Narratives on writing in Colombian Higher

Education emerging from online newspapers

Elizabeth Narváez-Cardona

The large-scale assessment in Colombian higher education, called Pruebas del Saber PRO, was established as mandatory test by the government since 2010 for students before getting their undergraduate degrees. Among other issues, this large-scale assessment evaluates communicative abilities for writing in Spanish.

Context

This large-scale assessment in Colombian higher education, Pruebas del Saber PRO, has become an opportunity to focus on writing in higher education as a nationwide important issue.

Context

The project perspective

Newspaper narratives could be seen as written accounts that become strategic sites to explore world representations deployed as public opinion.

Therefore, tracking the world representations (White, 1981;

Johnstone, 1993) created by the Colombian online newspapers on higher education writing would be useful to gain insights of the national expectations about such issue.

The project perspective

This project aimed at identifying world representations on higher education writing through evaluation devices deployed in the newspaper narratives (Tannen, 1993, Johnstone, 1993; Wortham, 2000).

The project goal

Data collection and the analytic focus

A data collection based on an online search enabled to analyze flexibly the plots of 16 newspaper narratives in order to explore (Labov, 2010; Coffey & Atkinson, 1996): a) what thematic focus has been selected in

the titles of the narratives? b) what differences and commonalities

could be identified across the narrative plots?

c) what "world representations" on higher education writing could be inferred from the narratives?

Findings Relevant features of the data

16 news were found related to the topic: “writing and Pruebas del Saber PRO”. They were published for different Colombian online newspapers between April 17th, 2011 and November 4th, 2012. The graphic 1 displays the regions to which these newspapers belong to and the numbers indicate the chronological order in which the newspaper narratives were published.

Findings

The most of the news matching with the # 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12 and 14 were published by the two most ancient newspapers in the country, called El Tiempo y El Espectador, from which the headquarters are located in the capital of the country, Bogotá. In terms of the spread in which the online articles were published, most of the narratives were concentrated in March 2012. This data behavior might rely on the fact that in March 15th, 2012 the government released the first official report of the assessment outcomes.

Relevant features of the data

It is noticeable that the newspaper narratives were embedded into a sequence of retelling starting with the texts # 3 and # 4. The contrastive analysis conducted across the narrative plots showed that in this sequence of newspaper accounts, the text # 4 could be appointed as the main narrative from which the remaining 12 narratives were derived. Consequently, the following accounts derived from this key text # 4 include within their contents some fragments of this main narrative.

Findings

However, the location of those contents within the retold story can vary. The graphic depicts this relocating phenomenon across the newspaper narratives. The actual content used in the key text # 4 for evaluation, the row colored in brown, becomes the abstract in the following texts # 6 and # 15, and the complication and orientation in the texts # 8 and # 12, respectively; whereas, the orientation, the row colored in pink, in the text # 3 becomes the abstract in the texts # 8 and # 12. This depiction of relocating the contents might show how this process configures new accounts and interpretation of the main narrative as a creative process of narratives. Indeed, new contents are also incorporated within the narratives as part of this relocating process, which are depicting in the rows colored in yellow in the graphic.

Findings

What these narratives were about according to the titles?

Findings

Identifying the evaluation devices used in phrasing the titles were useful to make anticipations about the abstracts of the narrative plots (Tannen, 1993, Jhonstone, 1993; Wortham, 2000). Furthermore, some transformations in these abstracts were identified across the retelling phenomenon; mostly about how the assessment outcomes were interpreted by different online newspapers.

What these narratives were about according to the titles?

Findings

Two tendencies emerged from the titles: 1) The first trend could be called “the crisis of the Colombian Higher Education”, given that 56.25% out of sixteen titles conveys as "message" that the outcomes of the large scale assessment are highly discouraging. 2) The second trend could be called “the problem is the assessment design”, because 12.6% out of 16 titles redirected the attention from the educational crisis towards questioning whether the assessment design is a valid instrument to evaluate the qualities of Colombian higher education.

Findings

What world representations on Higher Education writing could be inferred from the narratives?

68, 75% of the newspaper narratives included paragraphs related to writing. This could suggest that in most of the narratives analyzed, writing was an important issue for being published by the newspapers.

Findings What world representations on Higher Education

writing could be inferred from the narratives?

The graphic 3 is a useful visual organizer to summarize this world representation, which is basically a hierarchical organization of the thematic patterns identified across the narratives.

Methodologically speaking, this project was useful for exploring how the analysis on retelling sequences of newspaper narratives was related to changes in the location of certain contents within the narrative plots across time. This analysis was important in understanding world representations on a specific issue, which in this case was a large-scale assessment on higher education writing in Colombia.

Reflection