(FIRST PERSON)
A Study of Co-authoring in the AcademyBy KAMI DAY MICHELE EODICEUTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2001 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-448-2Contents
Acknowledgments.................................................................................vii1 How We Came to Write This Book................................................................12 Why Study Academic Co-authors?................................................................143 Why Call Successful Co-authoring Feminine?....................................................484 Completion of Caring: Successful Co-authoring as Relationship.................................615 What They Do: How the Co-authors View Their Collaborative Writing Process.....................1216 Co-authored Scholarship and Academia..........................................................1437 Learning to Care..............................................................................167Appendix........................................................................................185References......................................................................................190Index...........................................................................................201About the Authors...............................................................................205
Chapter One
HOW WE CAME TO WRITE THIS BOOK
BACKGROUND
We are co-authors who study co-authors. We observe them as they write, but our primary focus has been the stories they tell about their work together. The research we've compiled here is bookended by an attempt to write a collaborative dissertation in 1997 and by a College Composition and Communication Conference 2000 workshop involving experienced academic co-authors. Occupying the central position is a study involving in-depth interviews with ten successful academic writing teams, representing a range of disciplines, experiences, and expertises. This book features particularly the voices of these interviewees but also includes those of the participants in the CCCC workshop and the voices of students and other co-authors we have encountered in classrooms, online, and even in casual conversations. We seem to find co-authors wherever we go, and as we have collected and analyzed more and more of their stories, we have come to understand that the integral components to successful co-authoring include more than productive material practices and publishable products.
Our work has led to a book with two authors' names on the cover, but those two names represent more than the final result of a scholarly project. Behind them, as behind the names of Ede and Lunsford, Hurlbert and Blitz, Roen and Brown, Spooner and Yancey-and numerous other co-authors in the field of composition and outside of it-are the stories of their work together. These are the stories we wish to tell, and we will begin with our own. What Mary Ann Cain observes about her own researcher role as "both participant in the construction of this story [Revisioning Writers' Talk] and observer of that construction" goes double for us: especially as co-authors, our story "should not be excluded in constructing the meanings of the contexts in which [the] writers [in our study] talk about their work" (1995, 111).
In the spring of 1997, we began writing a proposal for a co-authored dissertation. We realized the task we had taken on: challenging the traditions of the research and academic communities, attempting to contribute something new to the theory and practice of collaboration, and especially investigating the ways we weave our very different voices and writing styles into a voice we called "(first person)." We proposed to continue this process, writing collaboratively sentence by sentence, with the goal of building a dissertation that explored what happens when people write together.
This project was a result of synchronicity. We met in the doctoral Rhetoric and Linguistics program at a mid-sized northeastern university as graduate students in a department that fosters collaborative efforts among its students and is exemplified by collaborative faculty projects. We were in a group of composition teachers learning about teaching writing at a time when the field was benefitting from the work of theorists who were recognizing the social dimensions of learning. Our first co-authoring effort was in our very first class, a course in research methods. We found that, unlike other times in which we had just "worked with" others, we were engaging equally and productively from the initial idea stage through the research to the writing of the final sentence. We did not think at the time about why our collaboration worked because it seemed to happen so naturally, but upon reflection, we realize the design of our graduate program promoted cooperation over competition. In this rich, intense learning environment, we forged supportive relationships rapidly and bonded over our work.
In our search for stories about how collaborative relationships formed in our program, we contacted several graduates. In an email message (May 27, 1997), Beth Boquet echoed our experiences. Like we were, she was a member of a unique cohort that formed as a result of entering this intensive academic environment:
Friendships that I had with people [in the program] were particularly close ... and unusual. I think you will have a difficult time getting at why that is though-seems pretty intangible to me. But we had women's dinners, we had Blue Moon parties, we spent evenings together on the dock at Two Lick Reservoir. We were very involved in each other's lives. When I've talked to people from other programs, they're usually amazed. "You had a good time in graduate school?!" is the pretty typical response.
We, like Beth, saw that while this emotionally supportive atmosphere carried over into the classroom, the intangible nature of our wanting to work with others stemmed from the program's pedagogical influences as well-the reading, the talking, the modeling. We were always given the opportunity to work together in our courses, and we often explored the theoretical implications of collaborative classroom work for our teaching back home. Little did the faculty know (or perhaps they did know!) they were encouraging us to "set aside the conventions to create an intellectual revolution" which Duane Roen and Robert Mitten (1992) would say defines the collaborative act.
After that first summer experience, we, Michele and Kami, worked in the same way successfully on many projects and, sensing that we created something better together than we could alone, we extended this collaborative model to our classrooms. What we had not done, but felt ready to do, was examine just how our collaboration and the that of our students and others works: hence, our desire to co-author a research project. Philip Murdock (1990) confirms the need for study in this area: "Little detailed ethnographic work has explored the dynamics of collaboration in the natural setting" (iii). Eager to engage in such exploration, we planned, in a joint dissertation, to study our students, experienced writers who collaborate and publish coauthored texts, and especially ourselves as we collaborated to study collaboration! We included this last element because what better way to study collaboration than to study it collaboratively?
When we began thinking (almost simultaneously-we can't remember who brought it up first) about writing a collaborative dissertation in 1995, we knew we were probably fantasizing. Our fears about bringing this idea up at all without being laughed at had nothing to do with lack of confidence in our program or the faculty of the English department; we simply knew "it's just not done." Ironically, two other women scholars in the same Rhetoric and Linguistics program had entertained but finally abandoned the idea of a collaborative dissertation ten years earlier. Looking back on that experience, Janine Rider and Esther Broughton wrote in 1994:
After writing a research paper together, we were encouraged to continue our work. Why not try a collaborative dissertation? Several of our professors confirmed the need for revising the concept of the dissertation, and they went on and on in class about how great it would be to see a collaborative one approved. More talk with them brought reality closer; however, getting a director in our department for a collaborative dissertation was one thing, but getting it through the university approval process was another. We would have been laughed right out of the graduate office. There was never a choice.... We concluded collaboration doesn't happen. (249)
We two women scholars wanted to move the concept of collaborative dissertations beyond the idea stage. We had no trouble finding a committee that was supportive of our desire to break scholarly ground; in fact, one of the members of our committee knew of a precedent. So, in July of 1996, we began to build our proposal, which we knew would have to include a strong rationale for a collaborative dissertation.
As new scholars, we approached our dissertation with the understanding that we were expected to contribute something new to our field. While other researchers have studied collaborative writing from the outside, by observing writers working together, there was as yet no inside study. The only way to truly understand how collaboration works is by studying it from the inside, as it appears to collaborators themselves. In this case, those collaborators would be us. Certainly, we felt we were furthering the work of scholars and researchers we admired, those who have called for expanding the scope and depth of knowledge about collaboration in journal articles about collaboration in the writing classroom.
Unfortunately, the graduate school at our institution did not share our vision. While our advisor was more than pleased with our proposal and our committee approved our research project, the chair of the Rhetoric and Linguistics program and the dean of Graduate School and Research did not feel our dissertation, although a worthy and necessary undertaking, fit the definition of a dissertation. The dean even contacted Dr. Jules Lapidus, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, "to broaden [his] own understanding," and in a letter to us, the dean wrote he was "convinced that a jointly authored dissertation could not be considered unless the individual contributions of each student were clearly identified. In this particular case, that does not appear possible" (August 1997). In this statement, we heard both a clear understanding of our co-authoring process and an admission that accepting this particular process was inconceivable. The program chair and the dean understood what we were trying to do, but neither man was willing to place our institution in the risky position of challenging academic tradition. After several long-distance conversations and memos involving the chair, the dean, and our advisor, we were forced to comply: we met with our committee(s) and split the dissertation into two studies. Michele's became a classroom study of students co-authoring, Kami's became a study of experienced academic coauthors, and we put the study of ourselves-what we had envisioned as the central element of our dissertation-on the back burner.
During the weeks when the fate of our proposal was being decided, we found support for our attempt as we exchanged email messages with scholars in the field of composition to find out their views on collaborative dissertations. In an online discussion on June 3, 1997, Katherine Fischer offered us encouragement and made the following observation: "Seems there is so much chatter about collaboration in our field, but actually not so much true allegiance to it in the act of writing." When we asked Andrea Lunsford what her criteria for a collaborative dissertation would be, she said they "would be the same as any other one, since I believe that by definition all dissertations are collaborative." She saw that we might need "special" criteria though, so she added "the safest thing imaginable would be a problem/study that could not easily (if at all) be done by one single scholar" (August 2, 1997). We found her words encouraging since our study of ourselves would have certainly fit these "special" criteria. Lisa Ede was sympathetic but reminded us that "academic bureaucracies are terrifically entrenched" and that we needed to think about the "implications of a collaborative dissertation on [our] academic careers" (August 2, 1997). When we asked Roen what he would do if two graduate students came to him with a proposal to collaborate on a dissertation, he said,
I would do everything I could to support that proposal. I would make the case with the graduate school. Co-authored work is common in many fields, including rhetoric and composition. In my reading and in my experience ... collaboration has led to better work, not less work. If anything, collaboration requires more work because two minds are seeing all sorts of revisions to do. (August 1, 1997)
However, according to a former administrator at the National Endowment for the Humanities, "There is little in the way of either precedent or encouragement for collaboration in the humanities; in fact, collaboration is sometimes actively discouraged. There is a tendency among humanities scholars to denigrate the significance of multiauthored works" (qtd. in Alm 1998, 136; see Borden 1992). As Lunsford told us, "If we can just get two or three precedent-setting dissertations, we will have a big breakthrough, I believe" (August 2, 1997). We had hoped to set a precedent in the humanities, but perhaps our attempt, although failed, will open the door for other innovative scholars to write dissertations collaboratively.
Since we couldn't be those scholars, we wrote two dissertations-together. We co-wrote the literature review, a chapter on collaborative dissertations, and part of the design and methodology for both studies; and we became co-researchers in each other's projects-Kami team-taught with Michele during the classroom study, and Michele took part in the interviews for Kami's study. Because we live together, proximity allowed us to participate jointly in all aspects of analyzing our data. We transcribed side by side, listening from time to time to each other's tapes to provide a second interpretation of what we were hearing and to check for accuracy; after one of us had coded a section of transcript, the other often coded it again to test and expand our understanding. And we talked-as we worked, as we cooked, as we ate, as we drove, as we walked.
However, although we had the benefit of proximity, we didn't just help each other by acting as sounding boards or as trusted readers or peer reviewers. Successful co-authoring, as we've learned from our own experience and from the co-authors we studied, goes well beyond what we have formally believed constitutes collaborative writing into an ineffable realm that involves relationships based on trust, respect, and care.
The co-authors in our study taught us about these ineffable elements-as well as the material practices-of their work as they told us their stories: stories of how they came to work together; how they negotiate their different ways of learning, knowing, and writing; how they merge their voices; how they have come to value their relationships with each other over the products of their collaboration. In interviews which took place in offices, homes, hotel lobbies, hotel rooms, and restaurants, they told us these stories, and rather than distilling or summarizing their accounts, we have included substantial chunks of our conversations so readers can hear the interviewees' voices and learn more directly from them.
OUR STUDY
We chose to interview the co-authors rather than observe them writing together because we wanted to take a phenomenological approach, to create a space in which the co-authors could describe their lived experience of writing together and the meaning they make from that experience. Steinar Kvale (1996) recommends interviewing as "particularly suited for studying people's understanding of the meanings in their lived world, describing their experiences and self-understanding, and clarifying and elaborating their own perspective on their lived world" (105). In addition, we agree with Diane R. Wood (1992) that "the way teachers [all the participants in our study are teachers] experience their lives as professionals matters, and the way they interpret their work can and should be grounds for inquiry, research, and theory in education" (545). We recognize the co-authors' authority over the accounts of their own writing processes just as composition researchers have come to recognize the value of what students say about their own writing processes. Kathleen Blake Yancey (1998) provides a useful parallel in her description of a particular moment in the history of composition studies. She points out that "in crediting students with knowledge of what was going on inside their heads and in awarding it authority, [early composition researchers] did something very valuable and very smart. These students are the ones who have allowed the rest of us, the teachers, to investigate, to understand, to theorize our classroom practice" (5). Likewise, the stories we have collected allow "the rest of us"-from writing teachers to authorship theorists-"to investigate, to understand, to theorize" what it means to write together.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from (FIRST PERSON)by KAMI DAY MICHELE EODICE Copyright © 2001 by Utah State University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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