Academic writing workshop-ing to support students writing bachelor’s and master’s theses

Description

Previous research has shown that students seem to encounter various challenges when writing their bachelor’s and master’s theses, highlighting a need to support them in their writing processes. Collaborative writing environments are suggested to promote students’ thesis writing; however, previous research has mostly focused on doctoral students, whereas bachelor’s and master’s students have received less attention.
This paper presents a study where academic writing workshops for students writing their bachelor’s and master’s theses were developed and investigated during three years of a participatory action research project. The academic writing workshops have been offered as university courses for students within educational, social and health sciences. The workshops offer three types of support: individual discussions with the teachers; thematic discussions about different parts of the thesis; and discussions about students’ writing in response groups. Theoretically, the study uses a more-than-human approach (Barad, 2007; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2013) to students’ thesis writing to explore how academic writing workshops are produced as material-discursive practices. The analytical questions are: How do human and more-than-human entanglements produce the academic writing workshop practices, and how do these entanglements matter in students’ thesis writing processes?
Based on diffractive analytical engagements, this study conceptualizes the workshop practices as the enactment of academic writing workshop-ing in the spacetimemattering of the workshops. The workshop-ing recognizes the workshops as active doings with students and writing tutors in social and material realities; workshop-ing is an enacted practice, rather than being preexistent or preceding. The study contributes to the existing literature with insights about how different entanglements matter in thesis writing practices and how workshop-ing can become productive in supporting students’ thesis writing.

Period	3 Nov 2021
Event title	Nordic Educational Research Association: Hope and Education
Event type	Conference
Location	Odense, DenmarkShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International