A Faculty Learning Community is defined as a small group of faculty and staff members working together to increase their knowledge and/or skills on a topic of mutual interest. The goal is to build community while enhancing the group’s understanding of the topic.  

The Writing Center has organized faculty learning communities around the topic of mentorship through writing.

The goals of the first group were to:  

  1. enhance participants’ knowledge around the work of mentoring writers and writing in graduate school,  
  2. create a space for clear communication between advisors and advisees to define roles and expectations. 

Faculty and graduate students discussed mentoring as it pertained to their roles. The outcome of the workshops was a co-authored mentoring expectations document. 

A second group of six faculty members was organized to discuss building successful mentorship relationships with graduate student writers.

The goals of this group were to:  

  1. increase the number of student publications,
  2. create a less stressful writing and revising process for both the mentors and mentees.   

The discussion group met during lunch over the course of three weeks. Participants read three different articles about mentoring writing and participants discussed how the proposed mentoring practices could be adapted for their contexts. 

We also facilitated a book club that met monthly to discuss the strategies set out in the book Air and Light and Time and Space by Helen Sword. The book was based on her work studying academic writers and how they get their writing done and establishes four types of habits academic writers can cultivate to become more productive. We read the book a chapter at a time and discussed how the ideas from the book might be incorporated into the writing lives of the participants. We also shared strategies and methods developed though our own experiences. This learning community is a great opportunity to meet other writers and set good habits for future writing.

If you are interested in learning more about learning communities, contact Assistant Director of Writing Across MSU, Erin Strickland (erin.strickland@montana.edu), 406-994-5314, Wilson Hall 1-114.