Collaborative Writing

The Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) includes a Special Interest Group for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). In 2016, the SoTL Canada SIG offered the opportunity for members to take part in a set of collaborative writing groups on a set of selected SoTL topics. I was selected to be a member of the writing group on the topic of leadership in SoTL.

The writing group had a couple of meetings over Skype during the weeks leading up to the STLHE Annual meeting in June, to discuss members’ interests and refine our topic. We then spent the weekend after the STLHE meeting together, reading, writing, and discussing our paper. We left the weekend with a set of assigned tasks that each of us would contribute to the paper.

This was my first experience collaborating with scholars whom I hadn’t know before. It was challenging in many ways, as we worked to discover each other’s strengths and negotiated our several responsibilities. In the final weeks before the paper was due, I spent a good deal of time weaving my colleagues’ various contributions into a coherent whole, which the team recognized by designating me co-first author with our group’s facilitator, Janice Miller-Young.

Miller-Young, J. E., Anderson, C., Kiceniuk, D., Mooney, J., Riddell, J., Schmidt Hanbidge, A., Ward, V., Wideman, M. A., & Chick, N. (2017). Leading Up in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 8 (2).  https://doi.org/10.5206/cjsotl-rcacea.2017.2.4