In evaluating academic work, faculty members are routinely slotted into distinct, potentially oppositional roles: author and peer reviewer, teacher and observer, mentee and mentor. But what if, instead, we were able to see those roles as truly collaborative? What if we responded to each other as partners in those ventures?
A few years ago, the two of us experimented with team-teaching and collaborative-writing projects. They have fundamentally reshaped how we view collaboration in academe.
We began by team-teaching a survey course on early British literature, attempting an intensely collaborative model that was new to our academic program as well as to us. We crafted the course (from the syllabus to the writing assignments) and taught all class meetings together. Tara, a medievalist, took the lead on the readings from the Middle Ages in the first half of the course, and Rebecca, an early modernist, did the same for the early-modern readings in the second half. We found that having two teachers in the classroom allowed for more flexibility in our activities, more energy in our discussions, and more meaningful ways of introducing students to literary studies.
Buoyed by that classroom success, we decided to write the guide to team teaching that we wished had existed when we started: an article that not only theorized the advantages but also provided a behind-the-scenes look at how two instructors actually designed such a course. The result was our article, “Reimagining the Literature Survey Through Team Teaching.”
While teaching is always a communal activity to some degree, writing (in literary studies and many other disciplines) is an intensely solitary affair. Never having jointly written an academic essay before, we wondered how to even start.
We found we were able to adapt some of the same best practices from team-teaching to team-writing: We discussed our ideas to create a unified foundation and divided the work — in this case, dividing the sections of the paper to be drafted.
Next we worked to integrate our contributions, this time on the page rather than in the classroom. We responded to each other’s drafts and pieced them together. From that point on, revisions went back and forth via email. One of us would make changes (tracked in Microsoft Word) or insert comments with questions, praise, or concerns, to which the other would respond before adding her own new content.
After several rounds of this intellectual volley, we realized that it was becoming harder and harder to remember who had originally written what. That turned out to be one of the great surprises of our collaboration: We had imagined our scholarly voices to be more distinctive than our teaching styles, but the former actually merged more seamlessly than the latter.
No doubt the harmony of our writing styles was, in part, the result of our team-teaching experience. In two courses, led discussions together, communicated daily, often via email, and became accustomed to each other’s tone and expressive habits. We also tried to maintain a “united front” before students, and to respond to their queries as consistently as possible.
Through our collaborative teaching, we had built a relationship characterized by trust and mutual encouragement. While we did not anticipate that our classroom relationship would lend itself so readily to a writing partnership, we found the shared voice that emerged to be liberating.
Writing together was also refreshingly angst-free: Being able to consult with another writer minimized the anxiety we had always assumed was inherent to the writing-and-publication process. Sharing a byline encouraged some emotional distance from the manuscript — especially helpful when the reader reports came back — yet didn’t negate our personal stakes in the argument.
In general, co-writing required us to practice writing habits that we know are good for us, but that we tend to shun in favor of the excitement of binge-writing and obsessive editing: We divided the project into smaller tasks, stayed on schedule, and resisted judging what we had written until we’d heard the other’s perspective.
Perhaps because of those good habits, our collaborative writing felt both easy and dynamic, especially compared with our independent writing projects. It was dialogue as opposed to soliloquy. Some of the most effective lines in our article started as hastily scribbled notes in the margin from one of us to the other.
In team-teaching, we found that it was crucial for both of us to be in the classroom at the same time. In co-writing, on the other hand, what worked well was for us to take turns having “custody” of the draft. That way we could write and reflect independently while also taking into account the other’s insights and feedback.
Our experience validates an observation included in Susan Cain’s best seller Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Cain wrote that “professors who work together electronically, from different physical locations, tend to produce research that is more influential than those either working alone or collaborating face-to-face.” She cited a 2005 article, published in Creativity Research Journal, that found that articles appearing in social-psychology journals were more likely to be cited when they had multiple authors from multiple institutions. Although it’s too early to be counting citations of our article, we both feel that it represents stronger work than either of us would have produced alone.
In writing as in teaching, collaboration involves different types of work rather than less work. But collaborative work also feels different. You feel that you are engaged in a shared enterprise; that you are putting forth your best effort, knowing that the collaborative process will turn it into something even better; that you can remain open to possibilities and opportunities as they come along. You feel a little gentler, a little more thoughtful, when approaching the shared work than you might be with your individual work. The focus — and the pressure — is less on your ego and more on the impact of the work.
In fact, our experience writing together has helped us appreciate the ways in which peer review, in its best form, produces many of the same benefits as co-writing. That is not only because peer reviewers often provide insights and suggestions that lead to stronger articles, but also because, like a co-author, reviewers have something at stake. As members of a wider community interested in similar questions, they, like co-authors, want the research to reach its audience.
The benefits of collaboration continued once we returned to our separate courses and writing projects. We each had a renewed energy and commitment to our students, discipline, and institution. This experience has made us more attuned to the inherent collaboration at the heart of academe and has given us a rich appreciation for its benefits.
