Great meeting today! I thought I'd write up a few notes of our discussion and plan for further action to help us keep going.
Today we discussed some of
our specific challenges in producing the next book/project that will get
us promoted and our motivations for wanting to move forward and found
that we have a lot in common. We've each made
some decisions, both personally and professionally, that have
distracted us from research/writing. We own those decisions, whatever
they may be, and recognize that ultimately each of us is responsible for
producing (or not producing) scholarship.
We also discussed some
specific strategies. Two things we are going to do in the near future to
help with motivation and accountability:
1) set up a blog where we can
post our goals and progress weekly. We can even post what we've
actually written. We can also post tips, strategies and advice that we
have or that we've found elsewhere. If someone
doesn't reach her writing goal, she will say that and write about what
happened that kept her from reaching her goal. The point is not to
inflict guilt or to feel bad for not having reached the goal; comments
by others will be focused on helping the person
reach her goal the following week.
2) find a time when we can
get together and write for a couple of hours. Right now we're looking
at some time on Fridays, beginning Oct. 25. We'll also try to find a
Monday before Oct. 25 when we can do this. We'll
also identify a neutral, distraction-free space where we can do our
writing together.
Somewhat longer-term:
3) Diana suggested that we
could each have a session or two with a writing coach. We will look for
possible writing coaches with experience with academics.
4) As proposed in the
original grant, we'll bring a speaker to Claremont who will address the
question of associate professors, mentoring, promotion, etc. This event
will be open to associate professors across the
colleges. The hope is that this will help our institutions conceive of
the move from associate to full in a more productive way and that we
will have some concrete suggestions about ways in which our institutions
can mentor and help us as we work to be promoted
to full professors.
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