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Teaching in Higher Education

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Research writing: problems and pedagogies
Claire Aitchison a; Alison Lee b
a
University of Western Sydney, Australia
b
University of Technology, Australia

Online Publication Date: 01 July 2006

To cite this Article: Aitchison, Claire and Lee, Alison (2006) 'Research writing:
problems and pedagogies', Teaching in Higher Education, 11:3, 265 — 278
To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/13562510600680574
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 Teaching in Higher Education
Vol. 11, No. 3, July 2006, pp. 265278
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Research writing: problems and

pedagogies
Claire Aitchisona and Alison Leeb*
a
University of Western Sydney, Australia; bUniversity of Technology, Australia

Writing remains significantly under-theorized within research degree programs in universities. Yet
there is clearly more at stake than the application of generic structural rules or guidelines for writing
research. Whatever the discipline, these mechanics are inadequate to account for the complexities
of writing faced by doctoral students. This article takes up the challenge of research writing as a
social, situated practice and calls for it to be embraced as such within research education. The
article identifies problems of policy, theory and pedagogy in relation to research writing. It then
examines recent initiatives, undertaken by the authors and others, in the formation of research
writing groups, in an attempt to address some of these problems. Despite wide variation, these
groups have in common a strong reliance on the pedagogical principles of identification and peer
review, community, and writing as ‘normal business’ in the doing of research. These are advanced
as key principles for a broader conceptualization of the requirements for research writing.

Introduction: research writing*a threefold problem

/

Writing is often seen as a problem for the educating of researchers in doctoral degree
programs. First, there is a new note of urgency in calls for writing as a strategy for
responding to policy-driven imperatives arising from global, long-term changes in
advanced higher education. These include profound changes to student demo-
graphics and the tighter linking of research training to research policy. The resultant
reformations, most pronounced in countries like the UK, New Zealand and Australia
(Marginson, 2004), are evidenced by greater accountability and tighter time frames
for completion (for example, in the UK, the ESRC, 2005; and in Australia, DETYA,
2001; and an ever-tighter folding in of research training into research assessment
exercises, for example in Australia, DEST, 2005).1 Writing becomes increasingly
visible as a point of tension in these contexts.
In response, the authors of this article are increasingly called upon, as researchers
and teachers of writing, to resource discussion and provision of research writing
development. Writing in these circumstances becomes problematic, construed as a
site of deficit or disruption to the smooth, ‘proper’ flow of punctual and effective
completion of the doctorate. Rarely is there an effective conceptual link between the

*Corresponding author. Faculty of Education, University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 123,

Sydney 2007, Australia. Email: Alison.Lee@uts.edu.au
ISSN 1356-2517 (print)/ISSN 1470-1294 (online)/06/030265-14
# 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13562510600680574
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266 C. Aitchison and A. Lee

current understandings of the centrality of text to knowledge production and student

learning and the pragmatic problems of policy imperatives in the name of efficiency
and capacity-building.
Second, writing is a problem of, and for, contemporary theory. The so-called
‘linguistic turn’ within social and cultural theory has focused on the centrality of
language to representation in the production of knowledge. Questions of writing, and
of textuality more generally, are the sites of major challenge to positivist and realist
conceptions of knowledge production. From the point of view of textualist epistemol-
ogies, writing is the practice as well as the site of the production and exchange of
knowledge (see Barthes, 1977). In the specific context of research education, there
appears to be widespread, if not universal, agreement among contemporary research
writers that writing, at the level of theory, at least, is central to research (see Lee, 1998;
Scott & Usher, 1999; Richardson, 2000; Maclure, 2003). Whatever the discipline,
conceptual challenges of one kind or another exert considerable influence on the
material struggles and practices of research writing for many students as they
encounter the protocols and sanctions of the discursive formations of their fields of
inquiry and construct and articulate positions for themselves within these fields.
Third, then, writing becomes a new problem of, and for, pedagogy. Within this
frame, problems of writing are most often construed either in terms of individualized
deficit and trauma (the problem) or of clinicaltechnical intervention (the solution).
Thus, as an explicit pedagogical category, research writing is often separated from
pedagogies of supervision and research learning and taken up in highly circum-
scribed settings such as learning support units. These specialist bodies, positioned
largely outside mainstream doctoral degree programs, thereby become proxies for
the thinkingwriting work which was absent from the inception of knowledge
production in the process of research teaching and learning.
This article addresses some of these problematics of research writing and of
research degree pedagogy. It enters a space at the intersections of the problems of
policy, theory and pedagogy, where writing has come onto the agenda in new ways
and where we see some possibilities for challenge and pedagogical development.
Specifically, we are concerned to address both the absence of a systematic
pedagogy for writing in most research degree programs and also the over-reliance on
clinical intervention by language or writing advisers at the point of crisis. Part of the
context in which this discussion is located is the still-dominant individual
studentsupervisor relationship in research degree pedagogy in many disciplines.
We use peer writing groups as a site to explore these complex problematics. We
propose that research writing groups, with their ‘horizontalizing’ pedagogical frame
of peer review (Boud & Lee, 2005), address many of the epistemological, experiential
and textual dimensions of writing within research degrees. In the common absence of
formal curriculum, such groups provide a learning environment that is antithetical to
notions of the all-too commonly isolated research writer. Writing groups explicitly
address the questions of knowledge, textual practice and identity in a context of peer
relations.
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Research writing 267

Through a brief presentation of two contrasting case studies of recent writing

group initiatives in our universities, we aim to ask questions about what is working,
why, and how. We then draw on the case studies again to explore emerging themes
and to revisit and elaborate a set of principles for the pedagogical work of these
groups.

Problems and responses

In this section we outline some of the epistemological and pedagogical problems of
research writing. We then mark a path through the two major strands of response
from within disciplinary communities most often nominated with the responsibility
for academic writing; those of applied linguistics and the North American field of
rhetoric and composition studies. The writing group pedagogy approached in the
final section of the article seeks to elaborate a practice that draws richly on both
traditions, as well as attending to the specificity of writing and knowledge production
at this most advanced level of formal education.
Writing is commonly seen, either deliberately or not, to be ‘autonomous’ (Street,
1984), or separate, from the work of knowledge production and hence the practices
of research, and understood in terms of individualized skills or deficits. Despite
decades of theoretical challenges to such epistemological positions, it seems fair to
say that, within research education pedagogy, the ‘silent realism’ of dominant
epistemological regimes remains often unchallenged and pervasive. That is, writing
remains, by default and neglect, always subordinate to the main work of thinking and
of knowledge production.
This state of affairs comes increasingly into focus in the recent contexts of
globalization and massification within the university sector. Major changes in student
demographics mean that, among other things, increasing numbers of students are
studying, researching and writing in a language other than their native language.
English speaking universities report the ever-increasing demands on academics, to
counter ‘deficit’ language skills of such students.
Universities have largely acknowledged these calls to develop students’ academic
writing by establishing separate specialist support units offering different kinds of
‘academic literacy’ assistance (see Ivanic, 2004, for an overview; also Lee, 1997; Lea
& Stierer, 2000). These units are staffed by practitioners who identify their practice
as ‘learning assistance’ (LAS), academic literacy, or English for academic purposes
(EAP). The latter is often used as an umbrella term for ‘language research and
instruction that focuses on the specific communicative needs and practices of
particular groups in academic contexts’ (Hyland & Hamp-Lyons, 2002, p. 2). The
particular nature and focus of these units, whether it is learning, literacy, or language,
reflects the variations of theoretical, historical, cultural and pragmatic conditions of
local institutional environments and diverse informing disciplines such as linguistics,
anthropology, education and discourse theory. More recently, EAP research and
pedagogy have focused increasing attention on research writing, for example,
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268 C. Aitchison and A. Lee

Paltridge (2002) and Hood (2005), and special issues of the Journal of English for
Academic Purposes (2002), and the special issue of the Hong Kong Journal of Applied
Linguistics (2003).
The North American higher education sector has had a relatively longer history of
supporting and integrating writing into the curriculum from the compulsory first
year freshman composition classes through to specialized graduate programs. The
discipline of composition studies and the theoretical frames of rhetorical and genre
theories offer resources for conceptualizing the social imperatives of writing
pedagogies within the context of research education. In particular, there is a long
tradition of peer writing group pedagogies (see Spigelman, 1999), which are
influential in recent developments. A recent focus on doctoral dissertation writing
has come from both composition studies (see Welch et al., 2002) and applied
linguistics and academic literacy (see Casanave & Hubbard, 1992; Prior, 1994;
Swales & Feak, 2000).
There is little connection, in general, between North American and British work
on writing pedagogy. An exception is the work of Murray and Mackay (1998) who
draw on Boice (1997) to explicitly address the social practices and strategies for
supporting research writing through writing groups. This work supplements, though
it rarely enters into dialogue with, the linguistic and literacy-focused work produced
within EAP and related fields.
Research student writers, preoccupied with the complexity of the writing process,
are often concerned simultaneously with the major questions of thinking, learning,
knowing, engaging, positioning, becoming and writing that constitute their extended
experience of research degree candidature and their transaction with the thesis text.
For students, the problems of knowledge production, text production and self-
formation are complexly intertwined at the point of articulation. Data analysis,
principles of selection and focus, the structuring of the text, the performance and
defense of an argument*are all questions of writing.
/

However, when students are working on their writing, often within a one-to-one
studentsupervisor pedagogical frame, opportunities for explicit engagement in such
complexities are arguably significantly limited. Research writing groups, in their
current forms, have emerged at the point in history of the university where there is a
distinct tension among the demands of theory, and institutional struggles to grapple
with policy pressures and greatly diversified and expanded numbers of students.

The emergence of research writing groups

Writing groups became an important feature of university culture in the late
eighteenth century in North American universities, in the absence of a structured
curriculum. They reached a peak of popularity in the mid nineteenth century, after
which they were replaced by the more contentious and politicized fraternities, as well
as by more officially organized forms such as seminars and lectures. Writing groups
burgeoned again through the student-centred learning movement of the 1960s and
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Research writing 269

the process writing movement of the 1970s in the US and elsewhere (Gere, 1987).
These in turn inform the ongoing presence of a specific ‘writing group pedagogy’
within North American composition studies.
The more recent establishment of research writing groups across different
institutions and countries draws on quite distinct strands of theoretical work on
writing and learning. For example, Murray and MacKay (1998) in Scotland and
Moore (2003) in Ireland draw extensively on North American composition studies.
Page-Adams and Cheng (1995) draw on US doctoral education policy literature of
the time, as well as specific work on scholarly publication within social work
education.
In Australia, there has been a diversity of emerging approaches and practices.
Aitchison (2003), for example, takes an explicitly language-oriented perspective in
her work with research writing groups. From quite a different theoretical perspective,
George et al. (2003) report on a multidisciplinary peer-initiated research writing
group. The writing group idea metamorphosed into a group committed to co-
authoring which they theorized in terms of ‘strategic learning’ and ‘knowledge
management’ targeted towards addressing a perceived ‘performance gap’ within the
current policy environment (George et al., 2003).
Groups of different kinds formed by Grant and Knowles (2000) and Lee and Boud
(2003) have drawn on a range of theoretical perspectives, including feminist and
poststructuralist framings. Groups developed in one faculty over the past 10 years
have been the site of theorizing about pedagogical principles such as ‘mutuality’,
‘identity and desire’ and ‘normal business’ as a way of building community
(Saunders et al., 1999; Lee & Boud, 2003).

Case studies of two writing groups

At this point we explore, through two examples, something of what can be learned
from our engagement with research writing groups. The genesis and form of the two
groups selected here, established in different times and places, are diverse. Yet each
of these studies instantiates the threefold framing of the problems of policy, theory
and pedagogy in research writing and each offers insights into the pedagogical
principles at work. These examples derive from our practices as research writing
teachers, researchers and consultants. They have been selected to indicate the
breadth and diversity of the framing of such groups, as well as for their capacity to
illustrate points of common pedagogical principle.

Case Study 1: thesis writing circles at the University of Western Sydney (UWS)
The Learning Skills Unit initiated thesis writing circles (TWCs) in response to a
frustration with increasingly urgent calls from supervisors and management for a
solution to ‘the problem’ of student writing. In a context where there were already
few system-wide structures for the support of doctoral research development and
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270 C. Aitchison and A. Lee

none that recognized the importance of writing, national policy imperatives driving
doctoral completions imposed additional pressures. The response of faculties,
supervisors and students was unsystematic and approaches to the Learning Skills
Unit typically positioned the language expert as ‘fixer’ of the text (Aitchison, 2000).
The rationale for establishing writing groups in response to these requests came from
a desire to move from a model of writing development as crisis control to a proactive
program that embedded writing with research, acknowledging writing as knowledge-
creating rather than merely as knowledge-recording.
Most TWCs have been multidisciplinary and culturally diverse, including students
at all stages of candidature who have elected voluntarily to join. All groups have
included some participants who are both students and academics at UWS. After
making the initial commitment, groups were typically highly motivated and some-
times formed subgroups for additional meetings and further networking.
Typically, groups met weekly over a period of 810 weeks. The three-hour
meetings were used for: the critiquing of new written work; the discussion of a
particular aspect of writing or generic aspects of the thesis; and the review of
reworked writing. The language focus was determined ahead of time so that
participants could coordinate their writing with the aspect under review that week.
Topics reviewed included generic aspects of thesis structure, writing research
questions, using evidence in argument development, and specific concerns such as
experimenting with the researcher’s voice, and micro-levels questions about style
and grammar. As a general rule, three pieces of writing were critiqued at each
meeting.
An important characteristic of this writing group was the leadership role played
by an independent language specialist. The role of this person was to facilitate
learning though, and of, writing. The development of skills for giving and receiving
feedback was crucial to the establishment of trust, as well as for the value students
found in learning how to describe and deconstruct language, and about the
writing process itself. The practice of critiquing each others’ work helped
participants develop a sense of membership within a new writers’ ‘community’
(Aitchison, 2003).

Case Study 2: doctoral writing group for academics (DWGA)

The DWGA was convened within the Faculty of Education at the University of
Technology, Sydney. The group ran for a year and a half and resourcing was provided
by the Faculty, which was focusing for the first time explicitly on research
development needs of academics who were enrolled in doctoral study.
These group members saw themselves as being in need of support for professional
development as they undertook doctoral study at the same time as being full time
academics. The structure of the group emerged from previous writing groups, so that
a routine, and a set of practices and processes had already been developed. Many of
the earlier topics and agenda items became articulated within the more specific
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Research writing 271

context of doctoral writing. Thus there was some continuity of participants,

structure, timetable, facilitator and agenda.
The common practice was to follow an agenda of discussion during the first half of
each meeting, the purpose of which was to build and consolidate a richer and deeper
understanding of the institutional nature of thesis writing, to surface and articulate
personal experiences, and to help participants develop a more sophisticated analysis
of how their experiences fitted into larger patterns, struggles, conflicts and dilemmas.
Participants attended to the development of a language for talking about writing,
both technical language about language and writing from within linguistics, but also
the language of theory to apply to the questions of textuality, discourse and
subjectivity in relation to academic writing and self (trans)formation. Specifically on
the agenda were dysfunctional binary separations of academic/personal writing,
teaching/research, knowledge/language, research/writing, academic/student.
The second half of each meeting involved an extended review of one person’s
work, which had been circulated to group members by email. The opportunity to
practise the ideas and the language of analysis and critique was a key element of
pleasure and success. Additional topics of discussion in this group included the
attraction of the writing group as an object worthy of analysis in its own right,
including a reflexive analysis of the group’s existence and its members’ needs and
desires. Common discussions revolved around epistemology, expertise, skill and
know-how about writing. The question of pedagogy within the group was explicitly
addressed in connection to questions about the skills, knowledge and expertise of
different participants. The group explicitly tackled questions of identity and desire in
the research writing process, as members negotiated a path into a new subjectivity as
becoming-licensed researchers and full members of the academicinstitutional
community.

Principles of research writing group pedagogy

Drawing from our two case studies, our professional experience and study of writing
groups, we outline in this section key characteristics of research writing groups and
propose a set of four principles that we believe make for effective research writing
pedagogies.
Research writing groups all respond to and address the sociality of writing.
Despite enduring romantic notions of writing as a solitary pursuit (Grant &
Knowles, 2000; Moore, 2003), writing in specific contexts always enters into a
more or explicit network of social, institutional and peer relations*of readers,
/

reviewers, teachers, examiners, editors, publishers. First and foremost, the essential
sociality of writing is instantiated in the primary operations of the groups, which
are all, more or less, organized in relation to the principle of peer review. Second,
we note that writing groups are self determining; that is, research writing groups
are on the whole explicitly negotiated, self-directed, evolving and dynamic and
inherently responsive to group agendas and articulated needs. The third intrinsic
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272 C. Aitchison and A. Lee

element of such groups is the notion of community. Here elements such as

identification, membership, stability and commitment are salient. In the remainder
of this section we outline four key pedagogical principles that we have derived from
our study of these groups.

Identification
The first principle is that of identification. Key points of identification can include
the institutional and work contexts, shared life and stage-of-life experiences, shared
geographical locations, common interest in research topics or areas, theoretical or
methodological frames, and so on.
Members of the DWGA shared many powerful points of identification. All group
members were women in the mid-stages of their career. All were undergoing
significant career and identity change in relation to their doctoral study, moving from
prior identities as adult educators into a risky and uncomfortable new identity as
‘becoming-academics’ and ‘becoming-researchers’. Desire and fear mingled to
promote a strong identification and shared sense of need (Saunders et al., 1999).
Elsewhere we have found powerful points of identification in less predictable
places. For example, the urgency of the timeframe to completion of a research degree
can bring otherwise disparate people together to learn and share the management of
the task. In one of the TWCs a strong and productive relationship evolved between
an educator undertaking a quantitative study of school mathematics and a social
scientist writing a highly personal, philosophical thesis about global development.
Their differing epistemological positions, manifested in widely divergent methodol-
ogies, and modes of writing, became secondary to the mutually identified desire for a
writing companion to facilitate critique and completion.
Uniting all of the groups has been a shared and developing belief of participants in
the value of sharing the work of writing and a fear or distrust of the hierarchically
organized isolation which most experienced without the groups.

Peer review
The second pedagogical principle, that of peer review, is the key practical unifying
feature of the different writing groups studied. The overarching principle at work
here is that of peer learning*learning with and from peers. The ‘horizontalizing’
/

pedagogy of peer review is one in which studentpeers work together and with more
experienced researchers and writing specialists to develop expertise in different
aspects of research writing, at the same time as entering explicitly into a network of
peer relations as becoming-researchers. This dual notion of both being- and
becoming-peer is what perhaps best characterizes this pedagogy in research
education context and moves the notion of peer review out of a studentexpert
‘vertical’ binary relationship into a more dispersed and community-based pedagogy
(Boud & Lee, 2005).
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Research writing 273

In both our case studies members were peers on multiple levels: as professionals, as
academics and as students. In the case of the DWGA, peer review had a particular
resonance. Most powerfully in this group setting, members were peers as professional
teachers and members of a single faculty, and they were peers dually positioned as
academics and doctoral students. This very common positioning has been neglected
within dominant stories of the ‘academicization’ of work practices and identities that
have taken place over the past decade, yet it is a constant feature of the groups
reviewed here.
We have identified three elements in peer review: mutuality; ‘know-how’ or
expertise, and writer identity. Mutuality has been written about at some length
elsewhere (Lee & Boud, 2003), particularly taking into account delicate dynamics of
power and difference; it operates at all levels of the group functioning: from the initial
negotiation of group norms through to the micro-dynamics of turn-taking within
specific group interactions.
Effective writing groups call on, and develop, particular know-how or expertise
that advances learning. They lend themselves to multiple formulations of expertise
depending on the type of group and the needs of members. The development of
group expertise can be both overt and conscious and more subtle. At the first
meeting of the TWC, for example, members talk about protocols for giving and
receiving feedback based on mutual respect. Initially the language specialist teaches
linguistic concepts and scaffolds appropriate language-focused feedback. This can be
a matter of particular sensitivity if groups are culturally and linguistically diverse.
Over time group members build up a repertoire of language and skills for analysing
and describing text, such that the peers themselves become the primary resource for
learning.
In addition, in effective groups, questions of identity are constantly interrogated
and so cannot be left to a decontextualized afterthought in the writing process. While
doctoral education is most commonly thought of in terms of the production of new
knowledge, it is for many students very powerfully a matter of producing and
negotiating new identities, or selves (Johnson et al., 2000). Peer review is a
pedagogical space for experimenting and for articulating that struggle between
knowledge and identity. In our experience, questions of voice, of authority and of
writer positioning arise naturally in research writing groups, where doctoral students
are often required to come to terms with the textual challenges of reflexivity,
positioning, situated knowledges and the textual production of self and other. The
theoretical point that identity is a relational concept is played out in the pedagogical
practice of writing groups as participants experiment with various structural,
grammatical and rhetorical strategies for representing the field they are researching
and themselves as participants in, or commentators upon, that field. What it looks
like and feels like to offer a critique, make a claim, exert an authoritative stance,
advance an argument, reflect, position oneself in a text or a field, assert a voicecan
enter explicitly into the exchange over particular texts. These matters can become
subjects of explicit discussion and negotiating as members’ texts are examined within
the group.
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274 C. Aitchison and A. Lee

Community
The third key principle for conceptualizing and framing the pedagogies of research
writing groups is that of community. Our discussion here interfaces with significant
developments in understanding learning as socioculturally specific and situated, as
exemplified by the ideas of ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger, 1998). Its particular
articulation here, however, takes up work within literary theory, linguistics and
composition studies. The notion of community here is neither a neutral context nor a
simple location for learning but is rather best conceptualized as both a condition and
a dynamic of learning.
In the first instance, writing groups themselves form a social context or community
within which members learn together from each other especially when they share
common knowledge concerns. That is, they may in themselves form epistemic
micro-communities by virtue of institutional or disciplinary location, which may in
fact form their primary identification. Other intellectually more heterogeneous
groups develop community of this kind through the explicit agendas of the group
processes and practices. A powerful example of this is the development of a shared
meta-language and set of rhetorical and pragmatic strategies for talking about
writing.
A related notion of community of particular interest to the pedagogies of research
writing is that of discourse community. According to Bizzell (1992), a discourse
community draws on the sociolinguistic concept of speech community, as well as the
literary notion of interpretive community. A discourse community is a group of people
who share certain language-using practices, ‘bound together primarily by its use of
language’ (p. 222). Further, it shares some kind of ‘collective project’ that unifies the
group, where key interpretive activities are shared by members. In this sense,
research writing groups can be viewed as discourse communities in and of
themselves. As well, their pedagogy can explicitly address the question of the
particular discourse communities individuals may seek to become members of (see
Canagarajah, 2002). Research writing groups can be nodes in a network of
heterogeneous and dispersed socio-rhetorical purposes, goals and strategies.
Within this framework, research students are also bound into performative
communities by virtue of the institutional conditions of their candidature. As
particular kinds of ‘apprentices’ into the communities of research practice to which
they aspire to belong, they are connected into a peer-based yet hierarchically
organized academic community of supervision, examination, administration and
review.
Our task in elaborating this point is to examine these different aspects and
dimensions of community that are all potentially at play in the arena of doctoral
education. First, membership is a matter for discussion within groups and can become
a force in the shaping of certain kinds of identity as writers within the particular
institutional context of their operation. This can even lead in some cases to a
commitment to co-authoring (see George et al., 2003; Galligan et al., 2003). In other
cases, full membership of group and student community sits alongside aspirational
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Research writing 275

and developmental goals of becoming full members of target discourse communities.

Each of these notions of community in turn manifest key aspects of ‘communities of
practice’, through notions of apprenticeship learning ideas such as legitimate
peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991).

Normal business
The fourth principle has been developed and elaborated from its first articulation in
Lee and Boud (2003). The broad argument is that research writing pedagogies need
to become incorporated into ‘the way we do things here’ in specific institutional
contexts. This ranges from organizational workload and time management issues up
to institutional policy and planning and down to the daily routinizing of writing into
everyday work.
In our case studies, groups included members who were both academics and
students, and who struggled to negotiate research writing into their workload
agreements, or to implement these agreements in practice. The acute levels of
emotion around the frustration of being unable to make time to write have often been
the motivation for joining our groups, as well as a topic of conversation and mark of
identification. In the DWGA, the particular plight of the working academic who is
simultaneously attempting to complete a research degree, mostly part time and
under enormous pressure, formed an explicit topic of discussion. The most pressing
need of this group of academics, however, hinged on an acknowledgement that
individual and organizational goals of doctoral degree completion needed a more
focused and targeted response. The consciousness-raising aspect of this was
foregrounded and shaped the possibility of a collective agency for change.
Concerns about the management of writing time have been addressed in TWCs by
explicitly helping participants to create personal writing schedules reflecting real,
competing life and work pressures that militate against writing becoming ‘normal
business’. Constructing a writing schedule based on each individual’s professional
and private life timetable is an exercise in monitoring the material conditions of work
against desire in the process of ‘becoming a writer’. Group members monitor their
own and others’ writing productivity against this schedule and thus, sometimes for
the first time, participants begin to address personal issues of avoidance and ‘block’
as well as structural impediments to productivity (Zerubavel, 1999; Grant &
Knowles, 2000).

Conclusion
Our individual work and study in the area of research writing groups was initially
motivated by the need to respond to the sense of desperation expressed by colleagues
and research students about a complex set of issues to do with ‘writing’. We each
initiated writing groups as one response to the effects of policy-driven changes
affecting the work of students, their supervisors and academics. At the same time, we
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276 C. Aitchison and A. Lee

became aware of writing group initiatives elsewhere that appeared to parallel our
experiences.
Our discussion of research writing groups in this article has detailed the emergence
and popularity of such groups. It would be inaccurate, however, to regard such
groups as a simple solution for the current problems with research education. There
are, of course, limitations and shortcomings associated with the management and
conduct of groups that needs to be further explored and theorized. Research writing
groups, like any others, face the challenges of small group dynamics, issues of
continuity and regeneration, leadership and purpose. In addition, research writing
groups situated in contemporary university contexts must confront issues associated
with changing disciplinary protocols, and cultural and multilingual diversity that
may trouble otherwise comfortable assumptions about the language and epistemol-
ogies of higher-level research scholarship. The broader issues about the location of
responsibility within institutions for ‘writing development’ in research degree
programs remain unresolved.
Notwithstanding these issues, we argue that research writing groups have the
capacity to surface and begin to address the important relationships between
knowledge production and language and learning. We have proposed a set of
principles for group-based research writing pedagogy that stand as resources for
rethinking the place of writing in research education.

Note
1. ESRC: Economic and Social Research Council, (UK); DETYA: Department of Education,
Training and Youth Affairs (Australia); DEST, Department of Education, Science and
Training (Australia).

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