Collaborative writing: intercultural and interdisciplinary partnerships as a means of identity formation

This chapter describes the collaborative writing experiences of a multidisciplinary group of educators brought together through an International Collaborative Writing Group (ICWG) initiative originally organized by the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSoTL) in 2012. Our ICWG writing partnership helped us develop our scholarship in ways that might not have otherwise been accomplished, had we worked alone or even with colleagues in our same institution or country. Through an analysis of a collection of individual reflective narratives about our collaborative writing experiences, we describe opportunities, affordances, inhibitors, and enablers for this approach to collaborative writing. We delineate the community of practice that we have successfully developed and how it has helped each of us develop our Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). We share the mechanisms that we have used to facilitate our work; the types of choices we have made about what research areas to explore that fit with our interests and the constraints of distance-based collaboration; and, most importantly, the ways in which our writing partnership has developed a stronger understanding of what SoTL is, and can be, moving forward.