Writing is often perceived as a solitary activity, but this may lead to a sense of isolation. In this episode, Rachael Cayley, Fiona Coll, and Dan Newman join us to discuss the benefits of writing in community.
Rachael is an Associate Professor in the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication at the University of Toronto. Before joining the University of Toronto, she worked as an editor at Oxford University Press. Fiona is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education & Practice and at the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication. Fiona had earlier been one of our colleagues at SUNY-Oswego. Dan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Director of Graduate Writing Support in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, also at the University of Toronto. Rachael, Fiona, and Dan are the editors of Writing Together: Building Social Writing Opportunities for Graduate Students, which was recently released by the University of Michigan Press.
Show Notes
- Cayley, R., Coll, F., & Newman, D. A. (Eds.). (2025). Writing Together: Building Social Writing Opportunities for Graduate Students (Vol. 1). University of Michigan Press.
- Practice, Pedagogy, and Programming for Graduate Communication Series, University of Michigan Press
- Social Writing Initiative Planning Prompts
- Healthy Research Teams & Labs Initiative – University of Toronto, Centre for Graduate Professional Development
- Rachael Cayley’s Doctoral Completion Cohort Program
- Daniel Newman’s Writing Camp
Transcript
John: Writing is often perceived as a solitary activity, but this may lead to a sense of isolation. In this episode, we discuss the benefits of writing in community.
[MUSIC]
John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
[MUSIC]
Rebecca: Our guests today are Rachael Cayley, Fiona Coll, and Dan Newman. Rachael is an Associate Professor in the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication at the University of Toronto. Before joining the University of Toronto, she worked as an editor at Oxford University Press. Fiona is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education & Practice and at the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication. Fiona had earlier been one of our colleagues at SUNY-Oswego. Dan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Director of Graduate Writing Support in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, also at the University of Toronto. Rachael, Fiona, and Dan are the editors of Writing Together: Building Social Writing Opportunities for Graduate Students, which was recently released by the University of Michigan Press. Welcome back, Fiona and welcome, Rachael and Dan.
Fiona: Thank you for having us.
John: Our teas today are:… Rachael, are you drinking tea?
Rachel: I am. I’m drinking something called Christmas in Paris, which is a mix of chocolate, peppermint, lavender and vanilla.
John: That sounds wonderful. And Fiona?
Fiona: I am drinking a classic. I am drinking Murchie’s Cream of Earl Grey.
John: Nice. And Dan?
Danl: I am not drinking tea. I am drinking water in a mug. It’s weak tea. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: There’s one in every bunch. Dan.
John: …at least one. [LAUGHTER] … very weak tea.
Rebecca: Very weak. [LAUGHTER] In honor of talking to Fiona, and it’s been a while, I have gone to my very old favorite, which is English afternoon tea.
John: Very good. And I’m drinking a new tea. It’s a three mint tea, which is peppermint, spearmint, and field mint. And I don’t quite know what field mint is, but it tastes okay. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: We’ll have to look into that, John.
John: Yes.
Fiona: You and your adventurous taste buds, John.
Rebecca: Stay tuned for more on field mint in the future. [LAUGHTER] We’ve invited you here today to discuss Writing Together. Can you talk a little bit about the origins of the book?
Danl: Sure. I’ll get us started. We’ve been working together, Rachael, Fiona, and I, in different capacities for a long time, and we’ve all ended up working in graduate writing support and teaching. And so we’ve been chatting about this, and we started off with some anecdotes, and the way I’ve been reconstructing the history of this project is starting with a conversation when we were talking about noticeably skewed gender ratios in a lot of our writing support activities, particularly those that were kind of group based, so like writing boot camps or feedback groups or peer review groups, and these groups, anecdotally, seemed to us to be very tilted towards more women than men participating, which wasn’t true for some of the more instructional things that we were doing. And we started discussing this as something interesting and neat and potentially something to look into. And then we decided it might be more interesting to shift the conversation away from gender per se towards the question of sociality. What is it about social writing that makes it more or less interesting to different people? And that got us more interested in the pedagogical implications of this and how we can foster sociality to help graduate students become better writers, become happier writers, move through their programs, but also just generally, learn the ropes of research and writing in general.
John: In your introduction to this work, you argue that writing together is useful, both as a form of graduate student pedagogy, but also for professional development purposes. Could you talk a little bit about this argument?
Danl: Yeah, fundamentally, I think the argument is that good graduate pedagogy should also be good professional development, and that encouraging social writing is an important way of realizing that ideal. And a lot of grad programs have professional development activities. And I think grad programs, in general, from what I can see, are getting better at this, but generally, these tend to be framed as separate from writing, especially separate from dissertation writing, which for a lot of grad students is kind of the main task. But dissertation writing is not just a way to complete your program, it’s also kind of a student’s, in a lot of cases, the first major entry into professional research writing. And so the idea that we could sort of approach both holistically is kind of what we’re getting at with that idea of good pedagogy is also good professional development. When I started working with grad students closely, I was struck by a disconnect between how they view writing and how my faculty peers and I write, and I’m simplifying horribly here and generalizing. But anyway, students would talk about withdrawing to their apartments for months trying to perfect a thesis chapter before showing it to anyone. And meanwhile, my colleagues and academic friends and I are sending each other emails saying, like, “Does this paragraph make sense? Here’s a really rough draft. What do you think of this?” Basically asking for feedback constantly. And again, not everyone does this, but this is my experience. Why are so many of our students not taking advantage of their communities, I guess is one of the questions behind this, too, and I think part of the answer, at least, is that they’re not taught to. And I see this as an opportunity for graduate pedagogy and programs and maybe writing together more like their profs do, could help them professionalize even as it helps them navigate their grad school experience.
Fiona: Another angle, maybe, to dig into a tiny bit is just the idea that writing is something that can be taught. I think one of the trickiest parts about that transition to grad school is that strange set of assumptions by which grad students are made to feel as though they should already know how to write things they’ve never written before. So grad students arrive and are sort of faced with these quite major writing deliverables that are different in scale and in scope than anything they’ve written before. And they somehow absorb this sense that if they don’t know how to do it, or struggle in any way, that there’s something wrong with them, that they don’t belong, or there’s some sort of grievous lack or problem. And so to treat writing as something that is a lifelong pursuit in many ways, but more specifically, that there are a set of skills that are unique or uniquely developed in graduate school around research writing, that there should be no shame in needing to learn these and that that learning process at the graduate level becomes richer and more sustained when it’s done in, and as part of, the development of a community, a disciplinary community. Rachael Cayley has a wonderful line that I steal as often as I can when talking with graduate students, which is when graduate students write a dissertation, they’re actually producing two things. Yes, they’re writing the dissertation itself, but they’re also developing themselves as researchers, so they change over the course of writing that giant piece of work, and there are skills and strategies, there are things to learn all along the way.
Rebecca: The focus of this collection of essays is on experiences in which sociality is an integral component of the process. What are the primary benefits of building this social component into graduate writing processes?
Rachel: I think the benefits of sociality in writing are similar to the benefits of sociality more generally. We are social beings who struggle with too much isolation, who naturally learn well in community with peers and have trouble keeping intentions when we’re not making them with other people. And I think you can hear in those three things that they would be particularly acute for writing, which is often institutionally organized and coded as a solitary activity, as Dan said. Even though many faculty have realized that that’s not the best model, students certainly think that that’s how they ought to be doing it. But we know that graduate students do much better when they’re not alone, when a day of writing is a day that has engagement in it. We know also that peer learning around not just writing, but also writing productivity and processes can be really, really helpful. By working with others, they can learn that everyone feels isolated, that everyone thinks their writing is uniquely terrible, that everyone thinks they’re probably not cut out for this, based on their writing difficulties. So to learn that their range of productivity challenges are within the sort of normal range is really helpful. And we know that setting public accountability goals is intensely useful, especially during the period of thesis writing that requires a degree of consistent self discipline that I think exceeds the bounds of what most people naturally have. And so given that we are social in that way, and writing particularly brings out the worst of us in our capacities to go looking for the sociality that we naturally need. We thought it was so important to make it central.
John: So by building more sociality into the process, does this provide a more inclusive environment, so that people won’t feel as isolated, and perhaps we won’t lose as many people in graduate studies, as we often do in many departments?
Fiona: I think the answer is absolutely, there’s an inclusivity piece to this puzzle. There’s an equity piece to this puzzle in many ways. As you’ve noted, there’s those feelings of isolation or those feelings of alienation are not evenly distributed across all demographics who arrive at grad school. And so there’s just a fundamental gain by creating places or spaces where that sense of loneliness or alienation can be dissolved away. There’s also a hidden curriculum piece here, again, as with all kinds of hidden curricula, it’s not an intentional obfuscation of how to learn to write, what it means to write in a disciplinary way, but these are all things that become invisible so quickly to the members of those disciplines that [LAUGHTER] it’s hard to remember what it felt like to not know the things you know. And so these writing groups are a fantastic place to explore and reveal and make explicit those expectations. There’s also some fascinating research that’s been done on the link between confidence in academic writing skills and that sense of disciplinary belonging. That connection is especially important for students who belong to historically underrepresented demographics in grad school, and indeed, several of the programs that we’ve included in this book collection feature writing groups that are organized not necessarily around disciplines or around levels of development, but are organized around identity or interest groups. And indeed, the University of Toronto, to give one example, has a writing accountability group that is co-led with our accessibility services organization. And so there are ways that these groups can be really specifically attuned to the needs of particular students, particular groups, in positive and inclusive and equity raising ways.
Rebecca: There’s a number of contributors to this volume. Can you talk a little bit about how you selected your contributors?
Rachel: Yeah, the most noteworthy part of the selection process was just the significant enthusiasm for this project. And we ended up with 14 chapters, but we started with more than 50 proposals, and we thought that enthusiasm probably stemmed from two things. First of all, just excitement about social writing opportunities, like we were really happy to learn that so many people were eager to talk about these. I think there was also some interest generated by the unusual nature of this call, which derives from the unusual nature of this book series. So the book series of which this is the first volume is a partnership between the Consortium on Graduate Communication and the University of Michigan Press. And this series, overall, seeks to provide practitioners with ideas that bridge the gap between theory and practice, so really meet practitioners where they are in terms of how they’re actually doing the work. As we said in our call for proposals, we were looking for “how we” accounts so not looking to tell people how to do things, but really asking people how they did them so others could learn from them. And I think there is a real hunger for people to talk about our pedagogical work in ways that are outside the bounds of traditional scholarly research publishing. And I think this book gave people a really easy, direct opportunity to talk about what they’re doing in the classroom, the things that they really love doing. So I think that led to some of the enthusiasm as well. So our actual selection process was enjoyable because we had so many great submissions, and also, of course, difficult for the same reason, ultimately, we chose these 14 because they offered us a wide spectrum of different types of initiatives across North American institutions, so we largely chose them so that we had different models that people could read about when deciding how they wanted to learn from this book.
Fiona: I will just add that one of the things I really appreciated about the 14 chapters that we did include is that they point towards just how collaborative the construction of these programs is. So often, these programs emerged out of an obvious student need in some way, and students sort of have driven the development of these programs in many ways, in ways that I find inspiring and really, really encouraging. So no matter the exact origin of the program or the way that the program is run, this sort of combination of writing experts or teachers of some kind, the grad students who are looking for that support, and then everybody else who’s involved in bringing these things to life, it’s people working together to write together.
Danl: And in some cases, it’s actually graduate students who are taking the initiative without support from the institution, which is encouraging to see. And that’s the kind of thing that I’m hoping other programs can generate, as well, models that students can use to do these things on their own.
John: And in this volume, you have quite a wide variety of diverse examples of writing experiences. Could you each share just a few examples of the experiences that are discussed in this volume?
Danl: Sure, I’m going to start. I’m going to talk about peer reviewing, which is something that a lot of the contributors talk about as part of their programs, but it’s also one of my favorite activities. It’s not revolutionary or anything. I think people have been doing peer reviews for a long time. I do them a lot, partly because it is a great way for students to get feedback and to give feedback to,o which I’ll talk about in a second. If framed correctly, it’s a good way to have students practice showing their writing to other people in a way that can be less intimidating than, say, sending it to your professor, your supervisor, advisor. So I do use it as practice for that which makes social writing easier to do in the future, ideally. I’m particularly interested, though, in the way that giving and getting feedback teaches people to become better writers, particularly giving feedback. Obviously, getting feedback is a great way to learn how to write better, but I found from working these groups where we do a lot of feedback, that the students who are most effective in giving really relevant feedback, it feeds back on their own writing in ways that are interesting. I feel like that’s something I would love to study more somehow.
Fiona: I will offer another example of a social writing initiative that I run here at the University of Toronto, and it’s called Mondays We Write!, and it is another example of just how rich and sort of widely ranging the sorts of conversations we have about writing can be in these social circumstances. So in many ways, Mondays We Write! is a very straightforward writing accountability exercise. So from nine until 12 every morning, I hop on Zoom and students are encouraged to come and drop in essentially any Monday they want, for as long as they want. The structure of the morning is such that I often start with some small piece of teaching, let’s say, some tip or some concept or some principle that I encourage students to work into their writing for the day if it fits with where they’re at, then students give a sense of what they’d like to work on that morning, and we embark on a series of sort of quiet writing intervals, where we’re all on Zoom together, but working on individual things, enforced breaks, which are good and healthy for all kinds of reasons. In those breaks, we have quick conversations if needed, we do some troubleshooting, and the morning continues. And what happens is that the students who attend regularly start to gain more and more confidence in their own ability to navigate: A. their own writing processes, but also B. their ability to give helpful feedback or ideas to their peers and to watch that sort of community building is what it is, that sort of building of trust, sharing of knowledge and experience and resources, often in disciplinary-specific ways, is tremendous. The other kind of cool aspect of this Mondays We Write! is that, because it’s on Zoom, if there is a student who’s running into a particular issue that’s a little more specific to their own situation than it is relevant to the group as a whole, that student and I can pop out into a breakout room and have a one-on-one conversation in the actual moment when they’re feeling that writing struggle. And so it’s this lovely model of sort of how sociability can enable a sort of writing practice to develop. But then our structure allows for these sort of dipping in and out of individual challenges as they come.
Danl: Something Fiona said really struck me, and it’s very related to what I just said before about peer review, but also to the question about pedagogy and professional development. This kind of feedback that you’re observing, how students become better at giving feedback, that clearly is part of a professional development for an academic who will eventually be giving feedback to their students, and is just such a great example, I think, of what it looks like in practice for good pedagogy to also be good professionalization.
Fiona: And I think it holds true for those who go on to professions other than academia. Most people are going to be in a position of needing to give feedback, often on communication related deliverables of some kind, especially in my world, which is heavily skewed towards engineering these days. And so you know that feedback process is tricky. Despite our sophisticated ways of being in the world, figuring out how to be constructive is much harder than it sounds. And so to offer students an opportunity to practice, to learn how to do this in a genuinely productive, constructive way is pretty fantastic.
Rachel: Then you’ll see that we’ve all chosen to talk about initiatives we’re doing ourselves, rather than choose favorites from the book, because we love all the chapters in the book and all the different things that they’re doing. I wanted to talk briefly about a sort of minimalist program that I run called the Doctoral Completion Cohort. It’s for people in their final year from any discipline, and it’s really simple. All I’m asking them to do is to come for half an hour on Monday mornings and check in. And so we start each week together. These are people who are really pressed to finish, like this is their core activity. And I usually give a short presentation on some emergent topic to do with productivity or revision, the things they’re thinking about most, and then the focus is with them finding co-writing times with each other, not running through me. So it’s designed to build that skill of reaching out to people and saying, I like to write on Tuesday mornings. Is anyone else free? Some of them are doing them in person, at different places. Some of them are running them on Zoom. Some people are in different time zones, so they’re using WhatsApp and from different countries, so they take on that part of the responsibility. And I’m just there to provide a Quercus or Canvas site that provides a lot of resources and a venue for them to make those connections. But it’s creating some of that sense that part of what you have to do if you want to have social writing opportunities is reach out to people and ask them to write with you.
Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of assessment that have been involved in these kinds of social writing opportunities and the kind of feedback that students have provided about this kind of work?
Fiona: For sure, we asked all the contributors to this volume to provide us with three important things in their very short, very readable chapters. The first, of course, was details about exactly what motivated the program that they described. We asked them to explain, of course, the model of facilitation that they used. And the third thing was, we asked them to explain how they evaluated or assessed each of their programs, because we know how important it is to be able to evaluate in some way or assess what’s working or what’s not working in any program, but especially one that deals with skills of such complexity as are involved in writing, but also as a kind of argument, an argument in favor of the value of this sort of work. And so one of the fascinating things that emerged out of this book collection was a sense that there were two distinct assessment modes or directions that didn’t always point in an aligned fashion, let’s say, and one of those threads of assessment was from a kind of pedagogical perspective. So of course, everyone running these programs was interested in how it was working for students, how students could themselves understand the developments or changes that were happening. And everyone is interested in iterating and improving these, improving the reach, improving the effectiveness of these programs. But a second line of assessment or evaluation was essentially proving the worth of these slightly odd in some way shaped programs to administrators or the sources of funding, and often those two are not exactly aligned, as I said, in the sense that to explain what happens in these complex exchanges, these really rich, productive exchanges that contribute not only to the writing skill development of a student, but to the sort of flourishing of that student in their disciplinary identities, that growing sense of belonging to a discipline, that increasing sense of confidence, that ability to sort of think on the page in more and more successful ways for the student, that is not an easy thing to convey In a spreadsheet. And so several of our chapters described that tension. Now what students have reported really consistently across the board, across these 14 chapters, is inevitably a sense of surprise at how powerful these communal or community-based social writing experiences were. So students just really describe feeling kind of relief, feeling a sense of camaraderie that they didn’t know could exist around the writing experience, just feeling that their learning was richer and they felt more motivated. And so we know that many students respond very positively to this sort of structured sense of community building. And one thing I’ll add is that one of the ways of evaluating or assessing these social writing initiatives is, of course, to have students reflect in qualitative ways back on their writing experience as they go. Many of our programs in the book do so at various points in the program. So there’s a gradual over time awareness of how things are developing for students, and in fact, enabling students themselves to recognize what’s changing about their relationship to writing is an incredibly powerful kind of assessment to be able to make.
John: In most graduate programs, individuals tend to write on their own. I know in economics, when I first started, quite a while back, co-authored papers were downgraded a bit in rankings. Today, most research in most disciplines tend to have two or more authors. And so I think this idea of having people share writing experiences together puts people in a much better preparation for the types of careers that they’re likely to be having later on. In this book, you’re focusing primarily on graduate programs in writing. But is this something that, perhaps, should be done in all graduate programs to some extent?
Danl: Should, is a tricky word. I think there are undeniable differences in how even something as capacious as writing together might look in economics versus sociology versus philosophy or math. I mean, some fields really do tend to work around more of a single author mode, and I think that’s true of the fields that Rachael, Fiona, and I grew up in in the humanities. I know people in math typically write their papers alone, whereas social scientists and a lot of STEM fields co-author together. And so I think one of the things that has come out of this book is trying to develop a broader understanding of what sociality means, as opposed to say collaborative writing, which is a type of sociality, or co-authorship, which is a type of sociality, but we’re trying to think of ways that are adaptable to different disciplinary practices. So writing in the same room as someone is a kind of diffuse type of sociality, and it can be deployed intentionally in ways that can be helpful. Even writing on Zoom with a group, which Fiona does and I do as well, is sociality, even if we’re each working on our own thing and not talking. Just for myself, I get a huge amount of momentum just from the false impression that all these students are looking at me when I’m writing. I better not look at the news, because they’ll judge me. But I think thinking about the ways in which writing together obtains in different contexts is something that we should think about when you’re developing programs, even when, for example, if you’re a faculty advisor for students, what will writing together look like for us or for the student in my lab, or whatever? I will say just as I’m wrapping up, that the introduction for the book, Writing Together, was the first time I’ve actually written together with other writers, and I’ve published two and three author papers before, but we separated the task of writing. In this case, we really wrote together, and it was great. It’s very unusual for our fields, but I don’t think it could be the norm, or certainly I don’t think it should be the norm.
Rachel: And certainly most graduate students who are writing with their supervisors are still writing alone. They’re being sent off to write the first draft often, and then they’re being corrected in some way, but it isn’t particularly social, often, and so we’re still trying to encourage even the ones who are very much in co-author situations that they might wish to find social writing opportunities that don’t necessarily even have to be with those co-authors. Although, as Dan said, it’s lovely when you can have both, but even when you can’t, you can still find a time to write with other people, your own writing, and develop a lot of richness from that.
Fiona: And I would argue that one of the real benefits of these social writing programs that we describe in the book is how they open up conversations about the writing process. So they help to share a language about the writing process and its stages and its iterations. They help to show what the process looks like. There’s a sort of writing-process literacy that I think is worth opening up and sharing much more widely across programs, especially across graduate programs, and that kind of fluency with ideas, or greater familiarity that with different stages of the writing process can absolutely inform the sorts of literal co-writing or co-authorship scenarios that, John, you point to that are becoming, I think, more and more common, even outside those traditional STEM fields where co-authorship is as prevalent as it is. So I will take a stand [LAUGHTER] and say, I do you think that most graduate programs would be doing a beautiful service to their students to think about opening up and sort of making this writing based awareness a valued and valuable part of that training experience.
Danl: I think there’s also very real ways in which, if students are getting support from their communities, it can change the nature of the support they get from their advisors, who might not have to deal with some of the really rough first stuff. And also when we’re talking about the peer review, I think one of the most striking benefits I’ve seen, which I think relates to what Fiona was just saying, is students realize that the kind of writing that they do that looks so different from the writing that they read when they read an article or a book, they realize that other people’s writing also looks like this. So I think that’s part of the writing process literacy that you’re talking about is really “Okay. I’m not just really bad at this. No one’s good at this.” And maybe talking about good and bad in terms of drafts is not the right language.
Rebecca: Sounds like there’s a little bit of an added benefit too, in both the examples that you’re pointing to, for those that are facilitating to also have some writing time, [LAUGHTER] some accountability for the facilitator too. [LAUGHTER]
Danl: It’s the only time I write. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: Now we all know. [LAUGHTER]
John: I know when I was in grad school, I spent an awful lot of time digging up sources, working with the data, and would write only when I had to, when I had to get a draft in. It was something I tended to avoid. This type of process where there’s this sociality, it’s essentially a form of commitment device. You’re making a commitment to work with other people at these times, and it’s much more likely that people will devote more time to writing when they have that sort of an experience, I think.
Fiona: I think you’re absolutely right. It is 100% a commitment device, these sort of regular accountability groups, for sure. And I often joke that one of the superpowers that graduate students often arrive at grad school with is the ability to write to an immediate deadline [LAUGHTER] in the full adrenaline charged way that that has happened and that that remains a useful skill to have access to, but it is also worth expanding that writing toolkit to include other kinds of writing and to even just learn to even feel what it feels like to write without a deadline is sort of revelatory to students. They say things like, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I was able to write even though nothing is due.” [LAUGHTER] But it goes to your point exactly, right? These are learnable skills and writing is a practice. It’s a practice that you need to build stamina around. It’s a practice that improves and changes and evolves depending on what else you’re doing, what kind of writing you’re working on, but that it is worth developing a sort of sustainable relationship with it, a sustainable and sustained relationship with your own writing process, because you need all sorts of versions of that writing process to be with you as you move through a program.
Rebecca: …just sitting here thinking like, “oh, writing isn’t always an emergency?” [LAUGHTER]
John: We should try that sometime. Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: One of the tools that you shared in the book is the writing initiative planning prompts table. Can you talk a little bit about what this resource is and how it works?
Rachel: Sure, as I said earlier, we didn’t want the book to be a “how to”, but more of a “how we.” But after we finished it, and so we had these 14 chapters and our own intro, we wanted to think of some way that we could actually leverage all that to help people think about what it is that they were going to do. And so that’s why we meant by having a chart full of prompts. So as Fiona said a moment ago, we asked each group of authors to organize their chapters around rationale, organization, and evaluation. So we wanted each chapter to have roughly that layout, so we’re finding out from each group: Why did you do this? How did you do it, and what did people think about it? How did you evaluate it afterwards? And so we put together this chart of prompts that asks questions of people. So it doesn’t say, this is how you ought to do it, it says: Why are you doing this? So questions like, will your group be formed by convenience or by theme, or by discipline or by stage of study? We saw examples of all of those things in the book, and it’s just an example of a question that people can think, is this just going to be convenience, right? It’s just going to be the people who can come at that time. Or maybe you want it to be more disciplinary and then have some more writing feedback involved in that, or you’re going to actually put out a call for people with a particular identity, so it’s more of an affinity group style to writing groups. So just by asking these series of questions, how much space do you have? Who’s going to run these groups? How do you feel about food? Those kinds of questions that are really important. One of the things that comes up in a lot of the chapters is hospitality matters when thinking about writing groups. And so our goal with this chart, which is available to anybody on this book site, and we’ll put all these links in your show notes, but people can just go and download that PDF and look at all those different questions and use it to either think about creating a writing initiative that they might not have already in their institution, or just think about how they’re doing it by going through this series of questions you might refine or slightly alter whatever it is that people are already doing.
John: In this collection, you have quite a wide variety of different ways in which people write together. Would you suggest that we should build more ways of having people work together on their writing, however, that’s done?
Danl: Just in the same way that I guess we’ve been trying to expand what we mean by writing together, the definition of sociality, or how we understand that. I think something I find myself saying a lot to graduate students is that a lot of things that they don’t think of as writing is writing. And so one of the slogans I find myself repeating is “it’s all writing.” So meeting one of your friends from your program and talking about what you’re working on can become part of the writing process, and it’s also part of writing together.
Rebecca: So we talked a bit about the number of chapters and contributors. Can you talk a little bit about the variety of examples that are available, just so people get a sense of the scope of what’s covered?
Fiona: Sure, these chapters cover writing groups with these highly social dimensions to them that are small, some as small as four or five students per group, some that are enormous. One of the chapters describes a writing initiative that, in fact, has grown to be a part of the entire institutional culture. We have groups that are disciplinarily organized, sometimes by the students in those disciplines. So we have a chapter, for example, by a group of students from a single discipline who were interested in developing their own cross-institutional connections, and made a writing program part of that sort of inter-institution set of connections. We have one chapter that is about a writing program that focuses on the experience of multilingual students. We have a chapter that describes a completely accidental development of a social writing phenomenon. So we really did choose these to be as idea inducing, as sparky as possible by showing just how different the shapes can take, just how different the sizes can be, just how different the facilitation models can be, and just how easily or ambitiously these can take shape and form in whatever writing context a person is in.
Rebecca: So, we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”
Rachel: Well, when we thought about this question, we thought we would answer it by talking about what we are doing together next, and our next joint project is to work on the issue of supervisory writing feedback for graduate students. So no matter how much writing facilitation or writing instruction we provide, our graduate students are very focused on this complex dyad between them and their supervisor. So the feedback they’re getting, the feedback they’re not getting, what their supervisor thinks of their writing, how the process is going, what the logistics are of that process. All of those things are always very present for graduate students and engaging in the sophisticated task of writing this high-stakes document that is by definition, in a new genre for them is incredibly demanding, and many supervisors are not able to meet that moment with the kind of writing feedback that those students need. And so in addition to the work we do with students to help them understand the dynamic and help them be better at getting feedback, we also thought it would be interesting to try to work a little more upstream with supervisors, to help them with some of the information and perspective that they might need to be able to provide better writing feedback. Many supervisors approach this task with a great deal of trepidation, because it is so time consuming and because novice academic writers are difficult to work with when you don’t have a lot of skill in that area. So we started with a faculty-facing workshop here at U of T through our Healthy Research Teams Initiative, and we’re interested in now building on that workshop to see if there’s other ways that we can try to support this relationship from the supervisor side.
Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for joining us. This has been a really great conversation and lots of things for folks to be thinking about in terms of bringing their writers together.
John: And it’s a great resource for anyone who’s considering building more sociality into their writing program.
Fiona: Thank you so, so much for having us. It’s an absolute delight to converse with you, as always.
Rachel: Thank you.
Danl: Thanks so much.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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