As some of the earliest scholars in our field to collaboratively write about collaborative writing, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford note that they “began collaborating in spite of concerned warnings of friends and colleagues” and though they “knew that [their] collaboration represented a challenge to traditional research conventions in the humanities” (1990, ix). Indeed, though Ede and Lunsford largely succeeded in their goal “to change the academy so that others can, without penalty, experience the satisfactions and challenges of collaborative inquiry” (x), some scholars may still encounter collegial cautions and be wary about institutional penalties if they choose to embark upon collaborative projects because, even now, in the second decade of the 21st century, “success in the academy depends largely on having one's work recognized as an individual accomplishment” (Ede and Lunsford, 2001, 357). This reality is reflected in Kathi’s admonition that she “wouldn’t do all collaboration… because all collaboration can get you into some trouble.” As our team can attest, the degree of “trouble” that may result from engaging in collaborative scholarly projects differs by individual institutional and positional contexts.
Collaborative scholarship and writing certainly have other challenges, as well. For example, as Kathi admits, “It’s a lot of work… It’s a pain in the neck, and it takes longer.” However, despite these “downsides,” Kathi is quick to point out the benefits of collaboration, including her (perhaps surprising!) recognition that “the kinds of things I’ve collaborated on, I couldn’t have done myself” and her humble acknowledgment that “Anything I’ve done that’s collaborative is much smarter than what I could have done because people see things I don’t, and so I’m the beneficiary of that.” This is a sentiment she and Michael Spooner (1998) also share in their co-authored article “A Single Good Mind”: “One of the key arguments supporting collaboration has been that it allows a constructivist, collective kind of knowledge-making process that is faithful to and takes advantage of a postmodern, multivocal, Bakhtinian understanding of how we ‘create’ knowledge" (48). In Beyond Conversation: Collaboration and the Production of Writing, Will Duffy (2021) articulates a similar attitude in his reflection that “When I begin collaborative writing projects, it is [the] emergent discourse I most anticipate, those articulations that result not despite but because of the interactions between each of our ‘separate causes’ as collaborators'' (8). In fact, these collaborative interactions are the basis for the Elon Summer Research seminars. As the Director of the Elon Center for Engaged Learning, Jessie Moore (2014), notes: “multi-institution collaboration structure allows researchers to scale-up what they are learning about the seminar topics, to compare results across institutional contexts, and to inform future curricular design of high impact educational practices in higher education – in specific institutional contexts and more broadly.” Indeed, because our team was made up of individuals working within various US institutional contexts and international contexts, we had the opportunity to consider not only how the “separate causes” motivating our individual and institutional expectations for the outcomes of our research were shaping our research questions and methods, but also how our collective cross-institutional data collection would add value to those outcomes within both our local instructional and administrative contexts and the broader landscape of writing studies research.
Another benefit of collaboration is increased productivity. When considering her own choices to collaborate, Kathi reflects that “I think it [collaboration] makes you more active as a scholar because you have a commitment to other people.” And Kathi has found this to be true in her own work: “I think at the end of the day, I’m more productive when I collaborate because I have an obligation to someone else.” Although writing groups are not always composed of scholars who are writing collaboratively, the very act of writing alongside others “can foster motivation through mutual encouragement, accountability, or healthy competition” and “can also increase productivity: Cuthbert and Spark (2008) and Fleming et al. (2017), for example, found that writing group participants collectively drafted and submitted numerous journal articles, book chapters, and conference presentations'' (Julien and Beres, 2019, 4). Happily, our team’s collaborations have benefited from this mutual support and commitment, in part because we readily acknowledged that collaborative research and writing add complications to the process. Here we agree with Will Duffy’s (2021) claim that “It’s easy, after all, to imagine the strategic benefits of collaboration when cowriters come together because they hope to capitalize on how their different backgrounds or sets of expertise might be mutually beneficial… the more pressing need is for greater recognition of the complexity coauthorship entails” (20-21). Our team initially brainstormed a list of potential publication and presentation opportunities, and then considered together not only the feasibility (timelines, locations, etc.) of a project, but also how the project would impact individual team members’ career and professional development goals. Once we agreed on a project to pursue, one team member typically took the lead (e.g., framing the argument, acting as the corresponding author, etc.) and then each of the rest of us took primary responsibility for completing some aspect of the project, with a secondary team member as our initial collaborator. Once we completed a draft of our element, we came together to review the project more holistically, commenting and making recommendations for revision, reiterating this process numerous times both before and after submitting the final manuscript or delivering the final presentation.
As we noted earlier, one of the most vexed aspects of participating in collaborative projects is the question of divvying up “credit” for the published product. As Kathi and Michael Spooner noted in 1998, "even ardent collaborators struggle with the ownership dimension of collaboration. If you'll notice, the practice described by many seems both celebratory of and resistant to collaboration at the same time: a reflection perhaps of what we all feel–the tug and pleasure of working together in tension with the need to receive individual credit" (50). We certainly faced this tension within our team, due to the differences in our academic appointments and seniority [link here to earlier conversation Teams Meeting 2:40 - 8:21]. However, as we considered the ways in which our research progressed, from designing our research question to collecting and interpreting data, we quickly recognized that it was “really collaborative” (as compared to simply cooperative or rigidly “number counting” because “there was no way you could divvy it up; we’d all participated in every phase of the process, so it made sense to do it collaboratively. And I think at the end of the day, that’s part of the argument for collaboration… when people are asked by institutions, “Well, how much of this work did you do?” it’s a futile question. Because if it’s really collaborative, it’s just impossible.” And so while we did not try to precisely quantify how much of the work each of us contributed to our publications, we did develop a process for composing.