The role of relationships in academic writing and identity

David Barton, Sharon McCulloch (presenting) & Karin Tusting,

Lancaster University

The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation:Academics’ writing practices in the contemporary university workplace

Literacy Research Centre, Lancaster UniversityDepartments of Linguistics and of Educational Research

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK

Research designMaths Marketing History TOTAL

interviewsUniversity A: plate-glass 60s uni

7 6 6 19

University B: red-brick Russell group

6 3 6 15

University C: post-1992 university

6 6 3 15

TOTAL no. of interviews 19 15 15 49

• Plus pilot work in our own disciplines, and auto-ethnographic work

Co-authored writing

Research collaborations seems to be very common now, more so than say ten fifteen years ago. The vast majority of papers are co-authored in pure maths. I don’t think that was true, like I say, even in the late ‘90s.

Ian, lecturer in Mathematics

Faster and easier collaboration

[Audacity is] an audio recording and editing software. So you can now record conversations straight from Skype. Somebody I work with in Dundee we quite often have conversations about papers, and it's fast, and it's really fast. So quite often I just record the conversation […] every so often I'll think, "I know he said something specifically about that." Or he mentioned an author and I wrote it down wrong and I can't find it. I'll just track back.

Diane, Professor of Marketing

Value of talking face-to-face

I met up with her [a co-author] and she said the last stages had been really, really hard. There was the issue of English; getting it into good English, as well as the issue of what was practical and what was doable, and all the rest of it. She’d found it hard working sort of always through cyberspace, rather than meeting. My idea is we should go for a networking grant, so we can actually meet and talk, rather than just sending these bits of written text, to each other.

Verity, Professor of History

Commitment to others

We had a workshop here and one in Ukraine just a couple of weeks ago, and so you get the personal commitment. You meet someone face to face and you could say, "It really is important that I get your chapter on good time", and it's often easier to say that to someone's face than to say it in an impersonal email which they just delete.

Colin, Professor of History

The social side of writing

I think it’s the whole social element as well isn’t it, actual, intellectual or whatever the work element. It’s the fact that you can, “Okay let’s meet and have a cup of coffee. How are you? Blah, blah, blah.” and all that sort of stuff.

Charles, lecturer in Marketing

Image credit: Nick of http://www.lab-initio.com/

Learning from co-authors

The thing I really enjoy is when I send that off to another co-author and they say, “That’s great.” I know they’re very experienced. That’s that point where you’re learning all the time because I’ve only been doing this four years, five years.

Charles, lecturer in Marketing

Peer and family support

I ask my husband, Hugo. He’s a very stern critic and a very good reader, but I do sometimes ask colleagues, because we’re in research clusters, so there’s a sort of little group I can ask.

Verity, professor in History

Learning about writing

Talking to senior peers who publish more than me about I want to say this, this is all going on in my head and them saying, ‘Well actually what you're doing is A, B, C.’ What they were doing was teaching me structure.

Diane, professor in Marketing

Learning about listeningRecently, my colleague from physics and myself, we wrote together the equipment bid for the university. People who know me quite often say that I try to just insist on my view. Well, probably it’s true to some extent. So, in the start, it was quite an interesting learning process for both of us. How to actually not insist on your opinion, but to listen to somebody else. But I think it was really useful for me, because, basically, surprisingly, I probably learned how to listen to other people. Andy, lecturer in Chemistry

Poussin, N. (1858)

Co-creation of knowledge

… over a period of time you have written some research and then people have contributed. Then you want to write something else but you want to take into account not just in a sense what you have done before but what people have said about what you have done and then what you’re going to do or have done now. I partially use it for that just to bring together what other people have developed from what you have done.

Brian, lecturer in Mathematics

The importance of trust

… we see each others' strengths and weaknesses, and we eventually can converge- because you have got that respect, you can converge to a writing that works for you. I think the key thing is that you get on well with the colleagues. If you've got a trust between you all, that is really easy.

Gareth, Professor of Mathematics

Writing is risky

Words are very personal things […] The more senior you get, the more specialist you get, the more important every single word is to you.

Diane, Professor of Marketing

Summary and conclusions

• Academics’ writing accompanied by other practices such as reading, brainstorming and talking

• Collaboration on writing becoming more common in some disciplines

• Even sole-authored writing is informed by relationships and bookended by discussions

Summary and conclusions

• Discussions around writing a key aspect of informal learning

• Trust and collegiality are crucial to writing success

• Institutions must create or enable conditions in which these aspects of writing and learning can be fostered

ReferencesLarivière, V., Sugimoto, C. R., & Cronin, B. (2012). A bibliometric chronicling of library and information science’s first hundred years. Journal of The American Society For Information Science And Technology, 63(5):997–1016.

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Murray, R. (2013) ‘It’s not a hobby’: reconceptualizing the place of writing in academic work. Higher Education, 66, 79-91.

Tusting, K. (2003). A review of theories of informal learning. Lancaster Literacy Research Centre Working Papers, 2. Lancaster: Lancaster University.

Wuchty, S., Jones, B.F., & Uzzi, B. (2007). The increasing dominance of teams in production of knowledge. Science, 316, 1036-1039 (18 May 2007) DOI: 10.112/science.1136099