Abstract

This project reflects on the processes and products of designing a pilot course in academic and research writing in English for PhD research scholars in Sree Sankara University of Sanskrit (SSUS), Kalady, Kerala, India. The one-week (40 hours) intensive course was designed for my pedagogy-based Capstone Project for the IWT CLASP Fellows Program to investigate through a pilot designing of an Academic Writing in English Course for doctoral researchers from various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, ranging from classical Indian music to European Philosophy and Sanskrit. The students are all non-native speakers of English who had their school education in the regional language of Kerala, Malayalam. They had not attended any academic writing course in their previous education. My goal was to test the relevance and appropriateness of some of the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking (IWT) Writing practices in such a multilingual and interdisciplinary classroom of doctoral researchers and reflect on the larger implications for designing academic writing courses based on practice for multilingual students in India. My primary conclusion is that Bard IWT practices, especially private freewriting, focused freewriting and writing to read in the zones are effective in generative writing inside and outside the classroom, facilitating discussion of academic writing processes, and significantly increasing the learner’s ability to generate more academic research-based text, as evident from the different kinds of feedback. Finally, I recommend that a skills-based (adapting IWT writing practices) content course can be a positive intervention in improving academic literacies for multilingual and inter-disciplinary learners in a setting like the state of Kerala, India.