Launched in December 2023, the postgraduate module Writing for Publication focuses on how students, alumni, and lecturers can target their writing to professional and academic journals to showcase their workplace and role innovations, through unique access to acclaimed fictional literature. Taught online over 10 weeks, the module learning process (a balanced mixture of online self-directed learning and regular facilitated webinars) presents students with carefully selected literature sources. Works of literature can help us to understand our identities, experiences, and lives, key aspects for leadership and professional development. Introducing literary works offers students “a more colourful and vivid palette to use when attempting to undergo the academic writing process, making such a process hopefully less of an endurance test and more of an exciting challenge” (Eastman, 2016). What’s so different about the course? We offer designated pre-reading of a different literary source to precede each webinar. Students experience immersion in a short story or novella which is often a compelling contrast from usual academic or professional sources. We facilitate discussion in the webinar to encourage deep learning with a focus on structure, style, and the mechanics of skillful writing. Students are surprised to discover how reflection on, and interrogation of, fictional texts, offer resonance and alignment to real world leadership and professional development challenges. How does this learning approach help? We offer designated pre-reading of a different literary source to precede each webinar. Students experience immersion in a short story or novella which is often a compelling contrast from usual academic or professional sources. We facilitate discussion in the webinar to encourage deep learning with a focus on structure, style, and the mechanics of skillful writing. Students are surprised to discover how reflection on, and interrogation of, fictional texts offer resonance and alignment to real world leadership and professional development challenges. How does this learning approach help? We believe that reading fiction helps us to imagine lives other than our own as well as making us more sensitive to language, behaviour, and motivation. The very act of examining a fictional text helps us to become more aware, reflective, and capable of addressing emotional blockages and discovering different perspectives. Literary fiction enhances our ability to empathise with other people and connect with something larger than ourselves. (Jenefer Robinson (2005) makes a persuasive argument that our emotions can be educated by literature. Integrating the Arts into Business Business schools need to recognise the evidence that reading fiction improves our social abilities, stimulates our minds, and helps us to navigate others’ worlds. It can also help us write in ways that expand our thinking and trigger better dissemination of our success in leadership and management. This process of reflective imagining provokes deeper learning and gives us permission to cross the boundaries and restraints of standard business thinking to discover fictional inspiration for current challenges. (Warren Bennis and James O’Toole (2005) have argued that academic shortcomings can be rectified by offering a study of works of imaginative literature “to exemplify and explain the behaviour of people in business organisations in a way that [is] richer and more realistic than any journal article or textbook.” Building on the strength of these imaginative narratives, we are now in the process of creating a multi-authored book, The Reinvention of Self. This process of reflective imagining provokes deeper learning and gives us permission to cross the boundaries and restraints of standard business thinking to discover fictional inspiration for current challenges. A Project informed by Knowledge Creation This book will form a collection of reflections on identity, a common yet perplexing aspect of leadership. In the context of a world which assumes a conventional retirement age and an acceptance of “winding down”, it seems timely to make a Quixotic tilt at the fixed identity windmill. With contributions from lecturers, alumni, and students, The Reinvention of Self aims to promote visionary ways of thinking about reinventing one’s identity in professional life and beyond. It offers the revolutionary perspective on retirement that old roles and behaviors need not be abandoned but instead modified, and that new sources of identity can be found. Many of the chapters will use fiction as a device to examine the formative psychological influences on our personalities. One contributor intends to explore how Charles Dickens’s (Martin Chuzzlewit) embodies the authors’ attempt to face deception and duplicity in his own life. The character of Tom Pinch represents Dickens’s examination of what it means to be true to one’s values, to oneself in a world of deceit and artifice. She was motivated to feature Martin Chuzzlewit in the context of reinvention and retirement, because she wanted to find “instances of less puritanical representations of retirement that don’t end in abject failure or miserable death” [book contributor, 2023]. Literary fiction can stimulate thinking through its emotional pull. We believe that these two initiatives signify illuminating alternative application of fictional literature for innovative knowledge creation and professional development. 7 Scholarship Matters Communities of practice (Wenger-Tayner, 2015) in which professionals create and share knowledge, are a driver for continued learning. We have developed two new initiatives which aim to transform how professionals create and share their knowledge through published writing.
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