Students seem to encounter various challenges when writing bachelor's and master's theses, indicating a need to support them in their writing processes. In this study, academic writing workshops for students writing bachelor's and master's theses were developed and investigated during three years of a participatory action research project. The…

Prior to the March, 2020 COVID-19 lockdown in New Zealand I was invited to offer professional development on ways that the writing of poetry could be facilitated in a Rotorua primary school. In March/April of that year, I engaged around 18 teachers (including the school principal) in four, twohour PD sessions using Zoom. A year on, in May 2021, I…

Teaching writing is complex, and a number of ideas circulating among schools and teachers often belie the difficulty of how to teach the techniques and processes of writing. I've come to believe that authorship is not a passive undertaking and does not originate in the struggle to put something onto the page. Rather it emerges by living with a…

This article outlines a workshop orienting sociology graduate students to overcoming challenges in publishing. Although graduate students are increasingly told to publish, little guidance exists on how to best prepare them for this venture; mentorship scholarship typically assumes the professor--student relationship is the best or most appropriate…

Context: Writing is an agentive act. Despite drastic improvements over the past few decades in writing instruction and the push for sharing with authentic audiences, the majority of writing students do is still for the teacher. These practices are at odds with those who advocate for classrooms that are culturally relevant, culturally responsive,…

Over the past few decades, the number of people enrolled in doctoral study has increased dramatically across the world. In practical terms, this has meant that universities now receive increasingly diverse students with regard to ethnicity, age, language, culture, and background preparedness for higher degree study. Students can, and often do,…

Publication, if successful, is exhilarating! Aspiring academic scholars recognize the contribution that peer-reviewed publications make to their careers. It identifies their engagement with their discipline. For students, the benefits of publishing a paper include bolstering their levels of confidence and knowledge and demonstrating to them how…

This paper explores an example of applied theatre and praxis learning in an Australian classroom with drama students aged 16-17 years which took the form of "real fiction" or social theatre monologue writing. It presents monologue responses from nine participants, altered by the researcher to protect identities and to tease out issues…

Many undergraduate students find the production of an extended piece of academic writing challenging. This challenge is more acute in the sciences where production of extended texts is infrequent throughout undergraduate studies. This paper reports the development of a new English for Academic Purposes (EAP) workshop and associated resources for…

In South Africa and in other parts of the world, many professions are bemoaning the poor ability of many graduates to communicate their skills and knowledge effectively once they enter the workplace. Increasingly, pressure is placed on higher education to do more in terms of equipping future professionals with the necessary critical reading,…

In Malawi, education is not always a top priority. Although there has been free primary education since 1994, attendance in school is not compulsory (Ngozo, 2010). Even when children do go to school, schools can be overcrowded with few books for students to use. Classrooms can hold over 100 children with whole groups of children sharing one…

Writing is a very important skill that should be mastered properly by university students, especially pre-service language teachers (e.g. EFL student teachers). In order to present their ideas efficiently in the context of their academic study, they have to be trained well on how to write meaningful pieces (e.g. essays, academic reports,…

In a virtual space between nations, children can come together to learn about and appreciate each other's culture--and their own. As the Co-Executive Director of Blue Planet Writers' Room, a nonprofit writing center in West Palm Beach, Florida, the author was one of the creators of an international collaboration through which they taught…

The authors report on the design and implementation of a pilot program to extend the principles of intensive writing outlined by W. Lee Hansen (1998), Murray S. Simpson and Shireen E. Carroll (1999) and David Carless (2006) to large macroeconomics classes. The key aspect of this program was its collaborative nature, with staff from two specialist…

This paper draws on a case study undertaken by an English teacher in a rural school with a Year 12 English class, most of whom had been singularly unsuccessful in terms of NCEA achievement. The case study was undertaken as part of a two-year project, directed by the first author, entitled: "Teachers as writers: Transforming professional…