Advancing Critical Thinking: Honing the Essence of Academic Writing Through Co-curricular Writing Workshops

Writing is more than just a tool in the academic toolbox. Writing in the academy is an essence, a part of our academic selves entering and engaging in intellectual conversations. Teaching students how to write becomes an act of awakening and honing writing as an essence to support students in their learning journeys. The Centre for Writing and Communication (CWC) draws on the ethos of writing as essence—centring the process of writing across disciplines in its pedagogy as the route to listening, thinking and learning. Our teaching activities are informed by questions raised on writing across the University and broader academic landscape, including critical thinking, creativity and inclusivity concerns: Is writing an innate ability or talent? How do you hone and advance the ability to write clearly? And how can writing pedagogy include varied disciplines, classroom backgrounds, and individuals?

In thinking through these questions, at CWC, we prioritise dynamism, challenging the reduction of writing to prefigured checklists and templates that too often focus on the outcome rather than the process, resulting in academic writing that is dense and obscure. Our work currently involves considering whether writing pedagogies have a particular South Asian shape. If yes, what does that shape look like? The complex problems of economic and health crises, environmental degradation, species extinction, climate change, political polarisation and persisting social inequalities are cross-disciplinary and have specific orientations within the South Asian context. Engaging with complexity and specificity requires students across sciences, social sciences and humanities to think through problems continuously.

Ongoing thinking through complex issues demands that our teaching build capacities to understand and communicate in ways that offer intellectual openings. For this, the centre views writing in the academy as a recursive and creative process. Our basic rubric addresses the varied components of academic writing. We further deepen the rubrics in collaboration with the needs of the classroom we are entering, where the level of study, discipline, and points of struggle are all part of our teaching interventions. Put differently, CWC develops teaching materials that support students to write in response to the questions they are thinking through in their classrooms while ensuring their writing is comprehensible and inclusive.

Our teaching activities include collaborations with departments, centres and the student body to offer academic writing support. For research writing, we offer Winter and Summer Schools to advanced research students, including ASP and Postgraduate students. We also provide standalone workshops throughout the year on campus. The teaching materials are consistently updated and adapted to the learning needs of our students, with modules broadly spanning principles of ethical writing, demystifying original contribution, balancing theory, data and analysis and writing for academic publishing, amongst others.