In early March, bioCEED co-hosted a writing workshop for individuals interested in submitting their work to The Nordic Journal of STEM Education (NJSTEME). This workshop was funded by Universities Norway (UHR) and developed by the journal’s editorial board, which includes me (Sehoya Cotner), Thomas Gjesteland (the Director of the MATRIC SFU at UiA), Jennifer Löfgreen (Lund University, Sweden), Reidar Lyng (NTNU), and Magne Sydnes (UiS). Seth Thompson (bioCEED and University of Minnesota) joined as an external facilitator. Over two days in Central Oslo, we worked with 21 participants from UiA, UiB, UiO, UiS, UNIS and Lund University.
Enjoying the sunset from the room of the Oslo Opera House (fun!)
On the first day, morning discussions centered on questions such as how does writing for the education-research literature differ from writing in our scientific disciplines? And how does the reviewing rubric support authors? In the afternoon, Seth led new authors in structured writing activities involving developing a key research question, establishing the rationale for their work, and sharing their methods in a way that is clear and reproducible. At the same time, Jenny led a team of authors in “writing snacks,” longer, free-form writing sessions framed by shared goal-setting and progress updates. After a nice sunset and dinner at The Oslo Opera, we returned to spend day two writing and having short discussions about how to frame developing manuscripts. Workshop facilitators will be following up with participants in the next two months, and we hope to see many new manuscript submissions, sponsored by UHR, in the months ahead.
This type of effort could really help NJSTEME get some momentum and become a great source of information for those of us studying STEM education in higher education. Furthermore, I am a big fan of writing workshops and know they can be productive and—seriously—quite fun. It would be great to plan a bioCEED-specific writing workshop sometime in 2022… We deserve it!
Working away on future submissions (even more fun!)