Imagined futures and relational agency in nurses' writing transitions: a qualitative study across two writing group interventions in a higher education setting
Keywords: transitions
socio-cultural and cultural-historical theory
health care clinical academic identities
writing development

Nurses in academia face challenges in their writing development. The transition from a clinical setting presents difficulties in positioning oneself as a research writer leading to missed opportunities to disseminate outputs that potentially improve health care outcomes.
This study explores the transitions of individual nurse clinicians and teachers as they engage with a writing group intervention to write a Master's dissertation or a research article. Previous writing group studies have focused on participant outcomes such as productivity and not the developmental processes of becoming a writer. To offer an in-depth analysis of transitions and human development, I took a sociocultural and cultural-historical approach. Theories were drawn upon that emphasise how individuals experience uncertainty and use resources to make sense, and make meaning to reposition themselves and become active agents. 18 participants at a university in the Southeast of England joined one of two writing group interventions to work on academic research writing concepts in a cultural and social learning environment. I posed the following research questions:
• How and why do the participants appropriate the mediational tools from the writing interventions during the work of transition?
• How do the participants experience relational work and deal with contradictions to shape their academic research writing development?
I collected data through participant observation, samples of writing-in-development, and individual narratives spanning up to three years. I analysed the data through a conceptual framework that draws theoretically from a sociocultural understanding of developmental transitions and a cultural-historical perspective on relational agency.
What mattered about becoming a writer in a clinical or teaching role created demands, and the writing tasks caused uncertainties. The research revealed the psychological work of transition through the appropriation of psychological tools. When the hidden aspects of writing were exposed, it led to self-conception and writers’ identity work. Novice writers needed to relinquish prior conceptions about writing. However, the transition became developmental when the participants engaged with where-to activities bringing them to the genre of the discipline and enabling concept development through a realisation of their contribution through writing. Becoming an active agent was contingent on supervisory support and cultivating and enacting know-who to align what mattered with others to develop common knowledge about disciplinary writing concepts. The findings revealed the potential to develop writers’ identities to help them change the status quo towards an imagined future. However, the contingent issues point to critical areas of practice for writing development that requires nurturing.
The study contributes to the literature on writing group interventions through its original theoretical approach in bringing sociocultural and cultural-historical work together to investigate formative transitions.