Academic writing in the broader context of early career researcher development

Abstract

Many of us working in the area of academic writing in Central European universities at the early career researcher level find ourselves struggling with the boundary of the term “academic writing.” Like a Russian Matryoshka doll, one finds that skill development often requires introducing students to concepts extending far beyond writing, exposing educational gaps that can be filled by disciplinary mentors who may or may not have time to work with mentees on developing the required competencies. This presentation describes an online tool, STEMskiller, developed by NTK to assist mentors in filling in such gaps, describing how its developers confronted the “boundary problem” as a supplement to introductory writing classes. The presentation provides case studies for STEMskiller’s use by academic writing instructors with stories from our initial experiences with mentors and other users. We discuss plans for the tool’s future development, including our desire to serve the global academic community by means of collaborative peer review and resource curation as well as our goal of working together at the cross-institutional, cross-national level in order to improve overall levels of education, particularly for mentors and students at institutions who, for whatever reason, cannot easily create new academic service units flexible enough to meet international disciplinary requirements.