"So, yeah, apparently I'm collaborating all the time."
Having the privilege of collaborating as a researcher with Kathi means that we gained some insight into her process: specifically, in how she talks about designing and conducting research, how she approaches research participants, how she works with data, and how she pulls themes from shared analysis. In all of these research processes, Kathi demonstrated through words and actions her deep commitments to using composition theory, pedagogy, and research to better understand and help student writers. Foundational to Kathi’s values as a writing studies researcher is a privileging of the voices, perspectives, experiences, and composition artifacts of students themselves as writers. Extending this value of student perspectives to the many graduate students she has mentored over the years, Kathi has also partnered with students in collaborative research, writing, and publications. As a result, we see collaboration with students as a significant component of her contributions and legacy in rhetoric and composition: she is indeed “collaborating all the time.”
Our team collaborated with Kathi in a multi-year, multi-institution research project that sought to study student writers and their spheres of writing beyond the university. Through all phases of this project, Kathi advocated for representing student voices prominently and accurately, as well as in using direct quotes from students to describe their own writing and spheres of writing. Our team as a whole shared these commitments to student voices; we included quotes from students in the title and throughout the analysis in one of our co-authored chapters (“There Is a Lot of Overlap,” Yancey et al., 2022), quoted heavily in large blocks from student research interviews (“Lifewide WAC,” Holmes et al., 2023), and reproduced numerous student-generated maps of their spheres of writing (“Multiple Forms of Representation,” O’Sullivan et al., 2022). Representing student voices became a central goal of how we approached our work, seeing student participants, in many ways, as collaborators in our efforts to understand and experts in representing their own experiences as writers.
In her 2004 address as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), “Composition in a New Key,” Kathi clearly indicates the value she sees in studying the rich and diverse genres and contexts of student writers, who “write words on paper, yes—but who also compose words and images and create audio files on Web logs (blogs), in word processors, with video editors and Web editors and in e-mail and on presentation software and in instant messaging and on listservs and on bulletin boards—and no doubt in whatever genre will emerge in the next ten minutes” (298). Leading composition instructors and writing program administrators to not fear these inevitable changes in writers and writing, Kathi has in the past, and continues today, to look to student writers and their writing practices for answers as to why there is such a disconnect between “what we teach” and “what our students know as writing?” (298). In Kathi’s ongoing pursuits to explore the relationships among school-based writing and writing in spheres beyond the university, student writers serve as a collaborative force in prompting inquiry, regenerating the research process, and helping the field of rhetoric and composition explore why students don’t always bring the “energy and motivation . . . [for] some of these other genres” to “our assignments” in the classroom (298).
While student participants in research projects factor prominently in Kathi’s contributions, her collaboration with graduate students in her programs, as well as students in international partnerships, has also resulted in numerous collaborative research pursuits and publications. For example, some of Kathi’s work on transfer has resulted from collaborations with Kara Taczak and Lianne Robertson when they were graduate students but has extended into their post-graduation positions through continued research and publications. As Kathi explained: “It made sense to do it collaboratively.”
There was a natural progression of Kathi’s research and eventual publications with Kara and Liane, who were graduate students working on dissertations and then became collaborators for ongoing research, grant applications, and eventually a collaborative book publication. As Kathi explains, “there was no way you could divvy” up their writing and research because “we had all participated in every phase of the process, so it made sense to do it collaboratively.” In a separate project on ePortfolios , Kathi has collaborated across differences with medical, pharmacy, and dental students at Trinity College in Ireland. She commented on the collaboration in this project, saying: “it’s felt perfectly fine--it’s felt great,” even if “it’s a lot of work.” In this project with students at Trinity College, Kathi described herself as “the oddball out,” as the “only American, the only non-health sciences person”; however, she continues to highlight the value she sees in collaboration with students because she enjoys these opportunities: “I like collaboration.”
In similar ways, our research for the Writing Beyond the University seminar involved collaboration with students in the way we approached discourse-based interviews, mapping, and re-mapping. As we wrote about in “Multiple Forms of Representation” (O’Sullivan et al., 2022), our research design involved students first mapping their spheres of writing, then participating in a discourse-based interview, and finally remapping their spheres: a process that “enabled the interviewee to triangulate their own perceptions.” We see this triangulation emerging in part from how we approached the interview as collaboration between the faculty interviewer and student interviewee: “eliciting students’ tacit knowledge . . . [as they] recall[ed] details about their genres of writing in specific spheres as well as the relationships between and among their spheres of writing.” This collaboration with students resulted in interviewees describing how discussion in the interview itself helped them imagine new possibilities for mapping their spheres of writing.
Throughout her career, Kathi has exemplified a commitment to collaborating with students as co-authors, as active participants in research about writing, and as experts on their own experiences as writers.