Increasing Academic Output and Supporting Equality Of Career Opportunity in Universities: Can Writers' Retreats Play a Role?

Abstract

Despite the pressure to write and to publish in academia, many faculty do not. This is not because of the absence of their potential contribution to knowledge and thinking. Many of them have been silenced, or are never given a chance to find their academic voices, because the academic writing process is often experienced as destructive, mysterious, daunting and unsupported (e.g. Boice & Jones, 1984; Murray & Moore, 2006). This paper describes the features and principles of writers' retreats, a professional development intervention for academics that is being utilised increasingly frequently in academic environments to provide writing-related support. It provides evidence showing that the effects are potentially very positive both in the immediate and in the longer term. We briefly explain that writers' retreats are encountered and evaluated differently by men and women academics, with women seeming to derive clearer benefits from the experience. The longer-term effects of writers' retreats on academics are explored in some detail and we analyse reflective evidence from previous participants. Overall the evidence suggests that retreats are useful mechanisms for helping to increase written academic output and for supporting career development, particularly for women academics. Writers' retreats involve bringing a group of academic faculty and/ or graduate students away from their normal environments to help them work on their academic writing for several days. The retreats that we have organized are typically between three and five days' duration. During the retreat time, participants live, work and write in the same residential spaces, away from their work and home contexts. Retreats are designed to provide an environment in which participants can develop and progress their academic writing skills and tasks. There seems to be a growing trend among some universities to offer these retreats as an optional part of faculty professional development opportunities (Antoniou & Moriarty, 2008). It has already been argued that offering writers' retreats can help academics to gain confidence, to feel more positively orientated towards writing and to develop more constructive writing strategies than would be likely without such support (e.g. Grant and Knowles, 2000; Moore, 2003). Furthermore, it seems clear, based on feedback received from many who have attended retreats, that the residential, off-campus, live-in nature of the experience affords development opportunities that are difficult to provide at on-campus workshops or on other writing development programmes, notwithstanding how useful such alternatives may be (Murray and Moore, 2006). The almost unanimously positive testimonials typically received from retreat participants in our universities are not just statements of the potential benefits of retreats. They also indicate that something fundamental may be amiss in many academic environments. Our own experiences with running retreats often cause us to be struck by evaluative statements by participants who typically say things like: ' I wish I had had an experience like this early in my career' or 'if only I had gone on a retreat BEFORE doing my PhD ' or Tve never been able to write so much, so well, in such a short space of time'. We suspect that such reactions are not primarily or exclusively related to the skills of facilitators. Rather they hint at the absence of a writing supportive dynamic within participants' own work contexts. Given that academic writing is an activity that should arguably be as close to the heart of academic life as research and teaching, such an absence provides a continued rationale for exploring the potential and impact of writing-supportive interventions. Criticial Questions and Perspectives on the Provision of Writers' Retreats Notwithstanding such assertions, the process of offering and running writers' retreats is not without its critics. As facilitators and champions of the retreat concept, we have often been asked whether this initiative contains any real benefits to academics or their organisations. …