About

About the Writing Retreat

The Writing Retreat aims to support writing projects authored by faculty, administrators, scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and others involved in interventions that broaden participation in STEM. It focuses on publications and proposals that detail the delivery of programs, curricular strategies for achieving diversity, equity, inclusion, respect, and justice in STEM. Participants will have guided and independent time to transcribe their practice, sharing empirical data, outcomes from program assessments and evaluations, and claims about policy that supports the success of individuals from groups that are underrepresented in STEM fields. During the retreat, participants will enter discussions about institutional reform, unpack ideas concerning the impact of interventions on student success in STEM, and address a variety of other concerns that will enhance their academic writing projects.


Through the Understanding Interventions Developing Publications for the Dissemination of Efforts that Broaden Participation in STEM initiative, participants, coaches, executive staff, and directors will achieve the following ends:

  • By writing about interventions that broaden participation in STEM, colleagues can help resituate reform efforts by giving voice to the most powerful agents of change in institutions such as HBCUs, Trial Colleges, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and other Minority Serving Institutions and programs at research-intensive institutions.

  • By writing about practice, colleagues can make public the vast resources of their knowledge, making it available to other faculty, administrators, training program leaders, and even legislators.

  • By writing about professional concerns, we enter the scholarly discussions about academic writing, making UI’s knowledge more visible to the community of researchers.


The writing retreat is specifically for those practitioners and scholars wishing to publish efforts related to diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM pathways. Participants will receive individualized support for crafting their manuscript, review select frameworks relevant to broadening participation efforts, participate in writing efforts specifically designed to increase productivity, and share initiatives and outcomes of efforts developed at their institutions. The retreat will feature a group coaching session that will support participants' efforts to:

  1. Craft a manuscript that views target demographics through an asset-based lens.

  2. Determine how to best present existing data and if additional data is needed to craft a compelling manuscript.

  3. Characterize the limits of their data.

  4. Develop conclusions that are descriptive, prescriptive, and translational.

  5. Publish in the UI Journal as a participant of the Dissemination Workshops and Training.


The retreat model demonstrates a proven model that successfully supports writing about practice. Through participation in the retreat, practitioners, scholars, and executive leaders return to their institutions with a new understanding of the importance of this kind of writing and with the potential to develop similar retreats for their own productivity and even their colleagues at their home institution.