Abstract:

Independence is a central ideal in Swedish Higher education and is embedded in course syllabuses, local course descriptions and assessment criteria. At the same time, the concept has long been interpreted in different ways across disciplinary contexts, creating ambiguity and a lack of consensus around what independent student work actually means. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) text robots such as ChatGPT and Copilot has made this issue more urgent challenging established assumptions about writing, authorship, and student performance.

This study examines how independence in writing is understood, required, and assessed in different disciplinary contexts within teacher education. Teacher education is a particularly relevant setting because students move between subjects with different academic traditions, writing practices, and assessment cultures.

This study investigates how teachers describe disciplinary writing practices, how they define independence in student writing, and what forms of independence are enabled and required through assignment instructions and assessment criteria. Adopting an academic literacies perspective, this study views writing as a social and situated practice influenced by norms and conditions. Teaching and writing assignments are thus understood to influence students' academic writing development, and must be understood in relation to each other. Within this perspective, writing and writing norms differ between situations and contexts. Typical academic concepts such as 'independence' are thus interpreted differently in different contexts.

The empirical material consists of interviews with teachers from different disciplinary areas in teacher education, combined with textual analyses of study guides, writing assignments and assessment criteria. By analysing how independence is formulated and operationalised across contexts, the study aims to contribute knowledge about how AI reshapes the conditions for academic writing and about the challenges this creates for students in teacher education.

Keywords:

Writing, Academic literacies, AI, independence, teacher education.