Innovative Methods and Practices of Academic Writing and Writing Instruction
THE SHARING OF PRACTICE AND RESEARCH ACROSS INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARIES VIA A DATABASE
Bronwyn James¹, Judy Maxwell²
¹University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia 2 RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
The sharing of practice and research across international boundaries is the theme of this research/project meeting. The Association for Academic Language and Learning (AALL) has a strong focus on writing and learning development in the Australian higher education context. As a way of sharing practice and research within this context, we have developed a database (http://www.aall.org.au/aalldb) that has many potential applications for both educators and administrators. The database provides a mechanism by which we are able to respond to the questions: ‘What do academic language and learning (ALL) educators do and what research is produced by and informs these practices’? The database is an outcome of two earlier projects funded by AALL. In 2008, RMIT University began the process of establishing a database for research conducted by ALL educators on topics related to ALL practice. This research is published in a number of places making it difficult to locate. In 2007, the University of Wollongong developed a practice website and database based on information provided by 33 of the 39 Australian universities. The two projects have been combined to create the current database, launched in 2013. It is userfriendly, updatable, and searchable by practice or research. Many of the current database fields appear to map neatly with the themes of this conference. In this research/project meeting, we begin with a discussion of the development and the outcome of the database project. We then invite participants to explore the relevance of the data fields to their own writing and institutional contexts in order to identify areas of commonality and divergence. Our intention in this meeting is to explore the following possibilities: 1. What might be the benefits of extending the database to a broader international context? 1. What changes would be needed to extend the AALL database so that it is reflective of an international context? 2. Could the database be replicated within other national contexts with links established across these different databases? 2. What funding exists to enable either option a or b ? 3. Can we establish an ongoing international working group to develop the database?