Writing Collaboratively Priority, Practice, and Process

While the teaching of adults is a priority fin the practice of adult and community education, writing is the dominant discourse for how we share our ideas across the divergent field. We write to share the good news of discovered ideas; to demonstrate our agencies' purpose, needs, or progress; to explain our interpretation of theories; or to illustrate theory to practice. Formally, we may present and even publish our writings in professional development workshops, regional meetings, annual conferences, practitioner publications, and academic journals. Language includes the acts of listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Listening, reading, and speaking require definite collaborative transactions. For example, when we listen, we need another individual to listen to. When we read, we engage in a conversation with the author's words. When we speak, we do so with purpose for an intended audience. But, the writing process is often practiced as a solitary act that includes the individual translating his or her own experiences, practices, or research into meaningful written language. For the writing to be transactional, it must be read, spoken, or listened to by someone else, who then brings his or her own experiences, practices, and research into the text (Rosenblatt, 1994). The collaborative transaction occurs only after it has been written. Imagine the transformative possibilities if we collaborated and participated in this transaction during the writing process. Writing is the dominant forum for how we communicate, and as adult and community educators, we value and promote collaboration. Joining the two ideas of collaboration and the process of writing should be natural. Writing collaboratively is now widely practiced in many fields. Particularly in this advancing technological age, we find that it is not only practiced but also commonplace. However, the practice of writing collaboratively has not been widely researched, presented, or taught, and practitioners are often left to learn what works purely through trial and error. This column encourages adult and community education practitioners to reflect on their own collaborative writing practices. And it offers possible frameworks of best practices that allow adult and community educational practitioners the opportunity to improve their practice of collaborative writing. In the field of adult and community education, we often work in isolation. For example, at a training program for state Adult Basic Education (ABE) programs, one of us found the participants repeating how rare it was to have the opportunity to gather, see, or even speak with other directors, let alone collaborate. In addition, another one of us informally surveyed the instructors at a community writing center about how they teach the writing process, and all of them, except for one, shared that they teach writing solely as a solitary practice. Despite our insistence that community and collaboration are key in our field, the lone writer writes on, continuing the accepted paradigm in the literary world. We write alone for several reasons, including the following: (a) The organizational structure we work within promotes single authorship by the person who is in charge of the educational agency, (b) no time or opportunity to physically or virtually gather to engage in the act of writing, (c) the lack of strategies for how to engage with other educators to produce a piece of collaborative writing that reconciles each member's expertise, tone, and purpose, (d) fear of how others outside our agency will judge our writing, our speak on paper, and finally (e) writing with others is often viewed as just another chore or a necessary evil, in which case the collaborative process is not used to its full potential. Which one of these reasons represents your current thinking? If we believe ourselves in adult and community education to be self-directed learners and educators and if we accept Mezirow's (1991) theory of transformational learning, which promotes the transformative abilities of writing, then we must push past the barriers listed above and practice the act of collaborative writing. …