Seeking balance within personal writing ecologies: a collaborative autoethnography of a doctoral student writing group

ABSTRACT

While the literature on doctoral writing groups suggests that these groups can have a substantial positive effect on doctoral dissertation completion, little is known about how group practices contribute to their success or failure. This collaborative autoethnography explores the experiences of five doctoral student participants in a peer writing group to discover how group participation either contributed to or disrupted each participant’s personal writing ecology. While participants felt that the group supported them through personal and job-related stressors and helped them maintain connection to their academic disciplinary community, for some participants the group became an additional source of stress and failed to provide needed guidance. Analysis of individual and group experiences through the ecological perspective challenges the normative meaning of ‘failure’ for doctoral writing and doctoral writing groups, suggesting that the concepts of persistence and attrition may limit our understanding of the doctoral student experience, while the concept of seeking balance may enhance our understanding. We encourage doctoral students who form peer writing groups to consider how the group can be structured to support each member’s writing ecology and to maintain flexibility with group practices as members’ circumstances change.

KEYWORDS:

• writing groups
• doctoral education
• dissertation support
• graduate studies
• collaborative autoethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.