Structured writing retreat: a pedagogy for students to construct scholarly writing

The focus for this research is the role of writing in doctoral study: what do students need to learn in order to write a thesis and develop writing strategies for the long term, and how should we teach these strategies? Previous research showed that postgraduate writing groups have benefits, and some students see peer feedback as the most effective pedagogy. The aims of this study were to find out how students adapted structured retreat and investigate the outcomes of writing in micro-groups. Twenty students at four UK universities participated in email exchanges, face-to-face discussions and interviews. Thematic analysis focused on components of structured retreat: fixed time slots, goal-setting and monitoring, discussion of writing-in-progress and social support. The findings suggest that postgraduate students' micro-groups are a pedagogy for scholarly writing. This pedagogy enables learning about scholarly writing and about situating it in academic and professional workplaces and workloads.