Dr Rebekah Sims
Lecturer
Education
Personal statement
My central area of research is higher education pedagogy. Currently, my research focuses on integrating writing instruction into teacher education programmes. Additionally, I'm interested in strengthening reflective practice among teachers and teacher candidates as a part of developing pedagogies that sustain the cultural identities and languages of all students.
I collaborate with an international group of scholars to develop and assess pedagogies that integrate intercultural competence into writing courses. Our most current article, 'Developing intercultural competence through a linked course model curriculum,' can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/tesj.613. More about this work can be found at http://writeic.org.
I completed my PhD in English at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA in May 2021. My dissertation, Investigating Culturally Responsive Teaching Practices in First-Year Composition, focused on mixed-methods evaluation of culturally responsive teaching among college writing instructors.
While at Purdue, I worked for the Purdue Writing Lab (home of the OWL) and the Oral English Proficiency Program. Primarily, I taught written and oral communication skills to STEM graduate students. I have an ongoing interest in collaborating with professionals in STEM disciplines, with specific attention to developing metalaguage for STEM writing applications. Metalanguage for writing enables experienced professionals to identify their implicit understanding of writing and articulate how they communicate effectively in various situations. Explicit metalanguage helps experienced professionals mentor students and new professionals on discipline-specific writing skills.
My areas of teaching expertise include academic writing skills, oral and written English for EAL learners, religious and moral education pedagogy at the primary level, and teacher education courses. I am a faculty advising editor for the journal Young Scholars in Writing.
I also serve as an honorary chaplain for the University chaplaincy. More information can be found here: https://www.strath.ac.uk/studywithus/ourcampus/whatsoncampus/faithspiritualitysupport/
Publications
Projects
Our learning objectives are:
1. To develop participants’ abilities to understand and discuss the goals, strengths and weaknesses of theoretical frameworks and research methods.
2. To increase participant familiarity with a variety of approaches, methods and analysis tools that are referred to as qualitative.
3. To learn how to write up a data analysis and results section to a qualitative research report.
- how higher education teaching professionals teach and/or support academic literacies
- what types of academic literacies students in teacher education need to develop for success in academic and professional settings
- what HE teachers and students think "good writing" looks like
- how teacher education programmes can integrate effective academic literacy instruction to enrich student learning and reduce inequalities experienced in academic settings
Our innovative model links mainstream and second-language-focused first-year writing sections to expose students to diverse texts, structured intercultural interactions, and sequenced writing assignments supported by team-taught pedagogical interventions.
More about the curricular model, its assessment, and our findings can be found at: writeic.org. Grant funding for the first phase of the project was $34250 USD.
Now, we are in the second phase of this project and have a new data set from implementing the revised curriculum at the University of Massachusetts -- Boston.