Residential writing retreats: three wishes for academic output

4 September 2018 by 2 Comments

BronwynEager-150pxDr Bronwyn Eager works as a Lecturer, Entrepreneurship at Swinburne Business School, Swinburne University of Technology. Her research focuses on stress, coping and time-orientation in entrepreneurs and integrating entrepreneurship education into STEM domains.

She tweets as @bronwyn_eager, and is always up for a coffee and interesting conversations. Her ORCID is 0000-0003-4512-1263. To learn more about her writing retreats, visit Academic Writing Retreats. 

Photo of writing retreat by Narelle Lemon

Photo of writing retreat by Narelle Lemon

If academia was a Disney film and I was a street rat (early career researcher) living on the sandy backstreets of Agrabah, who happened to summon a genie, my three top-of-my-head wishes would be: publications, grant money, and a pipeline of non-traditional research outputs.

But after the wishes were granted and I was flying away on my magic carpet, I’d realise my error (besides the fact that I’d forgotten to wish for world peace).

I should have asked for ‘time’ and ‘space’ and ‘someone to cook my meals’ so I could get on with what I actually love: reading, asking questions, collaborating with other academics, discovering answers, writing, editing prose, and disseminating my findings.

Outputs are by-products. If they were instantly granted through genie magic, then the joy of the journey would evaporate quicker than you can say “How’s your research going?”

Yet when you are under pressure to publish (just to keep, let alone advance, your career), have demanding teaching loads, a never-ending cycle of meetings, and deadlines, what you need is time. Time away from distractions. Time that you can dedicate to research. Mostly, that means time for writing.

Which is why, as the kind of person who walks through a weekend craft market thinking “I could make that!”, I decided to start running residential writing retreats.

Read more of this post

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Writing retreats: Academic indulgence or scholarly necessity?

21 March 2017 by 5 Comments

Yolande StrengersYolande Strengers is a social scientist, Senior Research Fellow and ARC DECRA-holder in the Centre for Urban Research, School of Global Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University. 

Together with Cecily Maller, she co-leads the Beyond Behaviour Change research program. Among other things, she’s interested in smart energy technologies and how they’re changing how we live.

She tweets at @YolandeStreng.

Cecily MallerCecily Maller is a Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University’s Centre for Urban Research. 

She studies human-environment interactions and how to make urban settings more biodiverse, equitable and sustainable and is co-leader of the Beyond Behaviour Change Research Program with Yolande Strengers.

She tweets at @DrCecilyMaller.

Sign on a small gate says "Beach", with an arrow. Beyond the gate is a wooden walkway into the distance.

To the Beach, by Jonathan O’Donnell on Flickr.

It’s not uncommon for academics to attend conferences that cost thousands of dollars and require time away from our usual place of work.

Many internal and external travel grant schemes support our engagement in these events, where we disseminate research, network, collaborate, and acquaint ourselves with the latest and greatest knowledge.

Strangely though, taking time out for writing retreats is less accepted, supported or practiced in academia.

We noticed this discrepancy last year when we organised a week-long writing retreat. It was fabulous, but some of the reactions we received indicated that it certainly wasn’t normal.

This got us thinking about the perceived legitimacy of the activity. Some obvious questions came to mind.

Do academics really need a ‘retreat’ to write? Isn’t that meant to be part of our ‘day’ jobs? Why should we spend precious funds on accommodation and cheese to deliver academic goods we are already paid to deliver? Read more of this post

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What makes a successful writing group?

11 October 2016 by 10 Comments

angeladobele02-smallDr Angela Dobele is an academic at RMIT University in Melbourne. Her teaching and research practices seek to make vital contributions to resolving the social, environmental and wicked problems of our times.

In her scholarly practice, Angela aims to be grounded in real-world problems, critical in theoretical and marketing orientation, and andragogical in her approach to student performance.

Her thesis topic and subsequent research considers word-of-mouth (at the intersection of relationship marketing and communication theories), both online (viral) and traditional referrals. Her other research topics concern academic workloads and research on student performance. Angela can be found on Twitter at @AngelaDobele.

Photo by Mark Asthoff | unsplash.com

Photo by Mark Asthoff | unsplash.com

An Organiser’s Perspective of Writing Groups: Dr Angela Dobele (@AngelaDobele)

It’s really hard in a crowded academic life to make time for your own research writing and spend time with your colleagues.

To create a great foundation for doing both, I introduced a writing program at my institution that aims to help staff and research higher degree students with the twin goals of improving writing skills and ramping up writing productivity.  The program is currently in its fourth consecutive semester and gradually increasing in popularity.

I conduct two writing groups each semester. In the program, we use the metaphor of ‘landing planes’ (a phrase coined by one of my first participants, Professor Lisa Farrell) with each aeroplane representing the achievement of a specific writing goal, such as submission of a journal manuscript or book chapter.

Over the three previous semesters that the program has run, participants have successfully landed 102 planes. Landed planes include 27 papers submitted to top flight journals, 18 grant applications (including four ARC expressions of interest and an ARC Linkage expression of interest), and 10 journal re-submissions.

The program is having an impact because it:

  • Socialises a task that is traditionally lonely (writing);
  • Incorporates gamification in the development of new writing habits (specifically, habitual writing practice);
  • Develops skills that make a favourable impact on research performance (research outputs and quality of outputs).

Increasing writing productivity is not about writing faster; it is about writing more often. It is what Silvia calls making writing ‘routine and mundane’ (Silvia 2007, p. xi). Read more of this post

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