Whakauae researchers and PhD students travelled from their kāinga across Aotearoa and Australia to attend the annual writing retreat, held at River Valley Lodge in Taihape from the 6-9th of November 2023.
The writing retreat has been developed as a way to foster concentrated writing time for our researchers, who are working across a range of projects requiring writing outputs. The setting of River Valley Lodge, right next to the Rangitikei awa, and Aorangi Maunga – both places of great significance to Ngāti Hauiti – made for the perfect environment in which to connect as a roopu, practise whakawhanaungatanga and exchange ideas.
It also fostered a peaceful backdrop to the reflecting and critical thinking that is needed to produce our research writing. For many of the team the retreat also allowed for shared writing time, which is a crucial aspect of team writing, and which can be difficult to schedule in across our diversely located team.
For the PhD student roopu in particular, the kanohi ki te kanohi time was seen as a rare opportunity to share progress and insights.
Dedicated time to kōrero at the end of the day for the whole team provided opportunities to discuss ideas around time management, writing prompts, and how to get dedicated focus opportunities within our writing practice.
The retreat ended with numerous outputs, which included the writing of articles, presentations, handbook, literature reviews, PhD chapters and conference abstracts, as well thematic analysis of research data.
