The Undergraduate Writing Retreat: A Group Writing Program to Increase Student Writing Self-Efficacy and Academic Wellbeing

Writing retreats are a staple of career development for scholars within higher education. Group writing structured around dedicated time, protected space, and peer participation delivers cognitive, affective, and social benefits aiding the professionalization of early career academics. Despite these findings, little research has investigated how retreats might aid undergraduate students, who also face challenges and anxieties in their early encounters with academic writing. This paper introduces the Undergraduate Writing Retreat (UWR), an instructor-facilitated and peer-led program that facilitates group writing for undergraduate students. In adapting the purpose of writing retreats from professional productivity to pedagogy, we demonstrate that the benefits associated with academic writing retreats translate to gains in writing self-efficacy and academic wellbeing among undergraduate students. Drawing from quantitative and qualitative data among students in a large introductory lecture course, we show that students participating in a single 90-minute UWR (n=85) expressed greater writing confidence, lower levels of stress and anxiety, and an increased willingness to share their work with peers relative to a control group (n=95). Qualitative feedback gathered from UWR participants reveals the mechanisms by which this modest pedagogical intervention delivered significant benefits to students.