Rowena Murray

Writing retreat as structured intervention: margin or mainstream?

Academics across the world face increasing pressure to publish. Research shows that writing retreats have helped by creating dedicated writing time and building collegiality. A new form of ‘structured’ writing retreat was created to increase its impact by taking a community of practice approach. This paper reports on an evaluation, funded by the British Academy, in which participants were interviewed one year after structured retreat. They reported many changes in their approaches to writing and in their sense of themselves as writers and some of these changes were sustained on return to campus. This paper argues that structured retreat increases learning through participation and helps academics to mainstream writing in their lives and careers. We conclude by suggesting that, since publishing is a mainstream academic activity, it makes sense to mainstream this intervention in academic careers.

Integrating Teaching and Research Through Writing Development for Students and Staff

Written output is a key topic in higher education for individuals and institutions. The importance of writing development for academics is established in the literature. What has not been examined is the effect of this development on participants’ teaching. While writing development delivers in terms of professional skills and the research assessment exercise, lecturers reveal that this form of effective staff development often has a knock-on effect, leading to effective educational development. One innovative approach to writing development for academics is a credit-bearing module on academic writing. During and after this module self-reporting and tracking were recorded. Analysis of writings, discussions and emails over the course of a year shows that participants took good practice learned about writing for publication into their teaching. These lecturers made genuine connections between research and teaching roles, integrating their work for the research assessment exercise with the aims of the Institute for Learning and Teaching.

Time is not enough: promoting strategic engagement with writing for publication

Research, scholarship and publication are central to the work of higher education. However, even academics with the necessary research and writing skills can struggle to publish as often as they would like. Research suggests that a writing retreat is one solution; there is a process going on there that addresses the problem, but how it does so has not been fully explained. The authors used a novel approach, containment theory, to explain why the functions of a structured retreat work. They argue that a retreat does more than simply provide time to write; it is a model for academics to meet the demands of research assessment. Finally, the authors conceptualise this as strategic engagement – a model for producing regular writing for publication while continuing to meet other professional demands.

The Writing Consultation: Developing Academic Writing Practices.

This article describes and analyses a specific mechanism, the writing consultation, designed to help academics to prioritise, reconceptualise and improve their writing practices. It makes the case for its potential to stimulate consideration of writing practices and motivations, a possible precondition for creating time for writing in academic contexts. This article proposes that the process of revealing and developing writing practices in a specific form of regular, structured, collegial discussion has potential to prompt academics to reconceptualise their writing practices and, perhaps crucially, to find different ways to write. In addition, it demonstrates, in a new way, how recognised behaviour change strategies might be embedded in the academic writing process. The writing consultation draws on principles established in other contexts. This article makes the case for adapting them to the context of academic writing, in order to support and improve academic writing output.

Managing researcher development: ‘drastic transition’?

Academics are expected to write for publication and meet publication targets in research assessment processes. These targets are set by national bodies and institutions, and they can be daunting for academics at the start of a research career. This article reports on an intervention designed to address this issue, writer’s retreat, where academics simultaneously engaged with research assessment and developed writing projects. Using Gardner’s model of researcher development, an evaluation study showed that retreat participants quickly adopted the programmatic element, made some progress in the relational element, but made little or no progress with the personal element. This analysis shows that the structured, facilitated writer’s retreat is an effective method of researcher development, and points to specific areas where development did and did not occur. It shows that this new retreat format allows emerging researchers to negotiate their relationship with research assessment through writing, but it also identifies areas where further support is needed.

Supervising writing: helping postgraduate students develop as researchers

Research and enquiry skills are increasingly required of students at all levels of the higher education curriculum, and this requires a sophisticated pedagogical response. The question is: how can we integrate current knowledge about academic writing with current knowledge about supervision? This article integrates different approaches to writing with an established theory of supervision to develop a new model for supervising the writing component of the doctoral curriculum. Theory-driven and research-based, the original model integrated five different approaches, that is, functional, enculturation, critical thinking, emancipation and relationship development and offered a way forward that has been used in many supervisor development programmes. The adaptation offered here provides a new framework for supervising writing that integrates different approaches and draws on a range of literature and research. It could help supervisors to recognise, choose from and combine the approaches to supervising writing that are available.

Developing a community of research practice

Writing journal articles is essential for academics and professionals to develop their ideas, make an impact in their fields and progress in their careers. Research assessment makes successful performance in this form of writing even more important. This article describes a course on writing journal articles and draws on interviews with participants one year after the course in which they identified persistent challenges. These writers’ accounts make visible some of the processes of writing for publication that are often tacit and identify key writing strategies. However, they also identify barriers to writing in academic workplaces and those professional workplaces where academic writing is produced. This article concludes by suggesting that while research assessment values written outputs over almost everything else, it is equally important to legitimise writing processes—and to be able to articulate the development of these processes—in communities of research practice.

Peer-formativity: a framework for academic writing

The system currently deployed to assess research outputs in higher education can influence what, how and for whom academics write; for some it may determine whether or not they write at all. This article offers a framework for negotiating this performative context – the writing meeting. This framework uses the established theoretical underpinning of motivational interviewing, which involves autonomy, self-determination, environmental factors and social support. A study showed that the framework helped academics negotiate performativity and re-connect their writing to their values. In this way, they could both privilege writing that was meaningful to them and meet personal and institutional targets. Writing meetings did this by developing writing-oriented peer relationships, defined in this article as peer-formativity. Using writing meetings, academics can submit for research assessment systems without surrendering to performativity.

Students’ questions and their implications for the viva

This paper draws on viva preparation workshops conducted at the University of Strathclyde and at other universities in the UK. In workshop discussions, students’ questions reveal anxieties, expectations and gaps in their understanding of the viva. A comprehensive list of questions would suggest that every aspect of the viva is unknown to students. However, analysis reveals recurring issues and underlying ambiguities in the viva. Given that universities provide so much information to students, it is surprising that students have so many questions. However, students’ questions do not indicate ignorance, but show them positioning the viva as a new communication event. The implications of this analysis for the viva are that a panel of examiners, rather than national standards, might provide the foundation for transparency and rhetorical development, rather than more information, would enhance students’ and supervisors’ understandings and preparations.

Facilitating Student Writing during Project Supervision A practical approach

Summary Many undergraduate and postgraduate students are required to write a project report, dissertation or thesis, which will be the largest piece of academic work they undertake. Because the writing is not produced in sequential order, it presents new difficulties for them. It may also be the first time they interact with academics acting as supervisors. This paper aims to give both students and supervisors a method for approaching what is often a daunting writing task. The process of visualising the structure of the project report has proved helpful in early discussions with students. In addition, group discussions of project reports can both enable students to address their concerns and save supervisors valuable time. The supervisor acts as facilitator, introducing a structured approach to writing and enabling students to adapt it to their projects. Integrating the dimensions of projects, including time, writing and conceptualisation, helps students to develop an understanding of the type of writing that will be involved throughout the project process. It enables them to begin writing at an early stage in the project.