Online Training for Retreat Facilitators 2 Day Course

Course Details

This course is for those who want to run Structured Writing Retreats. It offers a series of workshops, discussions and presentations facilitated by Rowena Murray. Everyone who completes this course receives materials for setting up and running writing retreats, which they can use or adapt for their own writing retreats.

Writing retreats have long been known to increase and improve scholarly output and research activity. The Structured Writing Retreat framework I created (Murray and Newton, 2009) can develop research capacity and activity.

This framework can be adapted for different aims, groups and timings. Attending multiple retreats can help to build research and writing into work and life. Consequently, many Deans, Research Coordinators and Heads of Department build writing retreats into institutional research strategies, and universities have been sending groups of academic staff on this course – one person from each faculty or school, for example – so as to embed writing in research and teaching across the institution.

Course content:

Review of writing retreat formats, focusing on Structured Writing Retreats

Explanations for rationale for this framework for writing

Strategies facilitators can use to support participants at writing retreats

Ideas on how to prepare for and organise retreats

Suggestions for ‘holding’ the retreat structure. Recurring issues and participants’ FAQs

Problem-solving? Review of the growing literature on writing retreats, academic writing and rhetoric

Practical session to develop retreat facilitation skills and review facilitation styles

Review of literature on health and wellbeing during extended periods of writing

Evaluating and evidencing outputs and outcomes – measures and meanings

Strategies for internal and external dissemination of findings

Strategies for using, adapting and sustaining this model in different settings

Strategies for running online/virtual writing retreats and groups.Before the course, I send participants four of my articles, for pre-reading. I email all the course materials to participants one week before the course.

The course fee is £1050 per person,

Email me to check dates, commission a course, for further information or to register: r.e.g.murray@btinternet.com