Personal Statements in University Entry (AcLits Seminar 2007)

Academic Literacies Seminar, UCL, 22 June 2007

Academic Writing and the School-to-University Transition: the Personal Statement as a Genre of Transition
(as part of a panel presentation on school > college transition with Christina Richardson, Tracey Costley and Martha Firestone)

Summary
This presentation looks at one written genre widely used in the British university admissions process – the UCAS Personal Statement (PS). Today I consider the PS as a genre of transition between school and university culture.

The PS serves as a tool of selection alongside examination grades and teacher references. It manages the transition of students from school to university. However, for students themselves it is often their first experience of writing for an academic audience outside the school environment.

This presentation gauges students’ understanding of this ‘new’ audience through an analysis of three writers’ revisions in subsequent drafts of their personal statements. The analysis suggests that through the personal statement students gain vital understandings about university culture, disciplines and academic writing whilst at the same time presenting themselves, as decisively as they can, as candidates in a competitive system.

In enacting these understandings in a formal text, they move beyond school-based, essayist conceptions of writing, but at the same time do not acquire genre knowledge which is equivalent to disciplinary writing in HE. The PS remains suspended between school and university. Precarious, but also caught up in pragmatic concerns, pressed by deadlines and the need to decide subjects, courses and locations.

The revisions shown in this presentation today suggest that the genre of the PS serves as a dynamic transitional space for students to imagine and project new identities beyond the world of school in response to their emerging understandings about university. I use the term ‘auditioning’ to describe the ways in which students ‘try out’ - and ‘try on’ - new wordings in their PS drafts. Functioning as a genre of transition, the PS plays host to subtle transformations through which the university is imagined or (to adopt Bartholomae’s celebrated phrase) ‘invented’.

My study suggests that ‘academic writing’ overspills university through a series of imaginings and recontextualisations. It is not a stable set of literacy practices bounded by a single institutional context and it does not begin when students enter university. Academic writing researchers might benefit from closer attention to the transition between school and university and the emergence of academic writing in the final years of secondary school, both in spaces defined by disciplines (history, science etc) and the more liminal spaces like the PS.

Widening participation initiatives rightly focus attention on school-to-university transition; but preparation of students for a pre-defined set of literacies in HE is not the only paradigm available for understanding student writing in transition. Student writing in this phase – often unstable, frequently revised, messy and contradictory – tells us also about competing identities amidst shifting notions of school, university, and ‘learning’.

For references and links see my bibliographies site at http://robsresearchbibs.blogspot.com/. For more on the UCAS personal statement see the site set up by Helen Martin and myself which is aimed at college-bound students: http://personalstatement.blogspot.com/