Aim of the workshop

This capacity-building workshop is intended to support institutions to develop spaces and opportunities for research writing and publishing within their institutions. The workshop builds on the interest created by our previous writing workshops in Addis Ababa and Mumbai, which targeted individual writers. The key element in this new initiative is the training of ‘writing champions’ who, for a small honorarium, will return to their institutions and set up writing groups, thereby fostering a research writing ‘culture’ in which peer feedback and mentoring will be key elements.

Applicants

We invite applications from previous participants in the Writing for Compare programme or institutions may already have someone who is institutionally well-placed to develop this role.

The workshop

The training will be devised and delivered by Anna Robinson-Pant, Anna Magyar and Nitya Rao, drawing on their collective experience of capacity building, academic literacies and writing development activities. The workshop will be experiential in that the ‘writing champions’ will participate in small writing groups. Some simple tools and techniques for facilitating discussions and giving and receiving peer feedback will be introduced.

The ‘writing champions’ will be supported by the Compare workshop facilitator for one year.

The rationale behind this initiative

The initial impetus for the BAICE/Compare programme was to address inequalities in academic publishing and participation through increasing individual participation and contribution of writers from under represented countries in the South. The workshops held in the UK only succeeded in drawing in our intended audience to a limited extent, because of economic inequalities. In our 2012 report to BAICE we proposed finding ways of running the initial workshops in the South through linking with local institutions. This was achieved in Addis Ababa in 2014 and then in Mumbai in 2015. From the feedback participants gave, it is clear that for individual writers, whether or not they get to the point of submitting a research paper to Compare, and whether or not that paper is then published, the benefits are significant. We now propose expanding these capacity building benefits in a sustainable way by focusing on institutional and not just individual capacity building.

Contact

compare@uea.ac.uk

Flyer

Compare Writers Programme Phil 2016