Is this course right for me?
Target Audience: SBS Staff
Writing retreats have long been known to increase and improve scholarly output and research activity. A more recent form, Structured Writing Retreat (Murray and Newton 2009), can develop research capacity and activity. Attending multiple retreats can help to build research and writing into work and life. This course is for those who might want to run their own Structured Writing Retreats.
This course includes:
- Review of writing retreat formats, focusing on Structured Writing Retreats
- Explanations for rationale for this framework for writing
- Strategies facilitators can use to support participants at writing retreats
- Ideas on how to prepare for and organise retreats
- Suggestions for ‘holding’ the retreat structure
- Recurring issues and participants’ FAQs
- Problem-solving
- Review of the growing literature on writing retreats, academic writing and rhetoric
- Practical sessions to develop retreat facilitation skills and review facilitation styles
- Review of literature on health and wellbeing during periods of intensive writing
- Evaluating and evidencing outputs and outcomes – measures and meanings
- Strategies for internal and external dissemination of findings
- Strategies for using, adapting and sustaining this model in other settings
- Running online/virtual writing retreats and groups.
What you should bring?
Any pre-reading suggested by Professor Murray.
Who will lead the course?
Professor Rowena Murray. Rowena is a highly respected facilitator of writing retreats and courses for academic writers. Her research focuses on academic writing, the subject of her books – How to Write a Thesis, Writing for Academic Journals, The Handbook of Academic Writing (co-authored with Sarah Moore) and Writing in Social Spaces – and articles in Higher Education journals.
Delivered By: SBS Faculty