The importance of showing up (virtually): a reflection on practice of an online doctoral writing community of practice
Faculty Advisor
Date
2024
Keywords
doctoral students, online communities, writing communities, faculties of education, dissertation
Abstract (summary)
Although online discourses about dissertation writing (i.e., you should be writing memes) offer students levity, they function in stark contrast to how dissertation writing is treated in real life. Canadian education scholars with PhDs have examined the student-supervisor relationship (McAlpine & Weis, 2000), collaborative writing spaces (Eaton & Dombroski, 2022; Ens et al., 2011), and the overall difficulties of the dissertation process (Bayley et al., 2012; Walter & Stouk, 2020), but we have yet to locate literature on the perspectives of Canadian education PhD students who have generated online communities of practice to engage in their dissertation writing. To obtain better understanding of our personal relationships to writing and virtual communities of practice, we established an online writing group during the summer of 2023 where we wrote our respective candidacy proposal and dissertation chapters while also reflecting on and responding to prompts about the process of writing. This reflection on our writing practice concludes that if PhD students feel un(der)supported by institutional writing communities, or if said communities are not available, constructing their own community will be beneficial to their writing goals.
Publication Information
Lorenz, D., & Patrie, N. (2024). The importance of showing up (virtually): A reflection on practice of an online doctoral writing community of practice. Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association (OTESSA) Conference Proceedings, 4(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.18357/otessac.2024.4.1.292
Notes
Presented June 29, 2024, at the Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Conference at the University of Sherbrooke, Longueuil, Quebec.
Item Type
Presentation
Language
Rights
Attribution (CC BY)
