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Vocational universities are increasingly becoming susceptible to pressures associated with the phenomenon known as 'academic drift'. Yet the specific influence of such pressures is experienced differently at various institutional levels and by different stakeholders in such universities. Exploring lecturers' understanding and perceptions of student academic writing can make visible the ways in which these pressures are realised, for example, in the types of writing given value and writing pedagogies deemed suitable in the context of the vocational university. In this paper, we report on an ethnographically shaped study exploring lecturers' writing pedagogies and perceptions of students as academic writers at a South African vocational university. The study analytically illustrated how wider socio-political, regulatory and ideological framings of these universities were implicated in lecturers' writing practices and pedagogies. The study found that lecturers and students were generally constricted by narrow vocationalist agendas, which reinforced negative conceptions of students as academic writers. Our findings suggest that while the explicit impact of academic drift drivers was minimally felt at the undergraduate diploma level of study in our research site, this appeared to close off the potential for writing to act as a means to facilitate students' epistemic access to their disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of academic literacies research has enhanced our understanding of university writing as contested, institutionally situated practice with important consequences, particularly for students as they learn to negotiate the writing demands of university study. Less empirical attention has been paid to the practices of subject academics as they guide, set, and assess student writing. This paper is based on an ethnographically oriented study of 14 UK university teachers in diverse institutional and disciplinary contexts. Data presented illustrate the ways in which competing discourses of writing as ‘skills’ and as ‘learning’ are played out in individuals’ practices, in their institutional contexts. Analysis shows how a dominant discourse of writing as ‘skills’ becomes associated with particular ideas about the value of writing work, how and by whom it should be done, and points to consequences for students, teachers and for the role of academic writing in teaching and learning at university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]