Conferences

The Writing Lab team presented a staff development workshop at the UCT T&L conference on the 21st of November 2024, entitled All Teachers are Language Teachers. The workshop used a variety of pedagogies including discomfort, reflection, and discussion to introduce participants to the theoretical frameworks of Discourse and Academic Literacies as ways of being within disciplinary contexts, and the associated concept of disciplinary language. Using a transformative lens, the workshop demonstrated how the power and privilege afforded to English as a dominant language works to maintain exclusion of marginalized students and perpetuate privilege. The workshop guided participants towards identifying practical elements in their curriculum that may be hidden from students, and introduced them to a variety of transformative teaching strategies that could be applied to make tacit disciplinary language and literacy practices explicit and accessible.