Leadership of academic writing development in England: narratives of problems, pragmatism and possibility

This chapter uses first-person narrative vignettes to ground a discussion of the problems, pragmatic solutions and possibilities which attended various writing development initiatives in two UK universities. The chapter has three parts: the first two trace the authors’ individual journeys to becoming research leaders with responsibility for staff writing development: Taylor’s vignettes focus on the development of her role as Reader and discuss the initiation of a cross-departmental writing development strategy, a mentoring project, and two staff development events, during a time of institutional change. Stevenson’s vignettes explore the tensions and difficulties which arose in attempting to support academics to make the transition from writing up their practice to writing for refereed research journals. In the third part we analyse leadership as an embodied, affective and relational practice; and discuss how we put the notion of ‘servant leadership’ into practice in the joint writing development workshops we ran for staff. This enables us to further explore some of the tensions and challenges we faced as research leaders supporting others to write for publication. Keywords: narratives; vignettes; academic writing; mentoring; leadership