This started with an email to a stranger. 

That email was sent because we had a shared interest in teaching. Specifically, creative pedagogies. "I read a blog post she had written and I wanted to chat about some of the ideas she had shared." That was it. 

We met on Zoom several times and somehow we came up with the idea of trying to get our faculty together to do something collaborative.  We settled on the month of November and to use the Academic Writing Month (#AcWriMo) as a way to frame the time we would work. 

We emailed a number of faculty we thought would be interested and had about 30 sign up. We created a email list and used that list throughout. We held two informal "information sessions" and only had a few people show up for each. We started emailing participants about two months before November to try to get them connected with others and decide on topics so that all they needed to do during November was work on the project.

We asked the participants to generate some ideas on a Google Doc. These are some of the suggestions participants offered:

• Mindfulness in a science course

• Transitioning to multimodal assignments

• Library administration leading to creative learning for our students 

• Creativity in a one-session opportunity–small creativity 

• Coming back to "small is all" from emergent strategy?

• Poetry as Reflective Practice 

• Art Show for Self-Awareness and Mindfulness

• Exploring space and place in learning and teaching

• Team teaching in active pedagogy

• Case competitions for professional development

• Creative approaches to experiential teaching for developing graduate skills

Matching up the participants

This was challenging because we had never done it before. We also offered a Discord Channel and a Padlet to help build connections. We also used a Google Doc with a table and had each person add their name, email address, topics they were interested in and how they might like to express their ideas. This is what it looked like. 

We intended to hold weekly meetings through the month of November, but that just seemed too much. We did hold one and it was really great just to visit with the faculty from the other university. That is still a good idea, we just forgot to schedule them... 

The participants had many ways they connected. Some met weekly on Zoom, some only once thought the month, and some used email, Padlet, or other forms of communication to interact.

Finally, we held a meeting about a week into December and asked the participants to share what they had completed. It was wonderful to see what people had done. Most wanted another week or so to finalized their contributions that you see here on this site.

At the end we had to collect the various projects participants had created. As you can see here, we used a very simple Google Site to display what we have accomplished. We looked at WordPress as well, but for our purpose, this worked out nicely. 

Helpful Ideas to Get Started

Start early and find a few early adopters to help plan.

Create an email list for consistent communication.

Try to get people to meet via Zoom or other communication tools.

Use Google Doc or similar for sharing ideas and making connections.

Find other ways the participants can interact, like visit the other's classroom via Zoom or publish an article.

Try to make the progress of the participants work visible and share that in "Weekly Update" emails.

Have a ceremony to end the collaboration.

Amazing Updates

Not only did we complete the great work on this site, but several of the groups continued working together on various projects.

Marie and Todd had a short version of the "First Five Minutes" work they did published by Faculty Focus.

Becca Price took the creative pedagogy idea to a learning community at another campus and they completed this reflection in their teaching practice.

Both the River of Writing group and the 30 Days of Writing Prompts groups are each working on a publication.

And Nathalie and Todd are doing this presentation, and we have plans to do this whole project again next year!

Lastly, if we can help, let us know!