Communities of peer practitioners. Experiences from an Academic Writing Group

Abstract

Learning academic writing is important for communicating research and participating in scholarly debates. This learning is traditionally conceptualized through a hierarchical teacher-student relation or individual accomplishment. However, in this paper we ask how we might understand the development of academic writing skills as a collective practice within a writing community. We draw on experiences from our own departmental writing group of PhD candidates and highlight our specific peer community as a tool and the draft texts we deliver as boundary objects through which we develop and broaden our academic skills.

Keywords

• academic writing
• peer writing group
• sociomaterial learning
• community of practice
• PhD writing groups