This Narrative Craft Writing Retreat for Second Years is a residential retreat and takes place at Shepherds Dene, Monday 14th – Friday 18th September, 2020 (shepherdsdene.co.uk). It is designed to help you build structural integrity and argumentative coherence into your PhD at a time when you might feel overwhelmed by the many pathways your research opens up to you. This ‘muddled middle’ phase of writing is also a very creative time, and the tutors leading this workshop will help you harness your best ideas and inspirations so that you can review and refresh your commitment to your thesis.

Where and when do you get your best ideas? And how do you capture them?  Can you cultivate frames of mind and ways of working that will help you access a highly creative state at will?

We tend to receive insights and make new connections when the mind is relaxed and wandering – when we’re thinking ‘soft’, not hard, when the mind is open to ‘left field’ input and can stretch itself sideways, diffusing rather than sharpening focus.

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to engineer the creative mindset using divergent thinking exercises, freewriting, and guided contemplation, and you’ll apply these techniques directly to your own research project. We will explore working habits and writing techniques that open up spaces in which creative insights can arise.

This online workshop will be delivered using Zoom and is limited to 10 students. One facilitator will deliver content spread over two days. This will include 2 x core 90-minute sessions, set exercises in the intervening period, and 2 x 30-minute check-in sessions. Each student will also be offered an individual tutorial. In addition, a welcome session will run a few days before the course so you can meet your group and facilitator.

This workshop aims to give you a toolkit of techniques to take with you as you embark on your first steps as a researcher – and as a writer. With first years, we aim to help establish good writing habits, anchored in two key ideas: your personal investment in the topic, and your ability to practise skilled questioning. We help students crack open their chosen subject, finding productive avenues for research and interesting potential arguments.

We’ll spend as much time thinking about focus – how your thesis will be different and why it matters – as we spend thinking about cultivating the kind of wide-open thinking your research needs to make nuanced connections.

We’ll also begin to explore how to nurture your own academic voice and how it can bring your writing to life and lend it distinctiveness and authenticity. 

This online workshop will be delivered using Zoom and is limited to 10 students. One facilitator will deliver content spread over two days. This will include 2 x core 90-minute sessions, set exercises in the intervening period, and 2 x 30-minute check-in sessions. Each student will also be offered an individual tutorial. In addition, a welcome session will run a few days before the course so you can meet your group and facilitator.

This is one of the compulsory cohort activities we provide and is designed to support those of you moving into the final stages of your PhD. We cover managing the final stages and the viva, careers – academic and non-academic – planning, open access, EDI issues and publication and peer review. We also have a feedback slot built in where you can discuss with the directors your experience of Northern Bridge.

The Study Hub retreat day will run from 9am to 4pm on Thursday 3^rd December, with a preparatory hour from 10am to 11am on Tuesday 1^st December.

Study Hub is a seven hour intense, structured, online study experience with Dr Natalie Lancer (life, career and writing coach). You will spend the day online with Natalie and a small group of other Northern Bridge students on Zoom.  Natalie will guide you through setting your goals for the day, creativity exercises, and mind mapping the next thing you are working on, so you can:

• Write your chapter or article
• Analyse data
• Work on a presentation
• Actively read something and make notes on it
• Or anything else PhD related!

Each attendee will get:

• A 20 minute one-to-one coaching session with Natalie, an accredited coach, experienced writer and academic, to help you unlock anything holding you back and make a plan for your next steps
• Supportive writing atmosphere broken up into blocks of 25 minutes
• Technical expertise in qualitative methods
• Creativity booster session
• Structured day in which you do not burn out and are able to stay focussed for six hours
• A pre-Study Hub Day planning session in which you make specific goals to ensure you get the most from Study Hub Day
• The real-time accountability of a group
• Encouragement and motivation from a small, focused group
• Six hours of supervised writing

To secure your place email Hazel Reynolds northernbridge.admin@durham.ac.uk

The ability of researchers to engage meaningfully beyond the ‘ivory tower’ is an expected skill of the modern academic Writing for the general public is something that is rarely taught and few academics possess it as an innate talent. Many of the bestselling books about art, history and literature are not written by professional academics, but by politicians, journalists and outside specialists. The public are most likely to encounter scholarly ideas through slick blogs, online articles or through the fun and humour of formats like Horrible Histories.  This one day workshop aims to bring some of the practical skills of journalists and popular writers to the humanities, helping you to compete in an increasingly crowded market.

Some of the skills you will learn include how to write a compelling introduction, utilising professional interviews and balancing exciting content with fact-based rigour. This will be achieved through a series of exercises, demonstrations and class discussion. By the end of the workshop you should be able to plot out a feature-length article (3,000-5,000 words) about an important academic story for a popular magazine. However, it is hoped that you will be able to take what you have learnt and adapt it to other formats, from a shorter article or blog to a popular and accessible book. 

Learning Outcomes

1. To understand the style of popular writing such as the use of the active voice, concrete examples, consistency/variation, and how to ‘read like a writer’.
2. To know how to structure the story, from sentences to chapters. The importance of length and function of the paragraph including pacing and digression.
3. How to conduct expert interviews and integrate them into an article.
4. To use techniques that grab and hold the reader’s attention, constructing an effective ‘hook’ and ‘nut’, pacing the story, incorporating humour and appealing to the senses.
5. To know how to work with an editor and the process of bringing a story to print.  
6. To understand which academic techniques to leave out.

This workshop is designed and delivered by ThePast online archive (www.thepastweb.com). It is fronted by Dr Stewart Tolley its chief historian and Paul Rodgers the editor. Stewart is an academic at Oxford University’s Continuing Education Department and Paul is a journalist with 30 years’ experience, including seventeen years working on Fleet Street for some of the country’s quality press titles, such as The Independent, The Economist and The New Statesman.

This is a one day workshop for up to 25 participants. Booking will be via Inkpath once the system goes live from 5 November 2020.

Getting cogent feedback on your work before showing it to your supervisor can be a real struggle. So how do you sidestep the impulse towards perfectionism, and then set about acquiring, directing and harnessing peer feedback?

This workshop offers you a working model of how to write regularly without becoming paralysed by anxiety or perfectionism. You will then be introduced to a three-step process for giving feedback, which you will be able to practise in groups, using anonymised writing samples as well as your own work-in-progress. You’ll be given the opportunity to set up your own ‘Writing Coaching Groups’ that follow a tried and tested etiquette.

You will need to bring a 1,500-word writing sample from a chapter you are currently drafting and a short example (2-3 paragraphs) of non-academic writing you admire.

This online workshop will be delivered using Zoom and is limited to 10 students. One facilitator will deliver content spread over two days. This will include 2 x core 90-minute sessions, set exercises in the intervening period, and 2 x 30-minute check-in sessions. Each student will also be offered an individual tutorial. In addition, welcome session will run a few days before the course so you can meet your group and facilitator.

Further information to follow.

Join us for this weekly writing get together to connect with other students who are writing and researching in these very unusual circumstances. This one-hour session is led by a professional writer from True North who will share their tips for staying creative, productive and energised. It doesn’t matter where you are in your PhD, this is an opportunity for you to share your experience of writing and researching during the time of Covid and gain practical tips and advice to ease your writing experience. Perhaps you’re finding it hard to get going and stay motivated, or you’re slipping into being overly self-critical about your writing, or you’re just generally struggling to concentrate on your thesis. This group is a practical source of advice and support to reenergize your studies.

Are you prone to procrastinating? Do you avoid writing until you’ve got your ideas fully worked out? Do you fear the blank page? If you find yourself looking for reasons not to start writing then this one-day workshop can help.

The workshop will help you face down the demons that stop you putting pen to paper and use a variety of techniques to help you ambush or seduce yourself into getting going. These include free-writing and visualisation methods, skilled questioning, and exercises for ‘growing’ arguments out of key points. We’ll also help you identify and thereby outwit your own strategies for avoiding the blank page. Please come to the workshop with a specific chapter that you need to write in mind.

This online workshop will be delivered using Zoom and is limited to 10 students. One facilitator will deliver content spread over two days. This will include 2 x core 90-minute sessions, set exercises in the intervening period, and 2 x 30-minute check-in sessions. Each student will also be offered an individual tutorial. In addition, welcome session will run a few days before the course so you can meet your group and facilitator.

Northern Bridge Consortium has run three residential programmes for our doctoral cohort in partnership with the British School at Rome and hopes to issue a call for applications from our students, at any point in their studies, to participate in the programme for January 2021. While full use will be made of the opportunity a base in Rome affords, the programme is not primarily to deepen research in the city or region, but rather to expose participants to a range of skills and approaches that they might not usually expect to encounter in their field.  The aim is thus to achieve a broader awareness of the breadth of arts and humanities research, and to open participants to new possibilities in interdisciplinary research. The programme is designed to engage participants with radically different approaches and materials from antiquity to the twenty-first century, exploring advanced research methods. For example, previous sessions have included the bioarchaeology of manuscripts, the impact of Ancient Rome on British imperialism, object learning, archaeology and working in international collaborations. Roughly one-third of the sessions are delivered by colleagues and fellows of the BSR and the rest from Northern Bridge Consortium colleagues.

The British School at Rome is one of the most prestigious research schools in Rome, and Britain’s leading humanities research institute abroad. It has been home to world-class researchers of the art, culture and history of the western Mediterranean for over a century.  The School is a bridge between the creative and academic researchers from Britain and the Commonwealth and the intellectual heart of Rome and Italy.   Most researchers at the School engage with one or more of the School’s major research themes: Rome: History, Place and Imagination; Landscapes and Urbanscapes; Language, Vision, Translation, Representation; Archaeologies of Knowledge; Connectivity in the Mediterranean; Church, State, Faith and Nation; Conservation, Heritage Management and Sustainability.

http://www.bsr.ac.uk/

Over two hours we’ll look at how social media tools can be used confidently to develop your professional reputation as a researcher and establish a network among other academics working in your field. The two-hour session will be followed by an hour-long clinic where you can stay behind to talk over questions, challenges and concerns one-to-one.

What will you learn?

• Refresh your understanding of the way some of the popular tools work.
• Work through five principles for creating effective and engaging online content.
• Consider 20 practical ideas of how you can use social media to communicate efficiently and influentially about your research and conferences make an influence.
• Finally, we’ll assess some gaffs made by other people so you learn how to stay out of trouble!

Alan Meban is a prominent blogger in Northern Ireland and a previous winner of Slugger O’Toole’s Political Blogger of the Year award. Better known online as @alaninbelfast he posts about politics, processes, accountability and transparency on Slugger O’Toole. On his own blog Alan in Belfast he airs views and reviews about arts and culture. As a freelance journalist he can often he found writing and reporting from civic, academic and political events, chairing discussions, commentating in the media, producing podcasts, and live-tweeting, streaming and recording lectures and conferences. He is a member of Ofcom’s Advisory Committee for Northern Ireland, and a director of FactCheckNI (Northern Ireland’s independent fact-checking organisation).

This workshop explores how to translate compelling, clear and authentic communication skills to digital platform engagements. Through a practical approach, we’ll take you through some communication theory and key approaches designed to help you get your message across in an engaging and positive way for your audience.

This workshop is ideal for:

• People presenting online
• People running/hosting/participating in online meetings
• People delivering and facilitating online workshops
• People using video/audio to deliver communication messages
• People using their social media channels to engage with their audiences

This workshop covers:

• Presenting your activity for the first time online
• How to manage what people see, hear, feel and think during your session
• Keeping people engaged
• Protocols for chat / Qs / comments
• Basic online facilitation skills

This workshop is for people wanting to take the next steps in developing skills for facilitating productive meetings, discussions, presentations and participatory sessions on digital platforms. It integrates effective people management, with compelling communication and utilising digital platform functionality for best effect.

This workshop is ideal for:

• People presenting online
• People running/hosting/participating in online meetings
• People delivering and facilitating online workshops
• People using video/audio to deliver communication messages
• People using their social media channels to engage with their audiences

This workshop covers:

• Effective facilitation online
• Leading with confidence – balancing managing people and digital functionality
• Building trust through a screen
• Maximising contributions of your participants
• Using positive language and 2-ways signals
• Balancing inclusivity with clear management
• Small meetings vs large groups

In this workshop, we consider the ways our brains and bodies work against us in stressful situations, with particular emphasis on situations where we have a lack of control. We’ll take you on a practical exploration of the stress response, touching on neuroscience and psychological theory to deepen our understanding and learn practical ways to recognise and then outsmart our natural tendencies.

This workshop is ideal for:

• People wanting to understand more about stress and its effects
• People wanting to learn new ways to become more resilient
• People wanting to support others to become more resilient
• People leading teams or organisations and wanting to integrate resilience into your culture

This workshop covers:

• Understanding the effect of the stress response on body and mind
• Dealing with uncertainty and lack of control
• Common pitfalls and ways to avoid them
• Practical ways to boost personal and team resilience

This workshop is a practical exploration of how to maximise your natural characteristics for effective and inventive leadership of teams, groups and organisations. We’ll walk you through how to implement psychological theory and simple techniques in your day-to-day work to boost commitment, motivation and resilience of those you work with.

This workshop is ideal for:

• People working in all levels of leadership
• People wanting to take a personalised approach to leadership
• People wanting to learn new ways to support their people
• People wanting to learn practical approaches to change management

This workshop covers:

• Personality profiling to identify key preferences and strengths
• Peer-to-peer learning to utilise those strengths
• Psychological theory linked to motivation, persuasion and managing conflict
• Understanding and managing change

This full day session is designed for people who want to increase their personal impact and need to communicate effectively with a range of people within different contexts; from larger audiences to small groups to one-to ones. You will explore different layers of communication – physical, verbal and psychological and experiment in a safe space with new tools and strategies, which will help you authentically connect and engage with others. The workshop will help you learn how to forge positive connections with your audience, how to tailor your delivery to suit different people, how to manage your body, mind and emotions in the process and increase your understanding of how interpersonal dynamics work.

This workshop is ideal for:

• People presenting or pitching
• People running/hosting/participating in meetings
• People in leadership positions
• People lacking confidence and impact when delivering communication messages
• People building relationships and needing to effectively engage with their audiences

This workshop covers:

• The different levels of communication and how they interact
• Exploring interpersonal dynamics and how they work in real life scenarios
• Using your voice to communicate engaging and confidently
• Using your body language to give clear, positive signals
• Managing interactions and relationship building
• Managing your own emotions within uncomfortable situations
• Stepping out of your comfort zone and quieting the negative voice in your head

This full day session promotes a creative attitude to leadership and is suitable for leaders at all levels. Across the day, we will work with you to reflect on and build an authentic leadership style and practice that is adaptable, responsive and evolutionary. The workshop explores the relational dynamics inherent in leadership and supports you in both identifying and making the best use of your personal qualities, skills and attributes. This session is designed for those who recognise that good leadership is an essential component to empowering people – we will explore how to you can do that by building trust, creating nurturing environments, empathising, listening, effective and authentic communication, investing into relationships and building connections.

This workshop is ideal for:

• People in leadership positions
• People aspiring to leadership positions
• People wanting to increase their personal impact
• People wanting to support, engage, lead, empower and influence others

This workshop covers:

• Identifying your leadership style and building your leadership practice
• How to lead by example
• The rider and the elephant – how to motivate others
• The importance of interpersonal dynamics and building authentic relationships
• Effective and impactful communication
• How to positively influence others

During this session, you will work with a theatre director to develop your performative presentation skills, applying similar techniques to those used in a theatre rehearsal process, considering structure and how to present your content to an audience in a compelling way. This session focuses on crafting your message and compelling delivery whilst identifying, then understanding and meeting your audience needs. This workshop is designed as a progression for those who have participated in Mortal Fools Communication workshop and want to develop their skills further to help with increasing personal impact during formal presentations, pitches, speaking engagements or client and colleague meetings. It can also be delivered as stand-alone session if preferred to prepare for a specific presentation or pitch!

This workshop is ideal for:

• People presenting, pitching or public speaking
• People running, hosting or facilitating meetings
• People in leadership positions
• People lacking confidence and impact when delivering communication messages

This workshop covers:

• Effective and impactful use of body language and voice
• Rehearsal techniques
• Practical tips to manage fear and quieting the negative voice in your head
• Successfully owning and using space and visual aids
• Practising presenting on stage in front an audience
• Personalised feedback and coaching from Mortal Fools

During this half day session, you will learn how to identify your own stress responses and triggers and how to utilise practical tools to manage and reduce the chemicals induced by stress and fast paced modern living. You will have a go at putting into practice techniques used by actors for preparation and managing stage fright. This workshop also explores ways to create and maintain a low stress workplace environment and organisational culture. By building resilience into the challenges of everyday work and life, we can also boost motivation, creativity and productivity in the workplace.

This workshop is ideal for:

• People wanting to understand more about stress and its effects
• People wanting to learn new ways to become more resilient
• People wanting to support others to become more resilient
• People leading teams or organisations and wanting to integrate resilience into your culture

This workshop covers:

• Understanding the physical and chemical effect of the stress response on body and mind
• Build an understanding of fundamental human needs
• Dealing with uncertainty and lack of control
• Common pitfalls and ways to avoid them
• Practical ways to boost personal and team resilience
• Fostering a workplace environment that boosts well-being

This course is open to all students completing a PhD programme and is designed to help you stay creative, productive and energised – as well connected to others on the same journey. How do you step outside your own work to view it with a cool editorial eye that lets you lift your writing to a new level?

This workshop is designed to embed professional habits of multiple drafting and polishing. We will help to make you more conscious of the editorial process, as used by professional writers and editors, and give you the tools to apply it to your own work. We teach you how to trouble-shoot your work, use direct, active language, and zoom in on significant details. We cover the link between the particular and universal, and the practice of knowing where the reader is at any given point. You will be given tools for better copy-editing and proofing, with red-pen exercises and examples of academic and non-academic writing. Between the tutor led sessions you will be set practical exercises to complete in pairs (online) and, in the week following the workshop, you will receive an individual tutorial from the tutor leading the group.  A writing sample of your work in progress is required in advance of the workshop.

This course is open to all students completing a PhD programme and is designed to help you stay creative, productive and energised – as well connected to others on the same journey.

How can you read source material and secondary research in such a way that you acquire writing skills at the same time as you build your expertise in your subject?

You may be used to reading in order to extract and distil information, but to really develop your writing you need to go a step further and read for technique. In two 90 minute Zoom sessions (over two days) we introduce you to a forensic approach to reading, thus giving you an understanding of how sentences are internally structured, and of how to appreciate the rhythm of language, paying attention to the way it builds within a paragraph, and across a whole chapter as paragraphs accrete. We will look at how metaphor should be integral rather than just decorative, adding depth and resonance to your writing; how rhetoric needs to land in order to make an argumentative point; and how you can develop an awareness of tone. Together we will analyse a range of examples, including students’ own work, and use these as a stimulus for writing exercises.  Between the tutor led sessions you will be set practical exercises to complete in pairs (online) and, in the week following the workshop, you will receive an individual tutorial from the tutor leading the group.  A writing sample of your work in progress is required in advance of the workshop.

This participative workshop will help you to identify key outcomes and objectives of your research and map out realistic and achievable alternative routes to achieving them.

Our focus will be on how you can re-plan activities that will achieve those intended outcomes and explore problem-solving skills and flexible approaches that will help you adapt to change.

We will work through a number of glucard™ brainstorming, planning, problem-solving and optioneering tools which you will be able to refine, adapt and review for use throughout your PhD. Sabina will graphically illustrate concepts and demonstrate tools by sharing live visualisations.

We will use real examples and processes that are accessible, visual and hands on and mindful of the present context. The workshop will adapt to your needs and enable small group/pair discussion and peer learning.

The workshop will help free your creative thinking by getting draft strategies down on paper, give you practical tools and tangible examples, and grow your capabilities and confidence to take actions forward.

This online 2h 15min workshop will help you understand ways to develop experience, demonstrate competencies and build your CV by working through individual and group activities that will help you to:

• Understand approaches for employed, independent, portfolio or mixed career
• Explore different kinds of CV (academic, industry, chronological/thematic, profile)
• Review relevant job descriptions and person specifications
• Find opportunities, resources and additional support
• Identify PhD transferable knowledge, skills and experience
• Create a glucard™ ‘CV builder’ to highlight skills, experience and examples to form an adaptable CV and record actions

The session will be run over Zoom and we’ll use the breakout rooms function for small group/pair activities. Sabina will graphically facilitate the session, demonstrating key learning and tools, and illustrating responses to your questions. Resources will be shared before and after the session using a shared Google drive.

A media and communications workshop designed to ensure that, the next time you address a rolling camera, an audience or an interview panel, you’re fully equipped to get your message across. This session covers a range of tips, techniques and broadcast skills including: taking control of your interview, developing and boosting your messages, tackling nervousness, communicating academic research to a wider audience, building confidence and presence, and dealing with hostile media or curveball questions. We’ll break down some interview examples and look at the media environment, exploring the different types of interview and how to best prepare for each one. And we’ll run a recorded mock interview so you have a chance to put some of those skills to practice. By the end of the session, you will have the confidence and ability to take media requests - even at short notice.

An award-winning journalist, author and broadcaster, Rachel Shabi works with a variety of clients including international NGOs, think tanks, universities and other organisations to develop and enhance communications skills. 

The aim of this session is to provide participants with a clearer picture of the post-PhD landscape and how to navigate it. This session will focus on how PhDs transition successfully to an academic research role and what to expect along the process. We will explore a range of options available to you inside academia and identify some of the experience and skills expected of early career academic staff in research roles. You will think about strategies to build relevant academic experience throughout your PhD, identify research roles, and familiarise yourself with the processes of submitting funding grants and/or increasing your competitiveness for academic positions.

The workshop will be a practical introduction to why and how to plan your career and will provide attendees with opportunities to discuss what life after the PhD is like. We will draw upon a number of case studies and successful funding grants.

The aim of this advanced training workshop is to explore the use of creative methods to mediate interactions and build understandings within arts & humanities/social science research. The workshop will introduce arts-based methods and how these techniques are being used alongside more conventional research methods (i.e. as mixed-methods). It focuses on different types of creativity/artful prompts and the processes associated with them; how they can be used within data collection, analysis, and presentation stages of the doctorate process. We will explore the full life cycle of creative research methods (including design, practice, delivery, analysis). The session aims to raise the profile of creative methodology and build capacity in the effective use of this advancing field. We will draw on case studies using creative methods within interdisciplinary studies on cities, geopolitics, austerity, microbial life, and beyond.

The session will include a mixture of presentations and discussions with more hands-on explorations of creative approaches. Attention will be paid to the social, political and ethical issues of using these methods and will explore some of the ideas in relation to your own research interests. The session will provide time for practical advice and tips on using creative research methods from a leading voice in this field. The workshop will be interactive so come with your project visions, ideas and enthusiasm.

You will need to bring an object with you to the online session. This object should summarise, describe or articulate your creative practice/methodology. You will be required to talk about your object, so you should choose something that is meaningful, but still something you are happy and comfortable to share.

This workshop for researchers seeking to publish in peer-reviewed journals focuses on the key criteria involved in journal editors’ selection processes and peer-review, and how to meet them.  Based on the inside knowledge of an experienced academic publisher, it is designed to develop essential skills in writing articles in order to increase researchers’ chances of placing their work in premium scholarly journals, to the benefit of their academic profile and career prospects.    

There will be a mixture of presentation, discussion, interactive exercises and hands-on writing tasks, together with extensive handouts for reference.  Topics covered include:  

• Why publish, and where to publish?
• What journal editors look for
• Addressing your readership
• Writing tips
• Presenting a scholarly argument
• Use of secondary scholarship
• Case studies and their larger implications
• Peer Review
• Open Access
• Writing an Abstract  

Workshop tutor Josie Dixon is an international publishing and research training consultant. Following a 15-year career in academic publishing as Senior Commissioning Editor at Cambridge University Press and Director of the Academic Division at Palgrave Macmillan, she has given training workshops for postgraduates, postdoctoral researchers and staff in the arts, humanities and social sciences in over 100 universities in the UK, USA, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Finland.  More details can be found at http://www.lucianconsulting.com   

This workshop run by two ex-BBC journalists and experienced programme-makers will give you the skills to create effective and engaging podcasts about your research. Podcasts are the most accessible “windows” to view your university through, and yours need to reflect the quality of your institution.

What strikes us about university podcasts is that although the production quality is important, it is the communication skills of the podcaster, and his or her ability to tell a good story, that makes the podcasts effective and helps them stand out among fierce online competition.

Our course will enable you to get the best out of whatever technical expertise or resources you may have.  We help you to pitch your podcast correctly to the target audience, to organise your thoughts and consider the best ways to present them. We will give you the skills to present the podcast in a talk format, and the interviewing skills to make an interview/conversation style podcast.

During our workshop you’ll have the opportunity to practise both formats, an audio talk and an on-camera interview. If the majority of participants are planning to create audio podcasts rather than vlogs, we will provide them with an opportunity to record both podcasts in the audio format.

This workshop DOES NOT cover purely technical skills in using recording and editing software, as technical capabilities differ from university to university and from person to person, but we will provide you with a list of useful links to ‘DIY’ podcasting. As experienced ‘radio hands’ we will also give you tips on how to make your audio podcasts sound professional.

It’s important for us to know your research topics before the workshop, so you’ll be asked to fill in a provided short questionnaire and email it to the organisers a week before the course date.

The Objectives

• The course enables participants
• to communicate effectively in their podcasts
• to pitch their podcasts correctly to the intended audience
• to choose the best format for their podcast

The Learning Outcomes

• Knowing how to tell a good story in a podcast
• Knowing how to plan and structure a podcast
• Knowing how to interview colleagues for a podcast
• Being able to record a podcast in both talk and interview formats

Do you...

• find that day to day demands affect your well-being?
• feel that negative stress affects your health?
• want to cope more positively with setbacks?
• want to learn practical, ‘nononsense’ tools to manage stress and cope positively?

Memorable, Engaging Then this webinar is for you...

• Put stress in its place - the cabbages and stress link
• Developing a Robust Support Network
• Spot the signs of overwhelm - spotting rotten tomatoes
• Developing a Resilient/‘Self Care’ Focus - meet your ‘inner radish’

Dave Algeo is a former police officer with years of experience working with those struggling to cope with difficult times and emotionally challenging situations. Dave’s genuine, honest and down to earth approach allow those attending his sessions to relate and engage with the content and the practical tools.

If you think in pictures, or in 3D, how do you write a sequential, linear academic argument? This short, practical online workshop helps you become more aware of your writing process, examines strategies you have developed over time and helps you identify where you need to improve. It also gives visual thinkers tools and techniques to organise their thinking before starting to write and to plan with confidence, without losing creativity.