Working Together: Collaborative Research and Writing in Higher Education

Author(s): Andrea Lunsford, Lisa Ede and Corinne Arraez

Source: Profession , 2001, (2001), pp. 7-15
Published by: Modern Language Association

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 Working Together:
Collaborative Research and Writing
in Higher Education
ANDREA LUNSFORD, LISA EDE,
and CORINNE ARR?EZ

[. . .] the first university to reward collaborative work by scholars in the

humanities will not only be sponsoring interesting publications, but will also
be promoting a different sort of society in [. . . English] studies. A collabo
rative [. . . English] department would look as different from today's his
torical model as collaborative feminist scholarship looks when contrasted to
traditional criticism.

?Holly Laird
Today we stand at unmarked crossroads, knowing that our future depends
on creatively rethinking who we are and what we do.
?Nellie Y. McKay

These epigraphs speak to issues at the heart of the 2000 MLA Presidential
Forum convened by Linda Hutcheon as a call to members of the associa
tion to engage in "creative collaboration" as one powerful alternative to the
adversarial academy. In many ways we, the first two authors of this essay,
have been hoping for and working toward such a moment since 1983,

Andrea Lunford is Professor of English at Stanford University. Lisa Ede is Professor of En

glish and Director, Center for Writing and Learning, at Oregon State University. Corinne
Arr?ez is Academic Technology Specialist, Program in Writing and Critical Thinking, at
Stanford University. A version of this paper was presented at the 2000 MLA convention in
Washington, DC.

1 Profession 2001

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 8 II COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH AND WRITING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

when we applied for one of the few national grants then available to collab
orative pairs or groups of scholars in the humanities. That grant applica
tion grew out of our desire to work together and out of our related
dissatisfaction with the professional barriers to such work. Our colleagues'
incredulous response to our collaboration ("How can you possibly write
together?" "How do you ever expect to get tenure?") captured our interest
and imaginations?and also influenced our lives in more material ways.
When one of us went forward for early promotion, for instance, the chair
told her in quite an offhand manner, "Of course, we will discount any work
that is coauthored." Shortly thereafter, in "Why Write . . . Together?" we
explored why, despite considerable resistance, we found writing together
stimulating and rewarding, and we called attention to the need not only for
scholars to write together but for students to do so as well (Lunsford and
Ede). Though in recent years students in composition classes have often
learned and worked together, they have seldom been allowed, much less
encouraged, to write together.
During the years of research that followed, we documented a rich
though largely unacknowledged tradition of collaborative writing and re
search, especially outside the academy. We also discovered that the collab
orative practices we identified tended to be obscured if not entirely erased
by powerful ideologies of individualism. Here are two striking examples of
such erasures. As part of the research for Singular Texts / Plural Authors:
Perspectives on Collaborative Writing (Ede and Lunsford), we surveyed 1,400
members of seven professional associations, including the MLA. To our
surprise, a large number of respondents reported on one page of our sur
vey that they never wrote collaboratively but on the very next page said
that they often, very often, or always worked with others to produce texts.
Closer to home, a colleague who has coauthored a major textbook and
with whom one of us has written a number of coauthored reports also de
clared (in response to our survey) that he never wrote collaboratively.
When queried about this apparent contradiction, he responded, "Oh, I
thought you meant real writing." This implicit distinction between real
writing?individually produced discourse that reflects a unique self?and
all other writing led us to recognize one of the most important reasons that
collaborative discursive practices are so readily trivialized, ignored, or
erased. It also taught us that working for change in the academy, for a
recognition and valuing of collaborative work as real, was going to be a lot
harder than we had anticipated.
And so it has proven. Despite our research and work like it, despite a
protracted and thoroughgoing critique of the author construct and of ide
ologies of individualism, despite the attempts of many feminists to articu

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 ANDREA LUNSFORD, LISA EDE, and CORINNE ARR?EZ ||| 9

late an agency not bound by those ideologies, little in the academy has
changed in the ten years since we published Singular Texts / Plural Authors.
Whether one is an undergraduate hoping to do well in a class, a graduate
student struggling with the oxymoronic mandate to produce an original
dissertation, an assistant professor worrying about meeting both explicit
and implicit criteria for tenure and promotion, or a senior faculty member
striving to gain recognition for scholarly work, everyday practices in the
humanities continue to ignore, and even to punish, collaboration while au
thorizing work attributed to (autonomous) individuals. Autonomous au
thors may be dead in theory, but in practice they are alive and thriving. If
we ever needed proof that critique does not equal change, this is it.
So what can those of us interested in effecting significant institutional
change in the academy do now? We must, first of all, understand the truth
of the old maxim: If you want to hear, you have to listen; if you want to see,
you have to look. We must, in short, retrain our vision so that we can see,
credit, and learn from successful collaborative endeavors already under way
around us. In addition to seeing what already exists, we must learn how to
see what does not yet exist, those possibilities that commonsense ideologies
of individualism now make unthinkable?such as collaborative disserta
tions, collaborative sabbaticals, or, for that matter, a reward structure that
would allow a beginning assistant professor to build a tenurable career in
the humanities through collaborative research and publication. Would we
look at the traditional distinction between service and research differendy,
we wonder, if we acknowledged the role that radical individualism plays in
valuing research over service? Why does it continue to seem commonsen
sical that a singly authored article makes a more important contribution to
the discipline than does, say, a collaboratively produced document aimed at
curricular reform? Such questions take on greater urgency at a time when
the humanities are under attack, when universities are turning more and
more to distance education and to what time-management bureaucrats call
unbundling, and when the corporatization of higher education seems a fait
accompli. Such questions reinforce for us the wisdom of Nellie McKay's
insight that "our future depends on creatively rethinking who we are and
what we do" (5).
One way to reassert the centrality of the humanities and to respond to
the reductive changes taking place in universities today is, indeed, to re
think who we are and what we do and to do so in collaborative rather than
adversarial ways. To begin this work, let us turn to several powerful exam
ples of contemporary collaboration, ranging from those that pursue tradi
tional scholarly goals to those that go well beyond the academy. Based at
the University of Alberta, the Orlando Project?whose participants come

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 10 11 COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH AND WRITING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

from schools in Canada, the United States, England, and Australia?is un

dertaking "the first full scholarly history of women's writing in the British
Isles" while also "conducting an experiment in humanities computing" and
providing "training and scholarly community for graduate students" {Or
lando Project). Even a cursory look at the project Web site will indicate that
this effort could not proceed without the kinds of collaboration the partici
pants describe. The sheer number of scholars involved, the breadth of the
goal, and the multiple perspectives necessary to illuminate the writing of
women across such a broad span of time?all suggest the crucial role col
laboration plays in bringing this project and others, such as Brown Univer
sity's Women Writers Project, to fruition.
In the field of rhetoric and composition, efforts to establish a national
research agenda that could bring together the interests of scientists and hu
manists around issues of information technology are also currently under
way. Launched at a discussion meeting held during the 2000 Rhetoric So
ciety of America Conference, the IText Working Group?whose partici
pants come from eleven different research universities?has collaborated
to produce a white paper that "defines future directions for research on the
relationship between information technology and writing," a vision the
participants will further elaborate at the 2001 American Educational Re
search Association meeting.
Other projects illustrate the degree to which humanities scholars are
currently attempting collaborative research and writing that reach beyond
the academy to address a broad public audience. At the 1998 MLA Presi
dential Forum, for example, Jay Winter described the varying kinds of col
laboration needed to produce the documentary series The Great War for
PBS and BBC. In that talk, Winter called on senior scholars in the human
ities to take the lead in creating and carrying out such large-scale projects.
Indeed, he argued, the survival of public history depends on such a change
in our scholarly practices.
Projects like the one Winter describes almost always call for interdis
ciplinary collaboration. The most recent work of Shirley Brice Heath
provides another strong case in point. For the last dozen years, Heath
and a group of researchers have been documenting the practices of youth
art groups around the United States as part of an effort to demonstrate
(to public policy makers, funding agencies, and the public) the essential
value of arts and humanities to young people. To make this argument,
Heath wanted to go beyond the traditional audiences that a book or re
search report might reach. The result, a documentary film entitled ArtShow
(screened during autumn 2000 on many PBS stations) required two years
of intensive collaboration among Heath, members of the research group,

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 ANDREA LUNSFORD, LISA EDE, and CORINNE ARR?EZ ||| 11

the young people involved in the four groups the film focuses on, film di
rectors and editors, digital sound and visual effects experts, and other tech
nical artists. In addition, participants in the youth art groups that were
featured often comment on the crucial role collaboration plays in their
work. Like Winter's The Great War, Heath's project aims at the kind of col
laboration necessary to bring humanities research to a broad public audi
ence?and to affect public policy as well.
During the last decade, we have been encouraged by the development
of several new humanities centers that explicitly define their mission as
collaborative (see, e.g., Ohio State University's Institute for Collaborative
Research and Public Humanities [Institute] as well as a newly funded col
laborative research in the humanities center established at Stanford [Stan
ford Humanities Laboratory}). Most recently, the University of Illinois,
Chicago, announced that it will develop a humanities lab, under the direc
tion of Sander Gilman, to serve "as an incubator of sorts for collaborative
projects in the humanities involving professors, graduate students, and un
dergraduates," and that incubator will result in such products as "books,
Web sites, and museum exhibitions" and in so doing move scholarship
"from an individual to a collaborative model" (Schneider).
In all these efforts, a group of humanities researchers has come together
to identify an issue or problem of mutual interest or concern, drawn up
plans for addressing the issue from different perspectives and areas of ex
pertise, and begun the hard work of carrying out those plans. These proj
ects point up the high stakes involved in achieving the collaborative goals
they set?such goals as the survival of public history, the record of women's
writing, the crucial connections between new technologies and humanities
informed theories of writing and reading.
Other collaborations that have inspired us are:

the editorial collective that produced a full decade of Sage: A Scholarly Journal
of Black Women, which provided "a forum for critical discussion of issues relat
ing to black women, promoted feminist scholarship, and disseminated new
knowledge about black women to a new audience" (2)
the administrator, faculty, staff, and student conversations that led to the guid
ing vision of California State University, Monterey Bay, as "essentially collabo
rative" {Vision Statement)
the rich and long-standing institutional partnership between Carnegie Mellon
University's program in writing and rhetoric and the Pittsburgh Community
Literacy Center {Community Literacy Center)
the extensive collaboration between faculty members and teacher-students at
the Bread Loaf School of English, a collaboration that in some instances has
changed the scholarly work of the faculty members as well as the research and
classroom practices of the teacher-students (Flint)

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 12 III COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH AND WRITING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

These are positive and even inspiring achievements that, if we look care
fully, we can see. (Another long-standing collaboration in the academy is
the Society for Critical Exchange, founded in 1975 to encourage coopera
tive inquiry and research in critical theory.) As scholars of rhetoric and
writing we would argue, however, that if collaborative efforts in the acad
emy are to thrive, those in the academy must not only see but also study
these efforts.

Collaboration, after all, is no panacea, no surefire corrective to agonistic

individualism. Collaborative practices pose significant difficulties for fac
ulty members and students, difficulties that must be faced and interrogated
rather than ignored. (The endnote to this article represents one attempt to
interrogate the authors' own collaboration and the difficulties entailed in
such seemingly straightforward decisions as those related to attribution
and to pronoun use.)1 Anyone who has worked on a collaborative project is
aware of the frustrations that can accompany such work, leading more than
one scholar to recall an earlier meaning of the term collaboration: during
warfare, after all, collaboration was a punishable offense. The dynamics of
collaborative research will be affected by any number of differences, pri
mary among them those of gender, race, class, and disciplinarity. Beyond
the difficulty of personal dynamics lie material and logistic problems?and
difficulties raised by differences in methodology and style?that can also
impede efforts at collaboration.
Thus, in our research, we attempted to identify not only those condi
tions that made for productive, satisfying, and ethical collaboration but also
those that did not. In our on-site visits with collaborative writers, for in
stance, we identified some modes of collaboration that led, participants
told us, to deep dissatisfaction and alienation. Our first impulse in identify
ing these modes was to establish a taxonomy that would characterize
modes of collaboration as either hierarchical or dialogic, productive or un
productive, ethical or unethical. But as generative as taxonomies can be,
they also inevitably oversimplify and can lead to the kind of either-or
thinking long associated with the adversarial rhetoric of the academy
rather than to the deeply situated and nuanced analysis required to under
stand behaviors as complex as collaboration. In our view, such highly situ
ated analysis is a key feature of what Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin identify
as an "invitational rhetoric," one that attempts to practice both-and rather
than either-or inquiry. In the spirit of invitational rhetoric, then, we want
to stress that in advocating the value of collaborative practices for both fac
ulty members and students, we are not proposing a totalizing argument
against single authorship and the practices associated with it. If we have
learned anything from the last thirty years of scholarly work in English

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 ANDREA LUNSFORD, LISA EDE, and CORINNE ARR?EZ ||| 13

studies, it is that the power-knowledge nexus is a place of danger as well as

of opportunity and that the human ability to bracket one's own experiences
and understandings from critique is substantial. These truths apply as
much to collaborative work as to work undertaken individually.
Such a recognition does not mean that we should not pursue the kind of
institutional change that would enact alternatives to the adversarial acad
emy, including the alternative offered by collaborative and invitational
practice. It does mean that we must recognize the difficulties inherent in
collaboration even as we make a space for and encourage collaborative
projects and secure the funds necessary to carry them out. It also means ad
dressing related professional standards and practices, as suggested by the
following questions:

What do subtle but entrenched conventions, such as the use of et al. or the
conventional distinction between the author first mentioned and the other au
thors, do to erase the work of those engaged in collaborative practices?
What changes at the level of the department, college, university, and profession
at large must occur in order for junior faculty members to participate in collab
orative projects without jeopardizing their careers?
What work of redefinition will further the understanding that the contribu
tions of doctoral dissertations come not from some abstract originality but
rather from their participation in complex layers of knowledge production?
Are we willing to undertake the potentially time-consuming and contentious
work required to revise tenure and promotion guidelines so that collaborative
research and publication will really count?
Perhaps most important, can we learn to take pleasure as well as pride in our
scholarly work when the traditional egocentric rewards of proprietary owner
ship and authority must be shared?

Responding constructively to these questions will call on our ingenuity,

our goodwill, and our commitment. Moreover, it will call on our ability to
learn how to work collaboratively, to build coalitions across disciplinary and
methodological divides, and to take seriously the imperatives of an invita
tional rather than an adversarial rhetoric. As one material step in this direc
tion, we invite readers to visit and contribute to a new Web site devoted to
collaborative writing and research in higher education: Collaborate! (www
.stanford.edu/group/collaborate/). This site will, we hope, serve as a clearing
house for information on productive models of collaboration in the humani
ties and on best practices for institutional change. More important, it has the
potential for the kind of synergistic collaboration necessary to effect such
change. Readers whose departments have developed promotion and tenure
guidelines that recognize collaborative work can share these guidelines on
the best-practices page of the site. Those who know of good funding sources

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14 I COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH AND WRITING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

for collaborative work or strategies for effective long-distance collaboration

can contribute them to the site's collective-wisdom pages.
Web sites are necessarily works in progress, and the one we have con
structed will succeed only if many colleagues contribute to it. At the very
least, establishing a collaborative Web site exemplifies the kind of modest
but concrete intervention that can begin to make a difference in how we
think about who we are and what we do and, along the way, offer one vi
able alternative to the adversarial academy.

NOTE =^
1 In this endnote we comment on the nature of the collaboration tha
development of a Web site, the inclusion of this site in a presentation
dential Forum, and, finally, the publication of this article. Invited to p
forum, the first two authors of this essay spent considerable time disc
their presentation might intervene in practices that discourage or eve
oration in the academy. The idea of building a Web site devoted to c
tices in the humanities quickly emerged, followed almost immed
recognition that bringing such a project to fruition would require a k
tive process that these two longtime collaborators had not yet experie
Corinne Arr?ez, who shares a commitment to collaborative work, ag
expertise to this project. Like many collaborative projects, it entailed a
Drawing on their twenty years of research on collaborative writing, L
sketched out the major issues that the site would address and conceptu
role in the MLA presentation. Arr?ez, meanwhile, designed and constru
We mention these details here for two reasons: to clarify the respon
three authors of this project and to raise issues about the differing wa
tive practices are recognized and valued in the academy. As the project
relatively intimate collaboration to an oral presentation at the forum a
print publication, the authors discovered that their assumptions about
they engaged in were not necessarily shared by others. For example, d
presentation, they sat together on the stage as a visual representation o
tive effort. By mutual agreement (reached after discussion of possible
Ede and Lunsford, who had written the talk, read the prepared text, w
cle does) acknowledged Arr?ez's crucial role in designing and constr
site. What all three authors intended as public acknowledgment of a c
collaboration struck some, however, as marginalizing Arr?ez's particip
ect. Several members of the audience suggested this to Arr?ez after the
In preparing their presentation for publication, the authors confron
difficulties. They wished to emphasize their three-way collaboration by
participants as coauthors of the published version of this project. But
names? Their first instinct was to use alphabetic order. Such a listing q
tual difficulties, particularly in terms of the pronoun we. Early in the es
specifically to personal experiences that caused Lunsford and Ede to un
on collaborative writing. An alphabetic listing of the authors' name
readers about whose experiences were being represented.

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 ANDREA LUNSFORD, LISA EDE, and CORINNE ARR?EZ III 15

How to be true to the lived experiences of two authors without erasing the contribu
tion of the third? After several discussions about this question, the authors agreed on
the name order that appears at the start of this article. They also agreed, however, that
this resolution was at best an awkward compromise, one that taught all three that issues
of attribution in collaborative projects pose challenges that have yet to be addressed in
the academy.

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