Some Thoughts on Collaborative Teaching

We are writers who teach writing. 

As such, we deal everyday with two predominant stereotypes:  1) the stereotypical writer who plods away at the typewriter, churning out the masterpiece from a lonely Paris garret in a five-floor walk-up and 2) the stereotypical professor who pores over research in an isolated office only accessible through a warren of cave-like, empty, and mysterious hallways. 

Contrary to popular belief, most writers are not celebrated authors devoted to garret living.  Most writers aren’t even celebrated:  they go about their work for a computer technology corporation, out on the beat as a reporter for a small-town newspaper, or as part of the requirements for the research they must keep up with in their discipline.  Their work isn’t necessarily published in the traditional sense, but it is meant to be shared with an audience.  More importantly, they don’t write in isolation.  Even the most reclusive authors had some circle of friends and admirers they counted on when they found themselves stuck at a certain point in their work, and many conducted lengthy correspondences (now phone calls and e-mails) with editors and publishers—anyone who would look at their work and discuss it with them. 
 
The same goes for teaching. Teaching is meant for an audience, and could, therefore, benefit from collaboration. But many of us in higher education avoid collaborative teaching because it equates with “team-teaching” of classes, and, since few administrators are willing to give a reduction in teaching load for team-taught classes, such collaboration is seen as a burden—twice the work of the traditional system.  Or, sometimes when a writing professor collaborates with a history or biology professor, the writing instruction may be seen as the “handmaiden” of the “more important” content of history or biology.  Our job as writing professors, then, becomes to take on the “onerous” task of grading all the written work students have done for the other professor and somehow make it better.  Hardly inspiring.

Still, to be effective teachers we need feedback, conversation, lengthy correspondences to fuel our creativity and imagination as much as writers do.  So what we offer here are productive ways some members of our department have found to collaborate, to inspire one another.  I, personally, have benefited from these collaborations in ways too numerous to count.  But the most important is the confidence I have gained as both a teacher and a writer from the mutuality of respect I have with my colleagues.  I am no longer just a grader of student papers; I'm an educator.  I'm no longer just a teacher who writes a little bit on the side; I'm a writer who is fortunate enough to be able to teach and be inspired by teaching.  I have become these things because my colleagues see me as so.  And with these, seemingly, small shifts in my thinking I have been freed, and the gift of freedom is one I can, in turn, share with my students, who, even though they really don’t know it, will all be writers and teachers one day, themselves.


Jennifer Deering

 

Collegiate Audience Panel

Student to Student Collaboration