The Purpose of Education Is to Stimulate the Imagination

Listen to this interview of Julia Molinari, lecturer in professional academic communication at The Open University (UK) and independent researcher. We talk her book What Makes Writing Academic: Rethinking Theory for Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022) and about the things people use academic writing for.

Julia Molinari : "We need to ensure that teachers of academic writing have access to scholarship and can do the research that they need to do in order to sensitize themselves to the different ways of conceiving of writing. Because I see scholarship very much as a lever to the change that needs to happen in higher education. Scholarship means, for the teacher of EAP, knowing what has been written about academic writing and knowing that there isn't just one standard form, there isn't just one template that says, 'This is academic. This is not academic.' So, enabling practitioners to do research, to do the scholarship — this is something that requires an institutional commitment: people need to have time built into their contracts, they need to be literally paid to do the scholarship, to be aware of what's at stake when it comes to academic writing."

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com.

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