Tag: Writing

  • Academic writing and spaces of resistance

    Academic writing and spaces of resistance

    by Kate Carruthers Thomas

    At SRHE’s Annual Conference 2025, I gave a paper which argued that community, collegiality and care were key elements of the writing groups and retreats I’ve facilitated for female academics. I used Massey’s heuristic device of activity space to foreground interactions of gender, space and power in those writing interventions. I concluded that in embodying community, collegiality and care, they can potentially be seen as activity spaces of resistance to the geographies of power operating across universities and the individualised, competitive neo-liberal academy.

    Academics must write. Written outputs are one of the principal means by which academics enact professional capital as experts and specialists in their disciplinary fields (French, 2020 p1605). Scholarly publications are central to individual and institutional success in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF). Writing does not automatically or quickly lead to publication and just finding the time to write productively presents challenges at all career stages. But as Murray and Newton state: ‘the writing element of research is not universally experienced as a mainstream activity’ (Murray and Newton, 2009 p551). 

    Applying Massey’s analytical tool of activity space: ‘the spatial network of links and activities, of spatial connections and of locations within which a particular agent operates’ (2005 p55)to this context, we can imagine the UK HE sector as an activity space shaped by networks and power relationships of disciplines, governance, financial and knowledge capitals, metrics and institutional audit. We can also imagine the sector’s 160 universities as nodes within that wider activity space. Massey coins the term ‘power geometry’ to describe how individuals and groups are differently positioned in relation to different geographies of power in activity spaces. For example, UK universities are more or less powerfully positioned across a spectrum of elite, pre-1992 and post-1992 institutions.

    We can also consider each university as an activity space, with its own spatial networks and connections shaped by the wider sector and by regional and local factors. These are enacted within each university through systems of management, workload and performance, creating the environments within which ‘agents’ – staff and students – work and study. Academics in more senior ranks, with higher salaries and research-focused roles are more likely to produce scholarly publications (McGrail, Rickard and Jones, 2006). And while the relationship between research and teaching is a troubled one across the sector, this tension is exacerbated for academics located in post-1992 institutions, many describing themselves as ‘teaching intensive’. Research and publication remain strategic corporate priorities for post-1992s, yet workload allocation is heavily weighted towards teaching and pastoral support.

    So, in relation to academic writing and publication, academics are also differentially positioned, more and less powerfully, within the activity space of the university. One of the key factors influencing that positioning is gender. If we scratch the statistical surface of the UK HE landscape we find longstanding gender inequality which is proving glacially slow to shift. Women form an overall majority of UK sector employees in academic and professional services roles but 49% of academic staff, 33% of Heads of Institution and 31% of Professors are women (Advance HE, 2024). They predominate in part-time, teaching-only and precarious contracts, all of which play a role in slowing or stalling academic career progression. These data cannot be seen in isolation from women’s disproportionate responsibilities for pastoral and informal service roles within the university and gendered social roles which place a burden of care for family, household and caring on many women of all working ages.

    Academic writing groups and retreats are a popular response to the challenge of writing productively. They can ‘be a method of improving research outputs’ (Wardale, 2015 p1297); demystify the process of scholarly writing (Lee and Boud, 2003 p190), and ‘enable micro-environments in what is perceived of as an otherwise often unfriendly mainstream working environment’ (ibid).  Groups and retreats are often targeted at different academic career stages and/or specific groups within the academic workforce. Since 2020, as critical higher education academic and diversity worker, I have run online writing groups and in-person writing retreats for female academics at all career stages, most employed at my own post-1992 university. Over 140 individuals have participated in one or other of the interventions and I used a range of methods (survey, interview, focus group) to gather data on their motivations, experiences and outcomes.

    The combined data of all three studies show that the primary motivation of every participant was to create protected space for writing, space not made sufficiently available to them within working hours, despite the professional expectation that they will produce scholarly publications. In this context, the meaning of ‘space’ is multi-dimensional: encompassing the temporal, the physical and the intellectual. The consequence of the interaction of protected temporal and physical/virtual space is intellectual space, or what was referred to by several participants as ‘headspace’ – the extended focus and concentration necessary to produce high quality scholarly writing (Couch, Sullivan and Malatsky, 2020) .

    When I launched the online writing group (WriteSpace) during the UK’s first COVID-19 lockdown, MS Teams software enabled the creation of a virtual ‘writing room’ and a sense of community over distance. Socially-isolated colleagues sought contact with others, even those previously unknown to them. As lockdown restrictions eased and remote, then hybrid, working arrangements ensued, the act of writing alongside others virtually or in-person remained an important way to engage in a shared endeavour. The in-person residential retreats in 2023 and 2024, followed Murray’s structured retreat model (Murray and Newton, 2009 p543).  Participants wrote together in one room, for the same time periods over three days. They also ate, walked and socialised together.

    Each of the writing interventions were multi-disciplinary spaces for female academics at all career stages, including those undertaking part-time doctoral study. Whatever their grade or experience, no one individual’s writing was more important or significant than another’s. These hierarchically flat spaces disrupted the normative power relationships of the workplace and the academy. On the retreats, additional practices of goal setting and review in pairs encouraged ongoing reflection and exchange on writing practices and developing academic identities.

    Many participants experienced the facilitation of the groups and retreats as professional care – a colleague taking responsibility for timekeeping, recommending breaks and stimulating reflection on writing practices. The experience of care was extended and heightened at the residential retreats because all meals were provided in a comfortable and peaceful environment and no household chores were required. This was particularly significant in the context of women’s social roles and conditioning to care for others.

    Viewing these writing interventions as activity spaces situated within the wider contexts of the university and the UK HE sector foregrounds interactions of power, space and gender in the context of academic writing. The writing interventions were not neutral phenomena. They were deliberately initiated and targeted in response to a gendered imbalance of power in the academy and the university. They were occupied solely by women. They intentionally prioritise temporal, physical and intellectual space for writing over teaching, administrative, pastoral, household and domestic responsibilities. Within them, academic writing becomes a social practice and a common endeavour.

    The interventions do not remove longstanding and pervasive gender inequality across the UK sector, change gendered social roles, resolve the tensions between teaching and research in the contemporary neoliberal academy, nor increase workload allocation for academic writing. However, in embodying community, collegiality and care they can potentially be seen as activity spaces of resistance to the normative geographies of power operating across universities and the wider sector. 

    Kate Carruthers Thomas is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Gender at Birmingham City University. Her research is interdisciplinary, drawing on educational, sociological and geographical theories and methods. She also has a track record in creative research dissemination including graphics, poetry and podcasting.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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  • Writing Labs Are an Answer to AI (opinion)

    Writing Labs Are an Answer to AI (opinion)

    Done! Finished!

    One might expect to hear such exclamations from exultant college students, relieved or ready to rejoice upon polishing off their latest essay assignment. Instead, these are the words I hear with increasing frequency from fellow professors who have come to think that the out-of-class essay itself is now done. It’s an antiquated assignment, some say. An outmoded form of pedagogy. A forlorn fossil of the Writing Age, a new coinage that seems all too ready to consign writing instruction to extinction.

    As a new director of my college’s faculty development office, I’m privy to ongoing conversations about the teaching of writing, many of which are marked by frustration, perplexity and pessimism. “I don’t want to read a machine’s writing,” one professor laments. “I don’t want to police student essay writing for AI use,” another asserts.

    Kevin Roose, a tech writer for The New York Times, who recently visited my campus, has suggested that the take-home essay is obsolete, asking, “Why would you assign a take-home exam, or an essay on Jane Eyre, if everyone in class—except, perhaps, the most strait-laced rule followers—will use A.I. to finish it?”

    Whether this situation is entirely new is arguable. For decades, we’ve had online resources that might make independent student reading unnecessary, yet we haven’t stopped assigning out-of-class reading. If I assign a rigorous novel like Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, I’ve long known that students can access an assortment of chapter summaries online—CliffsNotes, SparkNotes, LitCharts and others, all of which might make unnecessary the intellectual work of deciphering Dickens’s 19th-century sentences or wading into the deep waters of his sometimes murky prose. Maybe, as a recent New York Times piece about Harvard University students not doing their reading suggests, students aren’t doing that kind of homework, either.

    Still, being able to create sentences, paragraphs, essays and research papers with a single prompt—or now, having “agentic AI” engineer an entire research process in a matter of minutes—seems different from googling the plot summary for the first chapter of Bleak House.

    Maybe writing via LLMs is different because it’s not just about summarizing someone’s else’s idea; it’s about asking a machine to take the glimmer of one’s own half-hatched idea and turn it into a flawless, finished product. Somehow that process seems a little more magical, like being able to create a novel or a dissertation with a Bewitched-like twitch of the nose.

    Further, the problems with out-of-class writing are different from those linked to out-of-class reading because of how embedded AI has become within the most basic writing tools—from Microsoft’s Copilot to Grammarly. With tools that blur the boundaries between the student and their “copilot,” students will increasingly have difficulty discerning what’s them and what’s the machine—to the chagrin of those who do want to develop autonomous intellectual skills. As high school senior Ashanty Rosario complained in an essay in The Atlantic about how AI is “demolishing my education,” AI tools have become “inescapable” and inescapably seductive, with shortcuts to learning becoming “normalized.”

    In this world of ubiquitous AI shortcuts, how do we encourage students to take the scenic route? How do we help them see, as John Warner reminds us in More Than Words: How To Think About Writing in the Age of AI (Basic Books, 2025), that writing is an act of embodied thinking and a tool for forging human community, linking one human being to another? How do we encourage them, to use the language of Chad Hanson, to see their written assignments as “investments, not just in the creation of something to turn in on a deadline, but rather, investments in your humanity”? In an Inside Higher Ed essay, Hanson describes how he tells students, “When you give yourself time to use your faculties, you end up changing the dimensions of your mind.”

    But there’s the rub. Writing takes time. Teaching writing takes time. The practice of writing takes even more time. If there is still value in the time invested in developing human writing skills, where is the time to be found within the constraints of traditional writing courses? Writing practice used to take place primarily at home, on student PCs and notepads, over hours, days and weeks. Now that student writing is being chronically offloaded to a magical deus ex machina, Roose asks why teachers wouldn’t simply “switch to proctored exams, blue-book essays, and in-class group work”?

    As a writing professor, my answer is: There isn’t time.

    Shifting writing practice from a largely out-of-class endeavor to an in-class one doesn’t provide students with the time needed to develop writerly skills or to use writing as a mode of deep thinking. Nor does it allow for both instruction and sufficient hands-on practice. At my college, courses typically run either three days per week for a short 50 minutes per class or two days per week for 80 minutes. Even in a “pure” writing course, such time periods don’t allow for students to have the sustained practice they would need to develop skill as writers. The problem is even worse in writing-intensive courses for which a significant amount of class time is needed for discussing literary history, philosophy, political theory, religion, art history or sundry other topics.

    The solution I propose is to invest more rather than less in writing instruction: Just as we require labs for science lecture courses, we should provide required “writing labs” as adjuncts to writing classes. Here I don’t mean a writing lab in the sense of a writing center where students can opt to go for peer assistance. By writing lab, I mean a multihour, credit-bearing, required time during which students practice writing on a weekly basis under the supervision of the course’s instructor or another experienced writing teacher. Such labs would be time in which students develop their autonomous critical thinking skills, tackling assignments from conception to completion, “cloister[ed]” away, as Niall Ferguson puts it, from dependency on AI machines. And if writing “lab” sounds unduly scientific for the teaching of a human art, call it a weekly workshop or practicum. (Yet, even the word “laboratory” derives, via medieval Latin, from laborare, which simply means “to work or labor.”) Whatever the name, the need is real: Writing cannot be taught without student labor.

    The problem I am addressing is a critical one, with too few alarms being sounded in higher education circles, despite the plethora of articles about education and AI. Even as colleges tout writing skill as a major outcome of college education, I fear that writing education may quickly fall between the cracks, with out-of-class writing being abandoned out of frustration or despair and insufficient in-class time available for the deep learning writing requires. Quiet quitting, let’s call it, of a long-standing writing pedagogy.

    If colleges still wish to claim writing skill as an important learning outcome, they need to become more deliberate about what it means to educate student writers in the age of AI. Toward that end, colleges must first reassert the importance of learning to write and articulate its abiding value as a human endeavor. Second, colleges must devote professional development resources to prepare faculty to teach writing in the age of AI. And finally—here’s the pith of my argument—colleges need to restructure traditional models of writing instruction so that students have ample time to practice writing in the classroom, with a community of human peers and under the supervision of a writing guide. Only in, with and under those circumstances will students be able to rediscover writing as a true labor of love.

    Carla Arnell is associate dean of the faculty, director of the Office of Faculty Development and professor of English at Lake Forest College.

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  • What we lose when AI replaces teachers

    What we lose when AI replaces teachers

    eSchool News is counting down the 10 most-read stories of 2025. Story #8 focuses on the debate around teachers vs. AI.

    Key points:

    A colleague of ours recently attended an AI training where the opening slide featured a list of all the ways AI can revolutionize our classrooms. Grading was listed at the top. Sure, AI can grade papers in mere seconds, but should it?

    As one of our students, Jane, stated: “It has a rubric and can quantify it. It has benchmarks. But that is not what actually goes into writing.” Our students recognize that AI cannot replace the empathy and deep understanding that recognizes the growth, effort, and development of their voice. What concerns us most about grading our students’ written work with AI is the transformation of their audience from human to robot.

    If we teach our students throughout their writing lives that what the grading robot says matters most, then we are teaching them that their audience doesn’t matter. As Wyatt, another student, put it: “If you can use AI to grade me, I can use AI to write.” NCTE, in its position statements for Generative AI, reminds us that writing is a human act, not a mechanical one. Reducing it to automated scores undermines its value and teaches students, like Wyatt and Jane, that the only time we write is for a grade. That is a future of teaching writing we hope to never see.

    We need to pause when tech companies tout AI as the grader of student writing. This isn’t a question of capability. AI can score essays. It can be calibrated to rubrics. It can, as Jane said, provide students with encouragement and feedback specific to their developing skills. And we have no doubt it has the potential to make a teacher’s grading life easier. But just because we can outsource some educational functions to technology doesn’t mean we should.

    It is bad enough how many students already see their teacher as their only audience. Or worse, when students are writing for teachers who see their written work strictly through the lens of a rubric, their audience is limited to the rubric. Even those options are better than writing for a bot. Instead, let’s question how often our students write to a broader audience of their peers, parents, community, or a panel of judges for a writing contest. We need to reengage with writing as a process and implement AI as a guide or aide rather than a judge with the last word on an essay score.

    Our best foot forward is to put AI in its place. The use of AI in the writing process is better served in the developing stages of writing. AI is excellent as a guide for brainstorming. It can help in a variety of ways when a student is struggling and looking for five alternatives to their current ending or an idea for a metaphor. And if you or your students like AI’s grading feature, they can paste their work into a bot for feedback prior to handing it in as a final draft.

    We need to recognize that there are grave consequences if we let a bot do all the grading. As teachers, we should recognize bot grading for what it is: automated education. We can and should leave the promises of hundreds of essays graded in an hour for the standardized test providers. Our classrooms are alive with people who have stories to tell, arguments to make, and research to conduct. We see our students beyond the raw data of their work. We recognize that the poem our student has written for their sick grandparent might be a little flawed, but it matters a whole lot to the person writing it and to the person they are writing it for. We see the excitement or determination in our students’ eyes when they’ve chosen a research topic that is important to them. They want their cause to be known and understood by others, not processed and graded by a bot.

    The adoption of AI into education should be conducted with caution. Many educators are experimenting with using AI tools in thoughtful and student-centered ways. In a recent article, David Cutler describes his experience using an AI-assisted platform to provide feedback on his students’ essays. While Cutler found the tool surprisingly accurate and helpful, the true value lies in the feedback being used as part of the revision process. As this article reinforces, the role of a teacher is not just to grade, but to support and guide learning. When used intentionally (and we emphasize, as in-process feedback) AI can enhance that learning, but the final word, and the relationship behind it, must still come from a human being.

    When we hand over grading to AI, we risk handing over something much bigger–our students’ belief that their words matter and deserve an audience. Our students don’t write to impress a rubric, they write to be heard. And when we replace the reader with a robot, we risk teaching our students that their voices only matter to the machine. We need to let AI support the writing process, not define the product. Let it offer ideas, not deliver grades. When we use it at the right moments and for the right reasons, it can make us better teachers and help our students grow. But let’s never confuse efficiency with empathy. Or algorithms with understanding.

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  • Make Faculty Writing Support Easier to Find (opinion)

    Make Faculty Writing Support Easier to Find (opinion)

    Faculty writing has never been more crucial. In an era of heightened competition for grants, promotion pressures and demands for public engagement, writing is the vehicle through which faculty share their expertise, secure funding and advance their careers. Research shows that successful academic writers aren’t necessarily better writers—they’re better-supported writers. They have systems, communities and resources that support their productivity and help sustain engagement with writing as their needs change across their roles, responsibilities and careers.

    Faculty writers are seeking support for their writing. Where do they go when they need it? Many are unsure.

    Support for faculty writing on campus is often decentralized or may vary from year to year, making it difficult to find or accessible only to those with the advantage of an informed mentor. Support for faculty writing might be offered in any number of campus locations: centers for teaching and learning, provosts’ offices, offices for faculty advancement, writing centers or academic support centers, research centers for grant writing, graduate student support centers, or individual departments. Writing support may be outsourced through institutional memberships to organizations such as the NCFDD or the Textbook and Academic Authors Association, which offers webinars, writing programs and templates for downloading.

    Department chairs and campus administrators may want to support faculty writers but aren’t sure where to begin. Or if there is a problem, it’s considered an individual faculty problem and not one that calls for a campus response.

    Perhaps there’s an underlying assumption that faculty should already know how to write and shouldn’t need support to meet basic job expectations, like publishing a certain number of articles before tenure. Establishing a faculty writing space or central resource hub might be seen as suggesting they need remedial help—much like the stigma writing centers face as places where “bad” students are sent.

    Yet today’s faculty are expected to write across more genres than ever before: grant proposals, peer-reviewed articles, public-facing pieces, social media content and policy briefs. Each involves different skills and audiences. The faculty member who can craft a compelling journal article may struggle with a foundation proposal or an op-ed. Writing support isn’t remedial—it’s strategic professional development.

    The current moment also presents unique challenges. Post-pandemic isolation has disrupted the informal networks that previously supported faculty writing. Budget constraints mean fewer resources for individual faculty development, making shared writing support more essential. New faculty arrive on campus without the professional development resources or mentor networks that previous generations took for granted, while midcareer faculty face mounting pressure to produce more with less support.

    We can do better in our support of faculty writers. If you want to help, here are ways to do better, or to get started.

    • Gather resources. Even though writing support might be available, it may not be widely known, or up-to-date, and it may be dispersed across many different units or offices on campus. Create a centralized web page gathering information for all campus resources for faculty writing. The entity that hosts the site will be different for each campus. For some, it’s the provost’s office. For others, it’s a writing or teaching center. List the resources—where faculty can go for support—and help faculty navigate the resources by providing descriptions (not just links), categories (i.e., “find a writing group”) and contact information. Collaborate with faculty to curate a list of recommended books, podcasts and writing spaces they have found helpful.
    • Make faculty writing visible. What if faculty writing support were as central to campus as student writing support? A teaching center could include a workshop on writing about teaching; the provost’s office or campus research center could offer workshops on developing institutional review board protocols. Consider reserving dedicated spaces for faculty to gather and write (such as a faculty writing room) or schedule specific writing times/days in a university writing center or campus coffee shop. Give them a name (Writing Wednesdays, Motivating Mondays). Writers can plan for these meet-ups and write in the company of others, in public rather than isolated in individual offices.
    • Organize a virtual workshop watch session and follow-up discussions. Gather faculty for a workshop watch session. After the workshop, help participants continue to discuss what they learned and how they’ll apply it through group check-ins or follow-up meetings. Try NCFDD’s core curriculum webinar “Every Semester Needs a Plan,” The Professor Is In’s “Art of Productivity,” or join a London Writers’ Salon Writers’ Hour, and talk about everyone’s work after the writing session.
    • Identify a faculty cohort to support for a year. Supporting all faculty writers with diluted support is often ineffective. Instead, focus on associate professors one year, new faculty writers the next and clinical faculty writers the next. Help them connect and be resources for each other throughout the year through writing retreats and writing groups. Build a campus writing community one cohort at a time.
    • Collaborate with campus partners. Combine campus resources to support writers. Could the library offer a meeting space? Two departments co-convene a writing group? Campus units could take turns hosting a daylong writing space once a month, helping writers learn about different spaces and writers across campus.
    • Start a writing support library. This can be virtual or in a central location on campus. Partner with the library to keep track of which books are in circulation or in high demand. Consider developing a workshop or writing group around in-demand books.
    • Ask faculty what they need and listen and respond. If we don’t ask faculty what they need, we won’t know. What some faculty need now may be different than what they needed last fall.
    • Support connectors. Every campus has them—the person or department that is a go-to for troubleshooting faculty questions and connecting them to writing resources. Amplify their reach, and support the faculty relationships and networks they’ve already established. Support the person or people who will curate that library, update the resource list, collaborate with campus partners and serve as a faculty writer point of contact.

    What’s next? Start by mapping what already exists on your campus. Create one central hub where faculty can find all writing-related resources. Make faculty writing as visible and supported as student writing. It’s OK to start small: Try one of these strategies we’ve shared and notice what happens. And remember—supporting faculty writers isn’t about fixing deficiencies. It’s about recognizing that writing is central to faculty success and deserves the same institutional attention we give to other essential job functions. Faculty are an invaluable resource in our campus ecosystems. Let’s lower the barrier to them finding the support they need to write well. When they thrive, so do our institutions.

    Jennifer Ahern-Dodson is an associate professor of the practice in writing studies at Duke University, where she directs the Faculty Write Program.

    Christine Tulley is a professor of English at the University of Findlay and president of Defend, Publish & Lead, a faculty development organization.

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  • Texas Tech Puts Its Anti-Trans Rules In Writing

    Texas Tech Puts Its Anti-Trans Rules In Writing

    Months after beginning to enforce unwritten policies about how faculty members can and cannot teach topics related to gender, Texas Tech University system officials released a memo Monday that officially put those policies—and more—in writing.

    “Effective immediately, faculty must not include or advocate in any form course content that conflicts with the following standards,” Chancellor Brandon Creighton wrote in the memo to system presidents, which was passed along to faculty members. The standards include specific rules around race and sexuality that were not previously discussed, system faculty members told Inside Higher Ed. The memo also enshrines that the Texas Tech system recognizes only two sexes—male and female.

    The fuzzy anti-trans policies that were first introduced via a game of censorship telephone at Angelo State University in September have now been made clear and expanded upon across the entire five-university Texas Tech system. Course content related to race and sexuality is now also subject to heightened scrutiny. Although the memo doesn’t ban outright discussion of transgender topics or any topics that suggest there are more than two genders, policies across the country stating that there are only two sexes or genders have been used to restrict transgender rights.

    Texas Tech is far from alone in its efforts; public systems across Texas have taken on varying politically motivated course reviews, leaving faculty members in the state angry and confused. For example, the University of Texas system recently completed a review of all courses on gender identity, and the Texas A&M system board approved a new policy last month mandating presidential approval for classes that “advocate race or gender ideology, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”

    According to Creighton’s memo, faculty members may not “promote” or instill the belief that one race or sex is superior to another; that an individual is, consciously or unconsciously, inherently racist, sexist or “oppressive”; that any person should be discriminated against because of their race or sex; that moral character is determined by race or sex; that individuals bear responsibility or guilt because of the actions by others of the same race or sex; or that meritocracy or a strong work ethic are racist, sexist or “constructs of oppression.”

    Creighton defined advocacy as “presenting these beliefs as correct or required and pressuring students to affirm them, rather than analyzing or critiquing them as one viewpoint among others. This also includes course content that promotes activism on issues related to race or sex, rather than academic instruction.”

    The memo also outlines a Board of Regents–controlled review process, complete with a flowchart, for courses that include content related to gender identity and sexuality. Although race is mentioned earlier in the memo, it’s unclear whether race-related course content will also be subject to this review.

    “We’ve been in this slow rollout process already. We had to go through all of the courses and essentially do the flowchart before the flowchart existed,” said a faculty member at Angelo State who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. “Anything that would cover transgender [people] was flagged.”

    Creighton, a former member of the Texas State Senate, justified the new rules using Senate Bill 37, a law he sponsored earlier this year that, among other things, gave the control of faculty senates to public institution governing boards and established a once-every-five-years review process for general education curricula. An earlier version of the bill that passed the Senate contained language that’s very similar to the restrictions in the Texas Tech memo, including censoring specific course topics that suggest any social, political or religious belief is superior to another and allowing administrators to unilaterally remove faculty senate members for their personal political advocacy. The existing law does not prohibit teaching about transgender identity, racial inequality, systemic racism, homosexuality or any other individual topic.

    “This directive is the first step of the Board of Regents’ ongoing implementation of its statutory responsibility to review and oversee curriculum under Senate Bill 37 and related provisions of the Education Code. This curriculum review under Senate Bill 37 will, in part, ensure each university is offering degrees of value,” Creighton wrote.

    Texas Tech University system spokespeople did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s questions about the memo, including what next steps might be.

    “The Board’s responsibility is to safeguard the integrity of our academic mission and maintain the trust of Texans,” Board of Regents chairman Cody Campbell said in a news release. “The Board welcomed the clarity provided by Senate Bill 37, which reaffirmed the Regents’ role in curriculum oversight. This new framework strengthens accountability, supports our faculty, and ensures that our universities remain focused on education, research, and innovation—core commitments that position the TTU System for continued national leadership.”

    Faculty across the system are largely upset about the changes but unsure about how to push back, a faculty member told Inside Higher Ed. One Texas Tech professor emeritus, Kelli Cargile Cook, told The Texas Tribune she began drafting a resignation letter.

    “I’ve been teaching since 1981 and this was going to be my last class. I was so looking forward to working with the seniors in our major, but I can’t stomach what’s going on at Texas Tech,” she told the Tribune. “I think the memo is cunning in that the beliefs that it lists are, at face value, something you could agree with. But when you think about how this would be put into practice, where a Board of Regents approves a curriculum—people who are politically appointed, not educated, not researchers—that move is a slippery slope.”

    Brian Evans, president of the Texas chapter of the American Association of University Professors, criticized the memo Tuesday. 

    “Empowering administrators to censor faculty experts’ teaching decisions does a disservice to the university, its students and the state,” Evans said. “Such a system is inconsistent with long-standing principles of academic freedom, university policy and the First Amendment.”

    Graham Piro, faculty legal defense fund fellow for campus advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, decried the memo in a statement Tuesday.

    “The Texas Tech memo unconstitutionally singles out specific viewpoints on these topics, implying that faculty members must adhere to the state’s line on these issues—and that dissenters face punishment. The memo is also so broadly worded that an overzealous administration could easily punish a professor who seeks to provoke arguments in class or advocates outside the classroom for changes to curricula that reflect developments in teaching,” Piro said.

    “Decades ago, the Supreme Court recognized that the First Amendment ‘does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.’ It instead wrote that ‘truth’ is discovered not by ‘authoritative selection,’ but ‘out of a multitude of tongues.’ These principles are timeless, and Texas Tech should not compromise them, no matter the political winds of the day.”

    He also likened the memo to Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, currently blocked by a federal court, which severely limited how Florida faculty members could talk and teach about race, gender and sexuality.

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  • Writing Classes Are About Writing, Not AI-Aided Production

    Writing Classes Are About Writing, Not AI-Aided Production

    I had more important things to do.

    The assignment was dumb and seemed pointless.

    I don’t care about this class.

    I had too much stuff to do and it was just easier to check something off the list.

    I had to work.

    I didn’t understand the assignment.

    Everyone else is using it and they’re doing fine.

    I was pretty sure [the LLM] would do a better job than me.

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  • A Structural Approach to Writing

    A Structural Approach to Writing

    This presentation introduces a powerful structural framework for academic writing that helps writers organize their essays and research papers more effectively. The Thesis Statement Map approach demonstrates how a well-crafted thesis statement can serve as a blueprint for the entire paper, guiding both the writer and the reader through a logical progression of ideas.

    At the core of this method is the understanding that a good thesis statement does more than simply state an argument. It maps directly to the sections of your paper in a clear, predictable way. The thesis statement serves dual purposes: it prepares the reader’s mind for background information, definitions, and contexts about the subject, while also introducing the key topics that will contain supporting evidence. This evidence can take various forms, including statistics, historical information, examples, illustrative scenes, personal experiences, or lab and field results.

    The structural framework begins with the thesis statement at the top, which should clearly state your rhetorical goal followed by the key topics that will map to your body sections. This is followed by a section providing background, contexts, and definitions that connects to the reader’s existing experience and knowledge. The body of the paper then unfolds through three main topic sections, each beginning with a strong topic sentence and supported by relevant evidence.

    The discussion section plays a crucial role in synthesizing ideas, pointing out connections between topics, proposing counterarguments, and incorporating thoughts from other scholars or sources. Finally, the conclusion brings together the thesis and topics, highlights new insights gained through the analysis, discusses broader implications, and offers suggestions or recommendations.

    This systematic approach helps writers avoid common organizational pitfalls and ensures that every section of the paper serves a clear purpose in supporting the overall argument.

    — Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. 

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  • Understanding and writing the Literature Review in Mba Projects

    Understanding and writing the Literature Review in Mba Projects

    Understanding the Topic: Even before starting to write a student should be having a full clarity about the research title, the objective of the study and the research problems.

    Searching for Relevant Literature: Students should search the academic libraries like Google Scholars, Research Gate, JSTOR or Scopus.

    Evaluating Sources: Once relevant sources are collected students should analyze, evaluate the objective, findings and limitation of those studies.

    Grouping of Literature: Collected literature should be grouped as per the subheading of the required studies.

    Write Critically: Literature review should be written critically and analytically relevant to the study .

    Identify the Research Gap: Students should analyze and find the research gap and specify where his study will add value to those gaps.

    Cite & Reference: Students should use formats like APA (7th edition) or Havard Referencing style while using in text citing.

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  • Toward a Trauma-Informed Writing Process (opinion)

    Toward a Trauma-Informed Writing Process (opinion)

    “Your writing isn’t academic enough.”

    A single sentence from a faculty mentor cut deeper than I expected—because it wasn’t the first time my voice had been questioned. I spent decades believing I was not good enough to become a writer. Not because I lacked skill or insight, but because I was writing through a deep wound I didn’t yet understand.

    That statement was a flashpoint, but the wound began long before:

    • When I, as a shy Guatemalan immigrant child, felt I was lacking academically and learned to shrink my voice.
    • When I was told that my ways of knowing—grounded in culture, emotion, embodiment—didn’t belong in academic writing.
    • When I absorbed the perfectionism and shame that academia breeds.

    For years, I edited myself into invisibility—performing an academic voice that was praised for its polish and precision but stripped of everything that made it mine.

    And I am not alone.

    The Invisible Wounds We Carry

    In my work as a writing consultant and developmental editor, I hear the same story over and over: Brilliant scholars—often from historically excluded communities—are convinced they are bad writers when, in reality, they are carrying unprocessed writing trauma.

    We rarely name it as such. But that is what it is:

    • The trauma of repeatedly being told your voice is wrong or not “rigorous.”
    • The trauma of navigating academic culture that rewards conformity over authenticity.
    • The trauma of absorbing deficit narratives about your language, identity or intellectual worth.

    Academic spaces can be punishing, performative and isolating. Add in past wounds—whether from classrooms, reviewers, supervisors or broader systems—and writing becomes more than putting words on a page. It becomes a battleground.

    I once had a client who burst into tears during a one-on-one session with me. She opened the document she had avoided for weeks. The moment her fingers hovered over the keyboard, she said, her chest tightened. She felt dizzy, like the room was closing in.

    “I can’t do this,” she whispered.

    What was she working on? A simple literature review. But there was nothing simple about it.

    Her body remembered: her first-year doctoral seminar, where she was told her writing wasn’t academic enough. Being cut off in class. Watching her white male peer echo her words and be praised for his “insight.”

    Writing didn’t feel liberating. It felt like re-enactment.

    Her tears weren’t a breakdown. They were a breakthrough. Her nervous system was doing exactly what it was designed to do: keep her safe.

    I’ve experienced that spiral, too. Sitting in front of a blank screen, begging my brain to write something!—only to be met with my inner chorus:

    • I teach people how to write—what’s my problem?
    • I’m not going to say anything that hasn’t already been said.
    • This is going to take forever—and I’d rather not disappoint myself.
    • I’m not really a good writer. I’m just faking it.

    Even after years of writing—journals, academic papers, dissertation, books—it still doesn’t feel easy. I have to work at it each day. Writing, for me, is like a relationship. At first, it’s exciting. Words flow; ideas spark. But eventually, the doubts creep in. You start to ghost your own document.

    But real relationships, and real writing, require showing up. Even when you’re tired. Even when it’s hard. Even when it feels like your worst critic lives inside your own head.

    This Isn’t All in Your Head—It’s All in Your Body

    These blocks that haunt you as you imagine writing aren’t signs that you shouldn’t write the thing. These are survival strategies your nervous system uses to protect you. And yes—they show up at your desk.

    This is all to say that, in my experience, writing blocks tend to be trauma responses—not character flaws or technical writing issues. Now, are there times when folks are challenged by things like time management? Of course. But to me, that is just a symptom of something deep-seated.

    We’re told to “just sit down and write,” as if our struggle is solely or partly a matter of discipline, time management or motivation. But often, it’s not that we don’t want to write. We actually really want to write. It’s that our body—our entire nervous system—is sounding an alarm.

    Not safe. Not ready. Not now.

    The response varies. It’s not one-size-fits-all. But it’s always trying to protect us.

    Let’s break these responses down.

    1. Fight: You argue with your work. Nothing sounds good enough. Every sentence feels off. You rewrite the same paragraph 10 times and still hate it. You pick fights with your draft like it owes you money. You hover over the “delete” key like a weapon. You get lost in perfectionist loops, convinced that your argument is weak, your evidence lacking, your phrasing too soft, too bold, too elementary, too you.

    This is the part of you that learned, somewhere along the way, that the best defense is a good offense. If you criticize your writing first, no one else can beat you to it.

    It’s a form of protection dressed as hypervigilance.

    It’s exhausting. And it’s not your fault.

    1. Flight: You avoid it completely. The minute you open the document, your chest tightens. So instead, you check your email, clean the kitchen, research grants for a project you haven’t even started, reformat your CV for the fifth time or suddenly become very concerned about the state of your inbox folders. Every task feels urgent—except the one you actually need to do.

    It doesn’t mean you don’t care. It means your system is trying to escape danger. And in academia, writing often is danger, because of what it represents—exposure, judgment, potential rejection—and what it can lead to: excommunication, cancellation, even deportation.

    Flight says, “If I don’t go near the source of pain, I won’t have to feel it.” But avoidance doesn’t erase fear. It buries it. And that buried fear just grows heavier.

    1. Freeze: You stare at the screen, paralyzed. You’ve carved out time, made the tea, lit the candle—and still, nothing happens. The cursor blinks like it’s mocking you. You reread the same sentence 30 times. You open a new tab, then another. You scroll, refresh, skim, click—but you’re not absorbing anything.

    Your body might go still, but inside, it’s chaos: looping thoughts, spiraling doubts, blankness that feels like suffocation.

    This is shutdown. Your brain says, “Too much.” So it hits pause.

    It might look like laziness, but it’s actually self-preservation.

    1. Fawn: You overfocus on pleasing others.

    This one’s sneaky. You’re writing. You’re producing. But you’re doing it in someone else’s voice. You try to imagine what your adviser would say. You filter every word through Reviewer 2’s past critiques. You write with a white, cis-hetero-masculine ghost looking over your shoulder.

    You say what you think you should say. You cite whom you think you have to cite. You mute your own voice to keep the peace.

    You’re not writing to be heard. You’re writing to be accepted.

    Fawning isn’t about submission. It’s about safety. It’s about staying small so you don’t become a target. But in doing so, you slowly disappear from your own work.

    What if your block isn’t failure?

    What if it’s your body’s way of saying:

    “This way of writing doesn’t feel safe.”

    “These expectations aren’t sustainable.”

    “You are not a machine. You are a whole human.”

    Writing as a Site of Healing, Not Harm

    If we understand writing blocks as trauma responses, then the answer isn’t more pressure or productivity hacks.

    The answer is care.

    A trauma-informed writing practice prompts us to shift our questions:

    • Instead of “Why am I procrastinating?” ask, “What am I protecting myself from?”
    • Instead of “How can I write more?” ask, “What would make this feel safer?”
    • Instead of “Why can’t I just get it done?” ask, “What do I need to feel supported right now?”

    This practice is about making room for your whole self at the writing table.

    It includes:

    • Slowing down to listen to your resistance. What is it trying to tell you? What stories or fears are surfacing?
    • Creating emotional safety before expecting output. That might mean grounding rituals, community check-ins or simply naming your fear out loud.
    • Reframing writing as healing, not harm. What if writing wasn’t about proving your worth but about reclaiming your voice? What if it became a place to process, reflect, resist—and even rest?

    Because here’s the truth: You can’t punish yourself into productivity.

    You can’t shame your voice into clarity.

    But you can write your way into wholeness—slowly, gently, in your own time.

    Resistance Is Wisdom

    Let’s stop treating our writing resistance as evidence of failure. What if it’s an invitation to listen? A clue to your next move? A doorway into a new way of knowing? Let’s not avoid resistance but lean into it, face it and treat it with compassion.

    Ask yourself,

    • What if my block isn’t a wall, but a mirror?
    • What if my voice needs tenderness, not toughness?
    • What if my writing can be a place where I feel more like myself, not less?

    Maybe the goal isn’t to “push through” your writing block.

    Maybe it’s to create the conditions where it feels safe enough to speak your voice.

    You don’t need to force yourself to write like someone you’re not.

    You don’t need to perform brilliance to be taken seriously.

    You don’t need to sacrifice your health on the altar of productivity.

    You need practices that restore your voice, not erase it.

    You need writing that nourishes, not punishes.

    A trauma-informed writing practice invites your whole self to the page. It makes room for and challenges you to lean into the imperfection, reflection and vulnerability. It reframes writing not as punishment but as possibility.

    Toward a More Human Academy

    In this political moment—where academic freedom is under attack, DEI initiatives are being dismantled and scholars are being silenced for telling the truth—we can’t afford to ignore how trauma shapes whose voices get heard, cited or erased.

    Trauma-informed writing is a form of resistance.

    It’s how we push back against systems that demand performance over presence, conformity over courage.

    It’s how we cultivate an academy where all voices—especially those long excluded—can write with power, truth and unapologetic authenticity.

    I’m still healing my own writing wounds. Maybe you are, too.

    But here’s what I know now: Writing wounds don’t heal overnight.

    They heal when we meet them with compassion—every time we dare to put words on a page.

    Aurora Chang is the founder of Aurora Chang Consulting LLC, where she provides developmental editing, holistic faculty support and writing consulting rooted in compassion and authenticity. A former professor and faculty developer, she now partners with academics to reclaim their voices, sustain their careers and write with purpose.

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  • Thinking About AI’s Threat to the Writing Process

    Thinking About AI’s Threat to the Writing Process

    I will never forget the student who—upon being given 15 minutes at the end of class to get rolling on the writing assignment I’d just given—whipped out their phone and starting furiously typing away.

    At first, I thought this was an act of defiance, a deliberate wasting of time I’d been generous enough to provide following a carefully constructed discussion activity that was meant to give students sufficient kindling to get the flames of the first draft flickering to life.

    I said something about maybe texting people later and the student said that they were working on their draft, that they, in fact, first wrote everything on their phone. Not wanting to make a fuss in the moment, I shut up about it, but a week or so later in an individual conference I asked the student about their method, and they showed me the reams and reams of text in their phone’s Notes app.

    The phone itself was a fright, the screen cracked, a particularly dense web of fractures at the bottom, but when I asked the student to show me how they used the app for writing, it became clear that they could type at a speed comparable or better to the average student on a computer keyboard.

    I’d been teaching the writing process for my entire career, talking students through the steps and sequence to producing a satisfactory piece of work—prewriting, drafting, revision, editing, proofreading—with more detailed dives into each of those stages, but until that incident I didn’t fully appreciate that I shouldn’t be teaching the writing process per se, I should be giving students the kinds of challenges that allowed them to develop their own writing processes.

    As I considered this distinction, I realized how truly idiosyncratic my own process is and how different it can be depending on the occasion and situation. An outside observer looking at how I put together a column or book or proposal would see all manner of inefficiency and declare my method … madness.

    But the key thing about my method is that it’s mine, and I think I have sufficient proof that it works. It may continue to evolve over time, which I suppose we could equate with improvement, but it’s really just different.

    My student’s strategy was rooted in resource constraints, both time and money. Typing on the phone had started as a way to get stuff done during brief in-between times when working as a bicycle delivery person for one of the downtown-Charleston sandwich shops. They’d capture a draft on the phone on the fly and then transfer it to a computer for further development. The phone text had notes like “put thing from that thing here” as place markers for sources or evidence.

    I realized that this method required the student to fundamentally work from a place of their own thoughts and ideas, something that was actually at odds with some of their first-year writing classmates who had been conditioned to defer to their readings, seeing their job as students to prove that they’d read and (generally) understood the content, rather than building on that content with ideas of their own, as I’d been asking them to do.

    At the time of the conference, the student didn’t even have a computer, having had theirs stolen and not having sufficient funds at the time to immediately replace it. The student had been using the terminals in the library computer lab for the nonphone work.

    This conference also revealed the reason for the rather up-and-down nature of this student’s work that semester. This was a clearly curious and driven person who had a number of extra challenges at simply completing the work of college. The assignment we were working on at the time, an alternate history analysis where students had to take a past event, change some aspect of it and imagine a different future, was probably the most challenging experience of the semester, but according to my archives at least, it proved to be this student’s best work.

    Writing the initial draft untethered from any sources or even being able to easily move between information online and the text on the screen required the student to think creatively and analytically in ways that unlocked interesting insights into their choice of subject. Because of fate and circumstance, and without me really planning it, this student was getting a high-level experience in how to harness their own mind.

    I started thinking more deeply about the intersection between the affordances of the tools and the writing process. One of the biggest shifts in my method over the years was when I acquired an external monitor that allowed me to see two full pages of text simultaneously on screen. This was something I’d longed for for years but resisted because I’m cheap. I now have a hard time working without it.

    This incident happened as I was also experimenting with approaches to alternative grading, so it became a natural fit to start asking students to reflect more purposefully on the literal mechanics of their writing process so they could identify missing needs that they might be able to fulfill.

    At the time I hadn’t yet come up with my framework of the writer’s practice, but now I can see how integral asking students to be this mindful about their own process can be to the development of a practice.

    It’s also a good route for introducing mindfulness into the choices they may make when it comes to using generative AI tools. If they understand their labor and its meaning, they will have the capacity to assess how using the tool may enhance or—what I think is more likely—distort their process. It is also a reminder to us to design challenges that encourage the kind of labor we want students to be doing.

    Before we retreat to old technology that dodges these challenges, like blue books, I think we could do a lot of good by really leaning in to helping students see writing as an experience that will differ based on their unique intelligences, and that if they pay attention, if what they are doing matters, they can come to know themselves a bit better.

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