Developing writer identity through a multidisciplinary programme

Abstract

The Writing and Learning Mentor programme (WLM) at University College London (UCL) supports a cross-disciplinary network of PhD students who act as writing mentors to students in their departments. WLM also offers the mentors a space in which to reflect on their own writing practices. The focus of this article is our work with the mentors and their sense of themselves as writers. Following a consideration of institutional and theoretical contexts for WLM, we describe how the programme operates. We then consider writer identity and the significance of the multidisciplinary nature of the programme. We argue that the programme’s foregrounding of a ‘writing as social practice’ model (as opposed to a skills-based paradigm) encourages participants to think anew about the relationship between writing, learning and the discipline; this approach also enables them to articulate and reflexively explore their experience as emerging professional writers in their fields.