This semester I joined the Feminist Writing group at Lancaster University run by Danielle Turton. It has been 2 hours weekly writing as well as discussion on academic life, balance and critique of the academy. I have learned a lot and wanted to share the brilliant resources Danielle has pulled together. These come from a much longer line of women's writing groups, building on Kathryn Hollingsworth at Newcastle University women’s network who developed them from her attendance at the women’s writing groups at Texas Tech, where she was a visiting scholar.
Time management: weekly goals
- How to plan your week, at the start of each week. Please read the following blog and bring your weekly plan to the writing group
- Rockquemore, ‘The Sunday Meeting’: https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2010/09/20/sunday-meeting
*Taking Control of Work-Life Balance with Microboundaries
- Do you have work email pinging on your phone at the weekend? Read the following guide developed at UCL and we’ll debate whether the strategies posed will be useful in helping us set boundaries at work.
- https://digitalboundariesresearch.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/microboundary-strategies-for-work-life-balance.pdf
Perfectionism and over-functioning
- There’s now a wealth of research showing women take on greater service/admin loads then their male counterparts. Are you ‘over-functioning’? https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/11/28/essay-academics-who-do-too-many-things
Facing criticism
- How do you cope with facing academic criticism? Does it delay your publishing process?
- Read: https://theprofessorisin.com/2019/07/18/the-art-of-facing-criticism/
- N.B. if you’re having trouble accessing this, try going to the main website of The Professor Is In and searching the article title
*Managing your research pipeline: the big board technique
- Read this article: https://politics.virginia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/lebo_researchPipeline.pdf
- Do you find it useful? Overwhelming? Glad you’re not on the tenure track?
Academic Perfectionism: the shitty first draft
- Short extract (3 pages) from Lamont Bird by Bird (‘shitty first drafts’) available here:
- https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%20Drafts.pdf
Developing a daily writing practice with the accountability spreadsheet
- Can you ever imagine being able to write every day? An accountability spreadsheet may help.
- Read: http://www.thenoviceprofessor.com/blog/guest-post-creating-community-based-accountability-with-a-daily-writing-challenge
Debate: Is email making professors stupid?
- Read: https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-email-making-professors-stupid/
- You may have to be on VPN to get full access!
Semester 2
Mentoring:
https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2016/02/03/most-mentoring-today-based-outdated-model-essay
- Do you have a mentor or have you ever had one? How did it go?
- Did this relationship happen organically or was it set-up?
- Is there anything more we can do to support mentoring at our university or in our network?
I enjoyed this one so much that I followed up Kerry Ann Rockquemore's resources. If you want to do some mapping to figure out your own mentor-network these are great!
https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/files/Mentoring%20Map%5B1%5D(1).pdf
https://postdocs.rutgers.edu/files/mosaic-mentors-map-new-9-16-19pdf
https://community.chronicle.com/news/326-when-it-comes-to-mentoring-the-more-the-merrier
