From 26 to 30 March, the ESE:O team was at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, facilitating academic writing workshops for the Consortium of Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA). Soledad Falabella and Sebastian Brett attended CARTA’s JAS1, an intensive first year training session for holders of its PhD fellowships. The 26 participants, CARTA’s eighth cohort, are early career researchers in public health from Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa and Uganda.
Soledad and Sebastian ran a series of activity-based workshops on describing and documenting a research gap, conceptualization, critical discussion, paragraph construction and summarising. They piloted with the fellows two animations recently produced by ESE:O dealing with titles, subtitles, research gap and other key writing issues. For the first time, they shared an 80-page teaching manual based on online writing workshops organized jointly with CARTA since 2011, and soon to be available to the whole CARTA community.
Apart from meeting Cohort 8, with whom we will be working online until November, we enjoyed a reunion with Cohort 4 who also attended the JAS and participated in the teaching effort. One of CARTA’s strong beliefs, and ours too, is that knowledge gained should be passed on to others so that it multiplies society’s wealth!
At the closing dinner, the cohorts mingled and we were able to get some nice photos of the presentation ceremony for Cohort 4. Thanks to Makerere University for inviting us, and for all the Ugandans we met for their warmth, humour and hospitality!