Researcher Professional Development through Writing: A Negotiation Perspective

Abstract

Writing is a creative process. It is generative of ideas and practices, thereby, generative of the people who embody this creative process. For some, this embodiment is occupational practice and its various enactments identify journalists, poets, legislators, researchers and the like through the work of writing. For such workers, writing is a social practice, a negotiation practice that develops and sustains the skills, purposes and identities that are the bases and momentum of their professional practice.This chapter examines and discusses writing from the personal and professional development perspectives of an early career researcher who uses writing to examine work and learning practices for the purposes of enabling clearer understandings about how best to view, conceptualise and support learning through work. Through some of the conceptual foundations and findings from a specific project of the researcher’s work, the chapter will elaborate how writing has contributed to this researcher’s professional development. What emerges from this elaboration is an understanding of writing for professional development as a primary means of transforming researchers’ occupational practice. In doing so, the chapter advocates writing for professional development as an embracing of the knowns and unknowns that characterise the negotiations that constitute engagement in occupational practice.