Editors’ introduction: A collaborative exploration of reflexivity as a pedagogic bridge towards publication for international postgraduate students

Abstract

Research conducted by postgraduate students is a significant source of new knowledge in universities. While it is increasingly available in digital databases, it is not frequently published, and thus accessible, in the form of academic journal articles (Kamler, 2008; Kwan, 2010; Lassig, Dillon, & Diezmann, 2013). In this article we explore the notion of an academic writing group as a pedagogical arrangement to scaffold international postgraduate students into writing for publication. We draw from our experiences of facilitating collaborative writing workshops with five international postgraduate students from The University of Waikato. These workshops provided a pedagogic space for international students and academic mentors to collectively bridge the often obscured path between thesis writing and writing for academic publication. We explain how a focus on reflexivity offered a way of foregrounding the ‘backstories’ of each student’s research experiences and established a platform from which scholars could discuss and write. We also give consideration to the linguistic and discoursal resources that supported emerging writers to foreground reflexivity in their published text. Each of the articles in this special section celebrate the outcome of this academic writing group by showcasing the published articles that have been written by the international postgraduate students involved in this collaborative writing project. We conclude this article by offering our experiences of a collaborative writing group as one way to facilitate a pedagogic bridge between thesis writing and writing for publication.