importantly, reveal the organising principles of knowledge; and from this it develops tools and descriptions that uncover generalizable strategies for knowledge-building oriented toward doctoral-writing pedagogy.
Drawing on Legitimation Code Theory the thesis explores 25 exemplary doctoral dissertations across a range of subject areas in the humanities and social sciences. Through analyses at multiple levels of granularity – from whole dissertations, to individual sections and fine-grained phases of writing – it develops a set of conceptual tools for analysing knowledge in writing and demonstrates how such tools can be used to unpack the knowledge work involved in dissertations.
Through the dimension of Specialization, five ‘core components’ of dissertations are distinguished that reveal a set of strategies candidates use to foreground different kinds of knowledge. These strategies point to the bases of the claims being made, revealing one aspect of the ‘rules of the game’ underpinning dissertation writing. These ‘rules’ are not tied to any one discipline; rather, the strategies are organised according to the kind of knowledge-claim enacted. Drawing on the dimension of Semantics, key strategies for shifting the context-dependence and complexity of knowledge are explored that show how students construct findings in exemplary ways. To orient toward pedagogy, the strategies are then turned back onto the dissertations to demonstrate their utility for analysing texts to reveal key pedagogic insights.
The framework developed in this thesis provides an entry point for developing theoretically sophisticated but empirically-grounded tools with pedagogic potential for analysing knowledge practices in doctoral writing.
