Working with Faculty Writers

14. Imagining Coauthorship as Phased Collaboration

DOI: 10.7330/9780874219029.c014 14 Im ag i n i n g C oau t h o r s h i p a s P h a s e d C o l l a b o r at i o n William Duffy and John Pell All writers will tell you that they write to connect; we simply add one more, very important connection to that process: the connection with each other. —Kate Ronald and Hephzibah Roskelly In a time of dwindling institutional budgets, the idea of academic departments and university programs using their limited resources to support faculty writing sounds like a luxury from a bygone era. As departments and programs try to do more with less, many faculty members are left to navigate the challenging terrain of writing and publication on their own. Yet most of us know that regardless of one’s disciplinary field, writing is difficult work that often requires external motivations . While it is true that some universities offer workshops or sponsor writing retreats to provide the proverbial kick needed to start a writing project, these measures do not always alter the perceptions of faculty who believe writing is an activity that should be pursued alone. While it goes without saying that a successful academic career depends (at least in part) on the ability to work well in isolation, having regular access to and accountability from one’s peers often helps to scaffold and invigorate a scholar’s intrinsic motivations for writing. Is it possible to provide the external motivation faculty writers often need to move forward with their scholarship while simultaneously providing support that enhances their confidence as writers? Moreover can this kind of provision be achieved with little, if any, formal institutional support? As faculty writers ourselves, we have answered this question in the affirmative by engaging in the practice of collaborative writing, Imagining Coauthorship as Phased Collaboration    247 specifically what we call phased collaboration. Phased collaboration is the name we give to our orientation toward coauthorship and those practices of collaboration that serve both a utilitarian function (we get work done) and a conceptual function (we are encouraged to assess and improve our writing practices). Over time, we have come to recognize how phased collaboration allows us to discover ideas and compose texts that neither one of us could produce individually. The “could” in the previous sentence has nothing to do with individual ability, inborn talent , or old-fashioned effort; rather it signals the simple fact that one’s vision is always partial, which is to say there is always a horizon of insight that limits what one person can see at any given time. In terms of writing , this horizon is manifested in our capacities to intervene in and enhance the ways we read, think, and compose—actions that for many academic writers (as well as for our students) sometimes get entrenched with routine and convention. But as the aphorism goes, two minds are better than one, and thus collaboration has and continues to influence the writing we undertake as full-time faculty who are expected to maintain active research agendas. Now as faculty members of different departments, across the country from each other, collaboration offers a benefit that we never fully recognized when we had the luxury of walking into each other’s offices as graduate students and teaching colleagues. Namely, collaboration provides us with an organic support structure that encourages us to pursue scholarship while honing our writing craft. Such a support structure emerges as a result of the unique experience collaborators share experimenting with the work of coauthorship. Specifically, the type of collaboration we are discussing is entered into voluntarily, with those whom we wish to partner. Thus the demands to produce are simultaneously the demands to honor a partnership, which is to say collaborative writing encourages authors to attend to their own writing in order to uphold their commitments to a partner. The idea that collaboration helps support one’s writing by introducing a relationship with another is seldom discussed; after all, there aren’t many pocket guides for cowriters. Yet this is precisely what many novice collaborators require: ideas about how to conceptualize the work of coauthorship as a means of facilitating their shared development as academics . This is what we hope to offer here, a conceptual framework for imagining the work of coauthorship that encourages writers to experiment with writing that can genuinely be called collaborative. But as we will make clear below...