First Person Squared

A Study of Co-Authoring in the Academy

Kami Day & Michele Eodice

Publication Year: 2001

<DIV><P>In (First Person)2, Day and Eodice offer one of the few book-length studies of co-authoring in academic fields since Lunsford and Ede published theirs over a decade ago. The central research here involves in-depth interviews with ten successful academic collaborators from a range of disciplines and settings. The interviews explore the narratives of these informants' experience—what brought them to collaborate, what cognitive and logistical processes were involved as they worked together, what is the status of collaborated work in their field, and so on—and situate these informants within the broader discussion of collaboration theory and research as it has been articulated over the last ten years. </P><P>As the study develops, Day and Eodice become most interested in the affective domain of co-authorship, and they find the most promising explorations of that domain in the work of feminist theorists in composition. Against a background of feminist theory, the reflections of these informants and authors not only provide a window into the processes of current scholarship in writing, but also come to stand as a critique of traditional practice in English departments. Throughout the book, the two co-authors interrupt themselves with reflections of their own, on the rejection long ago of their proposal to co-author a dissertation, on their presuppositions about their research, on their developing commitment to the framework of feminist theory to account for their findings, and on their own processes and challenges in writing this book. The result is a well-centered volume that is disciplined and restrained in its presentation of research, but which is layered and multivocal in presentation, and which ends with some provocative conclusions.</P></DIV>

Published by: Utah State University Press

Contents
Search Inside This Book
Book Details

pdf icon Download PDF (24.7 KB)
pp. v-vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

pdf icon Download PDF (25.6 KB)
pp. vii-x

If we were to name every person, living and dead, who has contributed to this book, we would need to write at least a chapter of acknowledgments. So, we will limit ourselves to those with whom we have developed relationships, those who have been part of our lives and our work. First of all, we want to thank the co-authors who generously volunteered their time to talk with us, and, in...

1. HOW WE CAME TO WRITE THIS BOOK

pdf icon Download PDF (72.4 KB)
pp. 1-13

We are co-authors who study co-authors. We observe them as they write, but our primary focus has been the stories they tell about their work together. The research we've compiled here is bookended by an attempt to write a collaborative dissertation in 1997 and by a College Composition and Communication Conference 2000 workshop involving experienced academic co-authors....

2. WHY STUDY ACADEMIC CO-AUTHORS?

pdf icon Download PDF (172.3 KB)
pp. 14-47

We had several reasons for choosing to study successful, experienced co-authoring teams. First, as the view that knowledge is socially constructed has come to inform and complicate composition theory and practice, more and more instructors are incorporating collaboration into their classrooms in such forms as peer response groups, peer editing, group invention strategies, and...

3. WHY CALL SUCCESSFUL CO-AUTHORING "FEMININE"?

pdf icon Download PDF (76.1 KB)
pp. 48-60

As we met with the co-authoring teams, they talked with us and each other about their individual and collaborative writing processes, their products, their strengths and weaknesses, professional issues of tenure and single authorship, pedagogy, their views on collaborative dissertations, issues of choice and time and proximity, first author concerns, and what they saw as benefits...

4. COMPLETION OF CARING Successful Co-authoring as Relationship

pdf icon Download PDF (257.3 KB)
pp. 61-120

Having clarified the central terms we will use in presenting the data from our study, we would like to explain how we used Dickens and Sagaria's study to give structure to what we learned from the interviewees. We find it useful to think about the co-authoring teams in terms of Dickens and Sagaria's categories as we take both a phenomenological and hermeneutical...

5. WHAT THEY DO How the Co-authors View Their Collaborative Writing Process

pdf icon Download PDF (116.3 KB)
pp. 121-142

In this chapter we will concentrate on how the co-authors describe what they actually do together to produce a piece of writing. Four of the teams are made up of composition specialists, and we assumed they would be more articulate than the others about their writing processes, but we found that the ability to...

6. CO-AUTHORED SCHOLARSHIP AND ACADEMIA

pdf icon Download PDF (120.1 KB)
pp. 143-166

This chapter will look at how co-authoring, and what the co-authors believe about it, positions them in the academy. Mark Bonacci was the only author who felt confident that co-authoring is valued in his field. Of the other team members, some are sure co-authored scholarship is valued in their departments, but most of the others perceive that co-authoring...

7. LEARNING TO CARE

pdf icon Download PDF (99.3 KB)
pp. 167-184

Our conclusion that the respect, trust, care, support, sharing, heterarchy, and commitment that characterize the relationships of these co-authors have led to a feminine approach to co-authoring raises fascinating questions for us: How did the authors come to have a feminine approach? What are the implications...

E-ISBN-13: 9780874214581
Print-ISBN-13: 9780874214482

Page Count: 204
Publication Year: 2001