Creating online metacognitive spaces: Graduate research writing during the COVID-19 pandemic

This study looks into how a group of graduate research students from an Australian university created online collaborative spaces that facilitated highly productive environments for thesis writing during the global lockdown and travel restrictions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Using virtual meetings and shared digital repositories, these researchers progressed through stages in their writing from the formation of research questions, developing literature review, data collection and analysis and finally writing the discussion, each working on a different topic within the broader field of education. The study found that the regular online Shut Up N Write (SUNW) sessions created the conditions that allowed these researchers not only to share their work and solicit critical feedback, but to be aware of their own learning styles. The writing sessions became a facilitative ground in which a process and genre approach to writing allowed them to work independently, yet also drawing on advice from others that provided a greater sense of belonging. Using reflective autoethnographic narratives, and by combining genre, metacognition and third space theories, the study problematises these virtual meetings as spaces of inner growth as writers who, while learning from each other, also find their own distinctive voices in developing their theses.