Genre-based pedagogy for design-oriented theses in postgraduate design education

Academic design research currently produces a range of traditional and alternative doctoral outputs integrating writing and project-based components. While other academic fields, including architecture, have achieved sufficient disciplinary consensus that academic writing may be characterised in textbook guides, this is not yet the case in the newer design disciplines. Although there may be humanistic and creative resistance to the conventionalisation of academic design discourse and the perceived loss of academic freedoms this entails much can be gained by writing with an eye to models of good practice. Genre-based approaches to academic writing, including thesis writing, are firmly established in applied linguistics and composition studies. In disciplines with stable research paradigms, such as experimental science, the rhetorical and linguistic conventions for academic genres are well documented and accepted among the relevant discourse communities. This is not yet the case in emerging design scholarship where visual and textual modes of presentation jostle with creative project outcomes. Although postgraduate design education lacks the genre stability of other disciplines a growing corpus of academic documents, including digital theses in the design disciplines now allows some preliminary analysis and conclusions to be drawn about the textual production of knowledge in design. Given the pedagogical value of modelling in teaching writing in the current multicultural environment of Australian higher education, such findings have implications for design education. This paper reviews the genre-based approach and examines research proposals and thesis texts from design as a potential source for teaching at the postgraduate level. The paper suggests that the supervision and writing process for design educators and students can be facilitated by genre-based approaches to analysis and teaching, which is exemplified here.