Collaboration and Teamwork in Writing Classrooms

• Where are the overlaps between cooperation, collaboration, and teamwork in the classroom?
• To what extent is all writing collaborative? How should we think about responsibility and ownership when multiple people produce a text?
• What do students lose/gain when we treat the individual author as the default?
• What assumptions about knowledge are embedded in individual versus collaborative assignments?

1. Kenneth A. Bruffee, “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’” (1984) in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory
2. Andrea Lunsford, Jenn Fishman, and Warren M. Liew, “College Writing, Identification, and the Production of Intellectual Property: Voices from the Stanford Study of Writing” (2013)

• How do varying levels of confidence, unconscious bias, and different kinds of linguistic strengths affect multilingual learners’ experiences with collaboration in the classroom?

• How do we view instructor and tutor conferences through the lens of collaboration?

1. Yiting Chu, “Collaborative Learning of International Undergraduate ELL Students in Small-Group Writing Communities” (2021)

2. Ana Fernández-Dobao, “Collaborative Writing in Mixed Classes: What Do Heritage and Second Language Learners Think?” (2020)

3. Lucie Moussu and Christina Grant, “A Collaborative Approach to Supporting L2 Students With Multimodal Work in the Composition Classroom and the Writing Center” (2020)

4. Asset-based approaches to reduce bias in teamwork (WPI)

• What feels relevant to us about the kinds of collaboration described in these documents?
• What assumptions do these documents make about teamwork, collaboration, and individuals?
  

1. The Hub: Writing Intensive Course and Teamwork/Collaboration interpretive documents
2. Engineering: Facilitating Undergraduate Teamwork (resources for faculty)
3. Questrom: Questrom Team Learning (resources for faculty and students)
4. D&I: Liberating Structures

• Readings TBD depending on participants’ interest (collaborative work!)