Q&A on “Wellbeing While Writing: Supporting Mental Health & Wellbeing During the Doctoral Writing Process”
Professor Leigh Wilson, Graduate School Director at the University of Westminster, led one of the recent 17 Research England / OFS Catalyst Fund projects to support the mental health and wellbeing of postgraduate researchers. She recently ran and facilitated a UKCGE workshop to discuss Westminster’s project which looked specifically at wellbeing during the doctoral writing process.
Could you describe a bit about the PGR population at the University of Westminster, and what drove you to look into offering greater support during the doctoral writing process?
We have around 450 PGR students at Westminster. About a third are overseas students, and two-thirds are home/EU, and about a third are part-time. We have a relatively high proportion of students who are older, and many of them have lots of experience outside of academia. A good proportion of students are also self-funded.
In the Graduate School at Westminster, we began to think about the links between writing and wellbeing when we noticed an increase in applications for suspension of studies or mitigating circumstances applications around the time of annual progress review deadlines.
The supporting evidence for a significant number of these indicated that students were experiencing stress and anxiety, and we began to wonder about a link between this increase in stress and anxiety and the deadlines for pieces of writing. We brought in our annual progress review system a few years ago as a way of supporting progression – students have to submit pieces of writing throughout their degree to ensure a steady build-up of work.
We began to think that an unintended consequence of this might be an increase in stress through the degree (rather than leaving most of it till the end!). We felt that, if this was the case, we had a responsibility to offer support in writing for students throughout their degree.
In your presentation, you said that it is often assumed that doctoral candidates know how to be successful writers. Could you explain why you think that assumption is unfounded?
In academic writing, as opposing to say, in creative writing, the writing part of the process is a means to an end, a way of communicating methods, ideas, conclusions, and so on. Because of this, I think that the writing process itself has not been given much attention; but actually all writing is hard. It is never ‘not hard’ because all writing forces us to think carefully and clearly about what we mean, and that is always demanding.
In addition to this, in the academy very often writing is linked with being judged. Students produce writing for their supervisors, and they know they are going to get feedback. They want the writing to be good because they want to show that they merit their place as a doctoral candidate, and that produces enormous pressure.
In other words, students feel the need to produce good writing, but the fact that the process of writing means that ‘good’ writing is the hoped-for endpoint, not what is initially produced is rarely acknowledged. Our sense of academic writing (as being primarily about the communication of the research) doesn’t admit the nature of this process. Of course, all academics know this from their own experience, but it is almost as if it’s a guilty secret.
What was different about your project, as opposed to other kinds of writing support such as training in “academic English for doctoral researchers”?
The support offered through the project was not about writing skills or learning the conventions of academic writing (our students are already offered this in various ways). We wanted to focus on this idea of writing as a ‘process’, to make that visible and to validate students’ experience of writing as a process to counteract any sense that this experience is a marker of failure.
When we began to see the need for this, we realised that this idea of writing as a process had been given the most attention in the discipline of Creative Writing. Those who teach CW spend a lot of time getting their students to think differently about writing, to see it as a process, and to not be scared of it.
For example, underlying the very idea of ‘workshopping’ – a pedagogic practice which came out of CW programmes in the US and is widely used on all CW degrees – is the assumption that writing is a process, that the first draft is never the final draft, and that writers need input from others in order to get to their writing to its final version.
Much that happens in a creative writing class is focused on taking away the fear of writing by emphasising that the first version is not the final version, by encouraging free writing, by encouraging students to have a private space for ‘first writing’ that will never be seen or judged by others, and so on.
The confidence that comes from such practices was what we wanted for our students too, so we decided that our workshops should be facilitated by teachers of Creative Writing. This wasn’t so that our students could start writing poetry or fiction, but it was to ensure that they were being supported by those with expertise in giving students confidence in their own abilities and possibilities as writers.
What were your major challenges during the project?
Our major challenge was definitely in getting students to attend the workshops. Our project was called ‘Wellbeing When Writing’, and the workshops used this term too. Some of the feedback we had from students who did attend the workshops suggested that this title had created expectations that then weren’t fulfilled – some students thought there wasn’t enough about wellbeing, some that there wasn’t enough about writing!
Although our aim was always that writing support would improve students’ wellbeing, it may be that including the term in the title put people off for a variety of reasons. Having said that, the feedback we had from students who did attend was overwhelmingly positive.
Students commented, for example, that: ‘The writing exercises were the most enjoyable element, and the use of creative writing to unblock our writing style was very useful’; ‘Use of the storyboard helped me to see the bigger picture and tie my writing into my overall aim’; ‘The exercises were brilliant’.
I think if we offer versions of the workshops in the future, we will offer fewer and make it clearer that they are about developing confidence in writing.
What have been the major successes so far?
As I’ve said, those students who did attend workshops were overwhelmingly positive about them. However, as attendance was lower than we had wanted, we decided to adjust the project in its last six months and offered writing retreats as well as the workshops. We ran four in those six months, two residential and two on campus.
The take up of these was excellent, especially the residential ones, and the feedback was excellent too. We are thinking that, in the future, we will offer retreats, both on- and off-campus, which incorporate some of the exercises and strategies from the workshops.
A discussion point during the workshop was about the role of supervisors during the writing process. Could you give your reflections on that, and say how supervisors were involved in your project?
I do think that, in any activity with doctoral students, involving the supervisor in some way is key. We had three events for supervisors as part of our project – two supervisor forums and a symposium on the links between wellbeing and writing.
The most successful thing we did (in terms of numbers attending and feedback) was to run a truncated version of the workshops for supervisors, both to show them what was on offer for their students and also to get them to think about their own experience of writing.
We have also included a few supervisors in the writing retreats as participants rather than facilitators, so that students could see clearly that wrestling with writing – finding time to do it and actually doing it – is experienced by academics too.
What advice would you give to others involved in PGR support who are seeking to improve mental health and wellbeing during the doctoral writing process?
We wanted our project to focus on something very practical, but which can cause stress for a large number of students. While as I’ve suggested above, our focus on something not directly associated with wellbeing may have caused some uncertainty among students about whether the workshops were for them, but I do think that for the vast majority of students practical support in areas of their research that they encounter every day is key.