7. Of House and Home: Reflections on Knowing and Writing for a ‘Southern’ Postgraduate Pedagogy

2. Introducing research rigour in the social sciences: Transcultural strategies for teaching ERPP writing, research design, and resistance to epistemic erasure

“…In practice, hardly any of my ERPP participants have failed to understand and align themselves with professional imperatives like these. In our discussions, however, I am quite honest and open in expressing my personal opinions about the mores of the global academy (which are by no means necessarily favourable; see Cadman, 2014). Most significantly, my classroom curiosity about how the expectations of an anglophone research study are thought to be appropriate, or not, by novice researchers for their own communities, is entirely authentic.…”

“…As we have mentioned, we approached the design of this study in light of recent theoretical scholarship, which stresses the potentially destructive impacts of adopting anglophone norms in research and pedagogy for local-periphery contexts in both Europe and Asia (see, for example, Alastrué & Pérez-Llantada, 2015;Cadman, 2014). Thus we were conscious of Western critical values in both teaching and research as we sought to understand how Vietnamese ERP teachers and students saw and enacted their roles in research education.…”

“…45-6, citing Phillipson; see also Bennett, 2015). And for me too, despite the obvious diversity of contextual outcomes, the strong form of this argument remains convincing (see Cadman, 2014). It is from this position that I walk into a classroom as a research writing teacher, holding the same view as the Schostaks (Schostak & Schostak, 2013, p. 11) when they say 'rhetoric is more than just ornament since it provides an underlying structuring of the thought processes where data is transformed into evidence … ' For ERPP teachers, employed as often as not by anglophone metropolitan institutions, such a process takes a simple but indomitable form, in that, as Fenton-Smith (2014, p. A29) points out, these institutions 'recommend that instructors assimilate international students into the academic, sociocultural and linguistic norms of the host nation'.…”

“…It is just such a moral imperative that creates the tensions for me in my research writing and teaching (see Cadman, 2014). Particularly in my ERPP role, I am deeply challenged by the question: Am I primarily a part of the neocolonial problem or a contributor to its solution?…”

Whose Voice is Right when I Write? Identity in Academic Writing

“…An African worldview, for example, is different. Conceptions of knowledge in the African context are based upon cooperation and collective responsibility, corporateness and interdependence (as opposed to competition, individual rights, separateness and independence) (Cadmon 2014). In other words, the well-being of others and striving towards a common good rather 1 Also see Chapter 2 and Chapter 12 in this book that both speak to how African knowledge systems often get subverted to a westernised epistemic point of view.…”