About this program

Why focus on collaborative writing?

Collaboration activities are central to our research practices and increasingly to our syllabi and assignments, but the mechanisms of effective collaboration and the ways in which collaboration operates continue to be unconsidered. Further, the terms collaboration and writing vary widely in meaning across units. A cross disciplinary inquiry into both will advance opportunities for scholarship and teaching, helping to create bridges between objectives and achievement by using collaboration.

For our purposes, collaborative writing entails writing situations in which decisions are made by consensus (Lunsford and Ede). Collaborative writing is not simply writing assembled from separately authored pieces into a single document, display, or other artifact.

We propose to connect and leverage pedagogical practice across CLA to explore the future of collaborative writing in scholarship and teaching at UMN. As interdisciplinary scholars, and together with graduate and undergraduate students, we will 1) establish a collaborative writing community of inquiry, 2) hold six interdisciplinary learning sessions, 3) create and share collaborative writing resources for UMN system wide.

Workshop Team Members

The community of inquiry (COI) framework reinforces practices in collaborative writing. A community of inquiry is a "group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding."

Participants will have the opportunity to learn from peers as well as engage in practices of authentic collaboration. Interdisciplinary colleagues will be exposed to new strategies for collaborative writing and learn about available campus resources.

Two levels of participation

We seek to engage two different audiences faculty, graduate students and staff who

  1. Seek an introduction to collaborative writing, or who are interested in
  2. Developing a collaborative writing project for teaching, research or other work, whether they are new to collaborative writing or not.

Accordingly, there are two levels of participation:

  1. Attend workshops depending on interest in the topic. Participants may attend one, some, or all of the six workshops,
  2. Opt into a community of inquiry through which participants work on structuring a collaborative writing project. We will coordinate additional meetings for this group.