Teach Collaboratively

	Ways We Teach Collaboratively From the University of Central Arkansas Department of Writing

Our Collaborations Panel Grading Peer Review Letter Exchange Contact Us Sophie Bradford sophieb@uca.edu Jennifer Deering jdeering@uca.edu Lisa Mongno lmongno@uca.edu Resources Due Dates Fall '07 Due Dates Spring '08	An Introduction As people who teach writing, we deal everyday with two predominant stereotypes: 1) the writer who plods away at the typewriter, churning out a masterpiece from a lonely Paris garret in a five-floor walk-up and 2) the professor who pores over research in an isolated office only accessible through a warren of cave-like, empty, and mysterious hallways. Contrary to popular belief, most writers are not celebrated authors devoted to garret living. Most writers aren’t even celebrated: they go about their work for a computer technology corporation producing memos or instruction manuals, out on the beat as reporters for small-town newspapers, writing research articles for scholarly journals, creating Web pages or even simply writing Christmas cards. Their work isn’t necessarily published in the traditional sense, but it is meant to be shared with an audience. More importantly, they don’t write in isolation. Even celebrated authors had some circle of friends and admirers they counted on when they found themselves stuck at a certain point in their work, and many conducted lengthy correspondences (now phone calls and e-mails) with editors and publishers—anyone who would look at their work and discuss it with them. The same goes for teaching. Teaching is meant for an audience, and could benefit from collaboration. But many of us avoid collaborative teaching because it equates with “team-teaching” of classes, and, since few administrators are willing to give a reduction in teaching load for team-taught classes, such collaboration is seen as a burden—twice the work of the traditional system. Or, sometimes when a writing professor collaborates with a history or biology professor, the writing instruction may be seen as the “handmaiden” of the “more important” content of history or biology. Our job as professors, then, becomes to take on the “onerous” task of grading all the written work students have done for the other professor and somehow make it better. Hardly inspiring. Still, to be effective teachers we need feedback, conversation, lengthy correspondences to fuel our creativity and imagination as much as writers do. So what we offer here are productive ways some members of our department have found to collaborate, to inspire one another. I, personally, have benefited from these collaborations in ways too numerous to count. But the most important is the confidence I have gained as both a teacher and a writer from the mutuality of respect I have with my colleagues. I am no longer just a grader of student papers; I'm an educator. I'm no longer just a teacher who writes a little bit on the side; I'm a writer. I have become these things because my colleagues see me as so. And with these, seemingly, small shifts in my thinking I have been freed, and the gift of freedom is one I can, in turn, share with my students. My colleagues tell me that when they collaborate with others, they get teaching and assignment ideas from the collaboration and finding out all the exciting things their colleagues are doing makes them better teachers, better informed of current practice and theory. They also say that when they have worked in successful collaborations with professors from other disciplines, they enjoy seeing things from the different perspective. One colleague says, "I think each of us bring something different to this exchange of ideas, which means, I think, that collaboration has a habit of bringing the best out in people. Personally, I LOVE having the opportunity to talk about what we do and how we do it." We hope other members of our department will consider joining us in the conversation or forming their own collaborative groups. And we hope that other departments across the globe will contact us to let us know about their experiments in collaborative teaching. "Let's work together!" Jennifer Deering
All images and text copyright © Sophie Bradford and Jennifer Deering. All rights reserved.

A picture of hands together, one on top of the other

Ways We Teach Collaboratively

From the University of Central Arkansas
Department of Writing

Our Collaborations

Panel Grading

Peer Review Letter Exchange

Sophie Bradford
sophieb@uca.edu

Jennifer Deering
jdeering@uca.edu

Lisa Mongno
lmongno@uca.edu

Resources

Due Dates Fall '07

Due Dates Spring '08

An Introduction

As people who teach writing, we deal everyday with two predominant stereotypes: 1) the writer who plods away at the typewriter, churning out a masterpiece from a lonely Paris garret in a five-floor walk-up and 2) the professor who pores over research in an isolated office only accessible through a warren of cave-like, empty, and mysterious hallways.

Contrary to popular belief, most writers are not celebrated authors devoted to garret living. Most writers aren’t even celebrated: they go about their work for a computer technology corporation producing memos or instruction manuals, out on the beat as reporters for small-town newspapers, writing research articles for scholarly journals, creating Web pages or even simply writing Christmas cards. Their work isn’t necessarily published in the traditional sense, but it is meant to be shared with an audience. More importantly, they don’t write in isolation. Even celebrated authors had some circle of friends and admirers they counted on when they found themselves stuck at a certain point in their work, and many conducted lengthy correspondences (now phone calls and e-mails) with editors and publishers—anyone who would look at their work and discuss it with them.

The same goes for teaching. Teaching is meant for an audience, and could benefit from collaboration. But many of us avoid collaborative teaching because it equates with “team-teaching” of classes, and, since few administrators are willing to give a reduction in teaching load for team-taught classes, such collaboration is seen as a burden—twice the work of the traditional system. Or, sometimes when a writing professor collaborates with a history or biology professor, the writing instruction may be seen as the “handmaiden” of the “more important” content of history or biology. Our job as professors, then, becomes to take on the “onerous” task of grading all the written work students have done for the other professor and somehow make it better. Hardly inspiring.

Still, to be effective teachers we need feedback, conversation, lengthy correspondences to fuel our creativity and imagination as much as writers do. So what we offer here are productive ways some members of our department have found to collaborate, to inspire one another. I, personally, have benefited from these collaborations in ways too numerous to count. But the most important is the confidence I have gained as both a teacher and a writer from the mutuality of respect I have with my colleagues. I am no longer just a grader of student papers; I'm an educator. I'm no longer just a teacher who writes a little bit on the side; I'm a writer. I have become these things because my colleagues see me as so. And with these, seemingly, small shifts in my thinking I have been freed, and the gift of freedom is one I can, in turn, share with my students.

My colleagues tell me that when they collaborate with others, they get teaching and assignment ideas from the collaboration and finding out all the exciting things their colleagues are doing makes them better teachers, better informed of current practice and theory. They also say that when they have worked in successful collaborations with professors from other disciplines, they enjoy seeing things from the different perspective. One colleague says, "I think each of us bring something different to this exchange of ideas, which means, I think, that collaboration has a habit of bringing the best out in people. Personally, I LOVE having the opportunity to talk about what we do and how we do it."

We hope other members of our department will consider joining us in the conversation or forming their own collaborative groups. And we hope that other departments across the globe will contact us to let us know about their experiments in collaborative teaching. "Let's work together!"

Jennifer Deering