In (First Person)2, Day and Eodice offer one of the few book-length studies of co-authoring in academic fields since Lunsford and Ede published theirs over a decade ago. The central research here involves in-depth interviews with ten successful academic collaborators from a range of disciplines and settings. The interviews explore the narratives of these informants' experience—what brought them to collaborate, what cognitive and logistical processes were involved as they worked together, what is the status of collaborated work in their field, and so on—and situate these informants within the broader discussion of collaboration theory and research as it has been articulated over the last ten years.
As the study develops, Day and Eodice become most interested in the affective domain of co-authorship, and they find the most promising explorations of that domain in the work of feminist theorists in composition. Against a background of feminist theory, the reflections of these informants and authors not only provide a window into the processes of current scholarship in writing, but also come to stand as a critique of traditional practice in English departments. Throughout the book, the two co-authors interrupt themselves with reflections of their own, on the rejection long ago of their proposal to co-author a dissertation, on their presuppositions about their research, on their developing commitment to the framework of feminist theory to account for their findings, and on their own processes and challenges in writing this book. The result is a well-centered volume that is disciplined and restrained in its presentation of research, but which is layered and multivocal in presentation, and which ends with some provocative conclusions.
(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...
