Abstract
This chapter reports on a doctoral thesis with a focus on contract cheating in Canadian higher education. The study adopted an academic literacies approach (Lea & Street, Studies in Higher Education, 23(2), 157–173, 1998) which views literacy as a social practice and attends to the increasingly digital nature of literacies. In addition, Bourdieu’s (Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education, Greenwood, 1986) notions of capital were utilised to interpret the findings. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ghostwriters, students, and teaching staff. The project findings identified both collaboration and a form of literacy brokering within some student-ghostwriter relationships, giving rise to the term assessment brokering (Thacker, Contract cheating and academic literacies: Exploring the landscape. Keele University, 2022). The study findings challenge the current binary discourse found in academic integrity literature and call for a focus on assessment literacy and threshold concepts (Meyer and Land, Improving student learning: Improving student learning theory and practice. OCSLD, 2003) to address contract cheating.
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Thacker, E.J. (2022). Assessment Brokering and Collaboration: Ghostwriter and Student Academic Literacies. In: Eaton, S.E., Curtis, G.J., Stoesz, B.M., Clare, J., Rundle, K., Seeland, J. (eds) Contract Cheating in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12680-2_19
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