From Participants to Co-Facilitators and Beyond

Greetings again. I hope you’re doing well.

I’m back from a trip to China and Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, I facilitated a workshop titled “Effective Mentorship in Research Writing”. This workshop grew out of an earlier AuthorAID workshop. Here’s the story.

About 2 months ago, I facilitated a workshop at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Faculty members from various Sri Lankan universities attended. Near the end, faculty members from each site worked on plans to promote research writing at their institutions.

The faculty members from the University of Peradeniya included in their plan a workshop resembling that in Colombo. They wanted me to facilitate it. Conveniently, I was to be in Asia in May, for a meeting in China. So I added a stop in Sri Lanka.

Five University of Peradeniya faculty members who had attended the Colombo workshop helped with the current workshop. One of them, Dr. Sarathchandra Kodikara, served as the workshop organizer.

The other four—Drs. Dinesh Fernando, Sampath Tennakoon, Nilmini Wanigasooriya, and Nayana Wijayawardhane—were co-facilitators. In this role, they led small-group discussions. They also contributed to the lecture portions of the workshop.

The workshop attendees—who came from the faculties of medicine, dentistry, and veterinary medicine—indicated that they were very pleased with the workshop. Clearly, the contributions of Dr. Kodikara and the co-facilitators were crucial to the workshop’s success.

Having now both attended and co-facilitated AuthorAID workshops on research-writing mentorship, these faculty members are prepared to lead such workshops themselves. I hope they will lead such workshops for other faculties at their university.

Until the next post—

Barbara