Academic writing in an interdisciplinary undergraduate teacher education program in Southernmost Bahia

what students’ experiences reveal

Abstract

This study investigated the academic writing experiences of undergraduate students enrolled in the Interdisciplinary Bachelor's Degree in Languages and Their Technologies at the Federal University of Southern Bahia (UFSB), Paulo Freire Campus, with a focus on the meanings constructed by the individuals through their lived and narrated experiences. The research is grounded in the understanding that the academic environment demands specific uses of writing, which, in many cases, differ significantly from writing practices developed in other contexts of socialization and communication. Upon entering university, students are thus prompted to develop writing practices with which they have little or no familiarity, making the transition from writing practices fostered in basic education to those required in higher education more complex and challenging. Specifically, the study aimed, based on the experiences reported by the participants, to identify how students relate to academic writing and to map experiences that either facilitate or hinder their academic acculturation during the transition between writing practices in basic and higher education. The research is anchored in the New Literacy Studies (Soares, 2004; Street, 2014), discussions on Academic Literacy (Fischer, 2007; Fiad, 2011; 2015), and employed the narrative interview (Jovchelovitch; Bauer, 2002; Souza, 2004) as the data collection method. The corpus of the investigation consists of 8 narratives from students with active enrollment at UFSB, who entered the university between 2022 and 2024. The results indicate that the academic writing experiences reported by the participants were predominantly marked by feelings of estrangement, insecurity, and fear in the face of the new. The existence of a General Education component at UFSB – common to all programs and designed to prepare students for academic life – emerged in the narratives as a significant strategy that facilitates academic acculturation, particularly in the domain of academic writing. The findings highlight the importance of a more critical, reflective, and nuanced understanding of academic writing practices at the university, informed by the ways in which students observe, recall, and narrate their experiences. The lived and narrated experiences shared by the participants can inform broader discussions on academic literacy and the transitional process between basic and higher education, both within the institution where the study was conducted and in other educational contexts.