Xavier Faculty Writing Group

Xavier Faculty Writers’ Group

In support of your scholarship, we implement a semester-long scholarly writing group at Xavier through the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development. The group, based upon a UNCF-Mellon productivity seminar, seeks to create a community of teacher-scholars supporting each other, investing in the idea of daily writing, and increasing their scholarly output. If you think you might be interested in this model, please read on!

The goal XULA-WG is to facilitate greater day-to-day and week-to-week scholarly productivity among a small group of faculty members who desire to advance their scholarship but are looking for greater structure within which to accomplish their goals. The methodology behind the group draws on a number of ideas for productivity, but is focused on daily contributions to scholarship in order to maintain momentum and the camaraderie of writing group dynamics. In utilizing Wendy Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks, the group requires that each participant have already selected a piece of scholarship that they have begun in some form that they plan to submit for publication by the end of 12 weeks. Additionally, we will be utilizing the Pomodoro technique and other practices to encourage small yet productive allocations of work time in what we know to be already very overfilled weekly schedules.

Participants will be expected to attempt daily writing, attend weekly writing sessions (one hour), participate in the Writing Lock-Ins, and report to the group through blog posts or emails.

Requirements:

• Applicants must have a piece of existing scholarship that they will work toward submission at the end of the fall semester. While it can be in any state currently (conference paper, beginning of a draft, extended abstract, etc.), we ask that you commit to seeing this piece through to the end of the 12 weeks and submitting it for publication.
• Applicants must be willing to commit to the following attend the virtual Writing Kick-Off, Thursday, January 28, 5:30-7:30 PM (virtual).
• Applicants must be willing to meet weekly for one-hour writing session (time to be determined by the group).
• Applicants must be willing to check in electronically once a week via a group email or blog post.
• Applicants must be willing to commit to a minimum of 15 minutes of writing per day throughout the semester.

If you would like to participate, please send your CV and a brief description (approximately 500 words and in a separate document) of your scholarship piece and commitment to the program to both eyhammer@xula.edu and emanley@ xula.edu no later than 4:00 PM Monday, January 25, 2021.