Círculos de escritura y estrategias de regulación en tesistas de la Maestría en Educación de la Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombia)

Academic writing presents challenges for graduate students, as they are immersed in practices of production and distribution of knowledge typical of the disciplines, hence the importance of mediating the entry into these academic cultures. Precisely, the writing circle is constituted as a mechanism to incorporate students of the master’s degree in education in the dynamics of criticism and knowledge generation, as they are spaces for collaborative reflection focused on the joint revision of texts within the framework of their thesis. This article aims to analyze the development of the writing circle, explore the formulation of comments on thesis writing and feedback. Indeed, a writing circle is considered a set of participation in academic discourse through deliberations and reconsiderations facing written works such as the thesis. This article aims to analyze a writing circle composed of twenty-seven students of the Master’s Degree in Education of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana distributed into two cohorts and to establish how to express comments related to the process of the writing thesis, and the contribution of feedback in this space of collaborative development of writing practices. For this purpose, a mixed methodology was developed, in which the quantitative results of Difabio’s (2012) writing inventory were taken into account to understand the strategies that thesis writers declare to use and to confront these with the comments and the progress of the thesis. Likewise, the feedback provided in the circle is analyzed in some texts; this analysis is contrasted with the final discussion group that accounts for the impact of the experience. The findings indicate that at the end of the circle the students engage in a series of self-regulatory strategies to assume the writing of the thesis and hence the collaborative work is positively valued, which affects the quality of the texts and the confidence of the thesis writers.