Writing, Learning And The Development Of Expertise In Higher Education

Abstract

This chapter combines the issue of writing to learn with recent views of the development of prerequisites of professional expertise during higher education. The knowledge-intensive or symbolicanalytic work characteristic of today's professional jobs challenges educationalists to develop instructional methods that integrate domain-content learning with practising the general skills needed in today’s working life. It is argued here that constructivist and social constructivist views of learning offer promising starting points for developing instruction of this kind. Different traditional and novel fonns of writing are discussed from the viewpoint of these constructivist approaches and expertise development. It is concluded that each form of student writing has different benefits. Different fonns of writing and writing assignments entail different kinds of activities and thinking processes that, in turn, lead to different kinds of learning. From the perspectives of constructivism and studies of expertise, the general direction in developing writing-to-leam tasks would be moving from reproductive learning towards various reflective, metacognitive, and knowledge-building activities and integrating writing with other fonns of learning and studying such as reading and group discussions.