NAWE NEWS
HE Committee Chair’s Column Having conducted a survey on the different way institutions interpret their regulations on creative PhDs, I attended a panel at this year’s conference with Rachel Carney, Nikolai Duffy and Kim Moorein in an effort to try and get more information on the expectations of Post Graduate Study – and a picture is beginning to emerge. I am not proposing we prepare a Benchmark Statement on PhDs but a growing list of recommendations is beginning to have some consistency. The conference allowed members of the HE Committee to engage with what is going on in the NAWE community. The reports are that it was both successful and extremely informative. The Committee are mindful that NAWE has a wide remit and that Higher Education is only a small part of its engagement, so it’s good to be aware of what is going around in the country. I was particularly taken by the Panel on Know your Rights with Nicola Solomon (Society of Authors) and Lesley Gannon (Writers’ Guild of Great Britain). The information was useful and informative (and the session well attended). All of us writers have come across ‘rights’ issues many times in our lives. It is astonishing how liberal people and institutions can be with our work. So it’s good to see the hard work that goes on to protect that work. Perhaps this could be something NAWE look at again in the near future – especially with the emergence of the ‘online’ content. Finally, while we are easing into Spring and the Summer will soon be upon us, it continues to be the strangest of times. A toe in the water still reveals the water is cold, but getting warmer. And things on the NAWE front are heating up as we move into the next, post-pandemic phase. What have we learned, did we learn anything or are we just moving on? These are questions we will address in the coming months because I suspect it will be a long time before everything is back to what we knew to be normal. If anyone would like to write with comments, I would love to hear them. Andrew Melrose HE Committee Chair, NAWE
HE Committee: References and Links Advice on lodging doctorates and embargos https://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/writing-at-university/research/lodging-theses.html Directory of Creative Writing External Examiners (requiring your NAWE membership password) https://www.nawe.co.uk/membership/members-area/external-examiners.html NAWE Creative Writing Research Benchmark 2018 https://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/writing-at-university/research.html
NAWE incoming HE Committee members list https://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/writing-at-university/he-network/he-committee.html NAWE guidance on short-term academic contracts https://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/writing-at-university/contracts.html
OU/NAWE events (audio recorded) on Creative Writing and the REF and Creative Writing PhDs http://www.open.ac.uk/arts/research/contemporary-cultures-of-writing/events/contemporary-cultures-writing-seminarsspring-2018 QAA Creative Writing Benchmark (teaching) 2016 https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/subject-benchmark-statements/sbs-creative-writing-16.pdf?sfvrsnd4e2f781_10 Writing in Practice - submissions https://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-education/writing-at-university/writing-in-practice/submissions.html
8 Writing in Education
