Dr Julia O’Connell, Writing Skills Officer, University of Southampton | Dr Alison Daniell, Academic Skills Officer, University of Southampton

18 April 2024

Dissertation writing retreats: Strengthening curriculum and community

Dr Julia O’Connell and Dr Alison Daniell discuss their development of a dissertation writing retreat programme at the University of Southampton. The programme aims to address the awarding gap by empowering Black students to excel in one of the most important aspects of their degree, while also providing them with a space to engage positively with their peers and the wider university community.

This intervention was part of a recent TASO project in which theories of change and evaluation plans were developed for a range of higher education providers. Find out more about the project and access the outputs here.

The awarding gap between UK-domiciled full-time Black and white students is a significant problem at higher education institutions across the country, including at the University of Southampton. Latest data shows that the gap stood at 18.1 percentage points, and it is not just degree classifications which are an issue. Our responses to the 2022 National Student Survey results recorded a 14% difference between Black and white students in response to the statement: ‘I feel part of a community of staff and students.’ This is entirely incongruent with the egalitarian values of our institution and as such, we have developed initiatives to mitigate such inequity.

Southampton’s initiatives align with the innovative ‘three Cs’ framework (further discussed in our colleague Chido Chipato’s blog post) which was developed from student consultation and sector research, and focuses on three core areas: Community, Culture, and Curriculum. Inspired by the community-building and curriculum elements of the framework, we developed a dissertation writing retreat programme to support student success and belonging.

Targeted writing retreats

In recent years, structured writing retreats have become increasingly popular in the higher education sector, particularly for faculty and research students. Their format and delivery can vary, including on-campus retreats, virtual retreats, and multi-day residential provisions. Retreats break up the day into smaller blocks of writing time, usually lasting just over an hour. Participants are expected to set and discuss their goals with their peers at the beginning of each writing block and then review their progress with peers at the end of the hour. Regular breaks and communal meals are also an integral part of the process, allowing participants to get to know their peers and talk through their progress with writing.

Rationale behind the retreats

Research (for example, Cunningham, 2022; Eardley, Banister and Fletcher, 2021) demonstrates that there are plenty of benefits for those who attend retreats. These range from greater productivity, motivation, and focus on written projects, through to more personal impacts such as increased feelings of self-efficacy, confidence and the building of a community of support/practice. Given these benefits, we thought that the structured retreat model could be easily replicated and refined for a target group of UK domiciled, full-time, Black undergraduates in their third year.

Our programme offers students a two-day on-campus retreat and a three-day residential retreat, where standard writing blocks are supplemented with training on effective goal setting, access to writing and maths and statistics specialists. We are also developing a DIY ‘retreat toolkit’ which students can access asynchronously. We also want to emphasise to students the value of communal meals and other social times, which are just as important to the aims of the retreat as the writing that is produced: it is these opportunities which help students to build a community of support and allow them to refine their projects through informal chats with their peers.

Working with TASO

Working with TASO’s external evaluators from Staffordshire University and Advance HE has helped hugely with developing both a Core and an Enhanced Theory of Change for this initiative, which made the retreat programme much more robust. The two days of workshops gave us so much to consider and offered a range of key takeaways from the process, including:

How the specifics of delivering this intervention would engage with, and meet the needs of, our target group of students. Having external facilitators in the room to challenge our assumptions and ask probing questions really helped us to refine the retreat programme and supplement our delivery with additional tools and strategies.

How change mechanisms could be used to interrogate the ways in which the intervention would lead to the outcomes we hope to achieve; in our case, how the provision of protected time and space to write would lead to students being awarded a higher grade in their dissertation.

Being able to dedicate time to the discussion of evaluation. This experience was crucial in reinforcing the need for high-quality evaluation and showing us how we could build on our new knowledge going forwards and make further progress in addressing the ethnicity degree awarding gap in the future.