Writing collaboratively in groups: Reflections on twenty-five years experiences of international collaborative writing groups

Abstract

International collaborative writing groups (ICWGs), working with a sponsoring organization, have had a major impact on capacity building and developing learning communities, as well as producing quality outputs (Healey, 2017; ISSOTL, nd). They are about “working creatively, critically and collaboratively to address a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) challenge from a multi-perspective lens” (Abrahamson, 2023). ICWGs usually involve groups of staff and students from different countries working together with a leader in small teams to write articles about pre-selected topics for submission to an international peer-reviewed journal. The process normally lasts around 18 months from announcement to submission, with participants working mostly online. The highlight is when all the teams come together for between 2 and 3 days, before or after an international conference, to work intensively on their articles. Whilst this model has predominantly been used within the context of SoTL, it is easily transferable to other topics and disciplines. We ran the first full ICWG in SoTL from 2004-06 for geographers, drawing on the experience of running an international seminar in 1999 that piloted many of the features that subsequently came to characterise ICWGs (Healey, 2006; Healey et al., 2000)). Subsequently in 2012 we introduced ICWGs to ISSOTL (Healey et al., 2013). We have experienced each of the three ICWG roles – event facilitator, group leader, and co-author – several times in the last 25 years (Table 1). In this chapter we offer advice based on our reflections on these experiences, and the research evidence on the opportunities and challenges ICWGs have provided for participants. We outline some suggestions for how participants playing the different ICWG roles may make the most of their experiences, and how the model might be used by the wider SoTL community and other academic communities to support local, national, and institutional collaborative writing groups. We begin by exploring the nature and purposes of ICWGs in SoTL.