This thesis explores the institutional development of social engagement (SE) programmes within higher education institutions (HEIs). Since the 1990s, universities in the United States and Canada have become increasingly active in directly addressing social issues such as poverty, social exclusion and political participation in their own local communities. The past decade has seen similar developments at universities in the United Kingdom. At the global level as well, there are increasing discussions about the role and responsibilities of HEIs in human and social development. To facilitate their engagement with wider social issues, HEIs frequently create SE programmes which coordinate activities between university-based actors and community-partners. A significant body of literature exists on SE programmes; however, these writings fall into two categories: firstly, promoting the concept of university engagement and, secondly, evaluating the impacts of such programmes on communities or students. What is far less theorised or researched are the intermediary processes which enable the social engagement aspirations of HEIs to come to fruition, generating these documented impacts. This study aims to produce new knowledge and insights on how university SE programmes are created and institutionalised over time. This research is a qualitative study of SE programmes at three HEIs, two in the UK and one in the US. The data for the study has been drawn from primary programme documents, participatory workshops and interviews with more than one-hundred staff, academics, students and community-partners involved with these programmes. The research suggests that, despite differences in size, mission and national context, there are common enabling factors which lead to the creation of these programmes and which facilitate their successful institutionalisation within their respective institutions. Moreover, the research also suggests that the presence of these programmes catalyses unexpected outcomes within the HEIs themselves, such as changes in the formal curriculum as well as changes in the overall learning culture of the institutions where these SE programmes were located. Considered together, these findings suggest that the presence of these programmes contributes to the development of a systemic ―institutional pedagogy‖ which encourages students, staff and academics to engage with important social and developmental issues in their local communities, and often more widely as well.

Writing has a central role in UK higher education as a technology for, and signifier of, the learning, teaching and assessment of students. The nature and quality of student writing has also become an important issue outside the academy, particularly in the context of a globalised neo-liberal knowledge economy discourse which emphasises the importance of transferable and employability skills. Although there is a considerable body of research relating to student writing, the work that I undertook for earlier professional doctorate assignments suggested that the role of academic staff in regulating student writing was under-researched and under-theorised. The research carried out for this thesis sought to address this gap in knowledge by focussing on two central questions. Firstly, what role do academic staff play in regulating student writing? Secondly, how is this role shaped by the specific departmental, disciplinary and institutional contexts in which they are located? The research was undertaken in a criminology department in a post-1992 university in the UK. It was positioned in an academic literacies framework which conceptualises writing as a social practice, and drew on linguistic ethnographic methodologies to explore the written feedback that staff give on student writing. The written feedback encounter is where staff and student expectations about academic writing practices intersect, and is therefore a telling site for the study of educational discourses relating to knowledge and how it is represented. Data were collected from three main sources: written feedback and comments given by academic staff on 120 pieces of student work; 18 interviews with staff about academic writing; and institutional policies and procedures relating to marking, assessment and feedback. Employing a range of theoretical perspectives, including those informed by feminist and poststructuralist analysis, these texts were analysed to explore the relationship between institutional discourses, pedagogical practices and identity construction. My research showed that there was a considerable disjuncture between the institutional discourses which governed marking, assessment and feedback and the actual feedback practices of staff. Despite the strong scientific and positivist discourse that pervaded institutional documentation on assessment and feedback, some staff drew on a range of alternative pedagogical discourses and engaged in assessment practices which were more subjective and localised in nature. This gap between the institutional discourse and the situated literacy practices was mediated to some extent by the assessment coversheet and marking procedures which worked to provide an appearance of consistency and agreement to external audiences. This promoted a technical rational approach to feedback which obscured the epistemological and gatekeeping functions of feedback. The thesis concludes that the effective theorisation and teaching of student writing rests on an understanding of how academic staff construct and police the boundaries of appropriate knowledge in their discipline. This approach draws on existing academic literacies theories but argues for a more holistic model which understands academic writing as co-constructed through the practices of both students who produce the written work and the academic staff who mark it.