Project Lead: Miss Leah McCue, Skills Centre

To support postgraduate students with their academic writing, the team aims to launch peer-led writing cafés. These cafés will be friendly, supportive spaces where PG students can share best practice and learn more about academic writing. Each café will have a theme and different tables hosting (sub-theme) discussions. Possible tables include planning/ structuring ideas, finding sources, references/ citations, time management/ procrastination, and dealing with feedback. Each discussion group will be facilitated by a trained student Writing Guide. The cafés will work in tandem with our academic writing circles, where students will attend the cafés to learn how to best approach their work, go away and draft the writing, and then come to an Academic Writing Circle with their assignment. As a welcoming, peer-led space, the cafés will also help to create a greater sense of community across different PG courses. Student will be able to learn from each other, sharing best practice and meeting new people.

A project update was given at Edufest 2025, during the afternoon session. The copy of the presentation can be found on the teaching hub. The Writing Café project ran three Writing Cafés AY2425. The cafés received very positive feedback. Students rated the cafés 4.33 out of 5 for how effective it was in helping them with their writing and agreed that it helped them to meet other PGT students.

While those who did attend were very positive about the impact the support had on their learning, we struggled to get attendees. Students expressed interest in the cafés, but sadly this did not translate to attendance, despite a robust marketing strategy.

Due to a lack of sign-ups, we postponed the other cafés that were due to run this summer. Instead, we plan to run the cafés in Semester 1 of AY 25-26.