I view critical inquiry, intellectual engagement, and creative innovation, shaped by civic concern, to be key features of the type of learning community I foster in my classroom. For, as Erika Lindeman and Daniel Anderson have long established, “The teacher’s role is to build a community of writers who encourage one another to use writing to make meaning and effect change.”¹ To encourage a sense of community, fellowship, and shared responsibility in the classroom, I design writing assignments that feature both collaborative and individual writing activities to assist students to understand writing as a social activity rather than an isolated practice. As professor, I imagine myself as an advocate for my students, a role that parallels my work as a patient advocate in nursing over the past fourteen years, where I have directly experienced the benefits of collaboration in team-nursing and its correlation with better patient outcomes.² The collaborative model offers a way to teach students mutual respect and trust, to listen to each other, and to appreciate their individual differences and abilities.

Students present diverse styles of engagement in the classroom. While some students embrace tense discussions with peers, other students may be tepid in their initial interactions. I find that low stakes collaborative writing assignments nurture student-led discussions and level the hierarchical structure of the classroom that often inhibits student interaction. For example, in the science writing course that I taught this spring in-person, I had students collaborate in groups on a Podcast and Infographic Assignment where they had to collaborate to brainstorm a podcast topic, applying their research in the literature review to this new assignment, plan the podcast using a template, and finally record the podcast using state-of the-art equipment at The University of Alabama’s media center in Gorges Library. This collaboration challenged them to evaluate the elements of this new medium rhetorically, consider the expectations of this new audience, and conventions of podcasts delivered either in audio or video format, and then design a poster advertisement for their podcast. Students included their podcasts as evidence of collaborative science writing in their final ePortfolios.

I find that co-writing activities from the simplest textual analysis to the more complex multimedia assignments help students hone confidence in their analysis of texts, digital communication design, and become more comfortable and confident with writing and sharing their writing with peers. Thus, students’ practice of skills in groups leads to greater self-confidence and independence in writing tasks overall. Moreover, they become more comfortable with listening to each other and “listening” to texts, even digital ones.

Active listening enriches understanding and promotes an appreciation for diversity and inclusion. In my composition and literature courses, students collaborate in several ways: through social reading and co-annotation in Perusall, through discussion boards, through group work and classroom discussions, and through group research and presentations. Students receive further in-class practice in close reading activities in group work in class. In structuring my classes in this way, I take guidance from Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy, who have shown that prioritizing active learning approaches in a high structure classroom, benefits all students, regardless of achievement level.³ Integrated activities promote equity and inclusivity in my classroom, and this in turn promotes student development of active listening skills.

During this process of discussing and reflecting on the readings in groups, the students take turns listening to one another and speaking, thereby transferring the work of “listening” to texts—formally diverse in form, genre, and style and diverse in perspective—to the work of listening to each other. As the students learn to trust each other through these group discussions, they build the foundation of community that they need to be successful. For example, in my EN102 English Composition course that I taught this spring with an identity and disability theme, one of the major assignments initially involved group research. After being assigned to groups based on a survey of student career interests, students in this course collaborated in brainstorming research topics and assisted each other to formulate research questions together. Thereby, the work of the invention process of writing was then formally articulated in individual research proposals that the students submitted along with their project schedules. By working through the process of identifying a viable research topic with a partner, the students benefited by the union of their collective knowledge and skills as they worked through the process of invention, preliminary research, and composition of a proposal. Although each student selected a topic appropriately narrow, they reported feeling inspired by their partner’s research. Students repeatedly told me that composing the research essay made them realize how much the guided library research and group discussions and prepared them for writing about their topic. Thus, interdependent research activities provided a segue that facilitated their building self-confidence in independent writing.

Students are not the only ones who have to practice listening. As an advocate of the writing community, I listen to their concerns and assist them to navigate the challenges they face in groupwork. For example, in co-writing activities, I emphasize clear communication and accountability through the group schedule, the necessity for accurate definition and delegation of roles, and open and transparent lines of communication that include the professor as arbitrator. I instruct students how to communicate through e-mail, wiki-boards, Zoom, Teams, and even Google Chat rooms. When situations arise, I help students to resolve schedule conflicts with peers and address interpersonal conflicts. I see these interactions as opportunities for growth in leadership and conflict resolution. Through careful interventions, I teach students to develop rapport, to negotiate scheduling conflicts, to implement a system of checks and balances, and to utilize digital documents, online presentation programs, and campus resources for optimum collaboration.

Students gain tremendous experience through the incorporation of collaborative learning in the classroom. Each student brings a wealth of diverse experiences, and collaborative learning provides pathways that facilitate student engagement with each other. Bringing diverse perspectives further opens opportunities for the kind of innovative learning that Mary Louise Pratt posits as occurring at the borders of “contact zones,” those “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of asymmetrical relations of power…”⁴ and which I argue offer rich sites of critical knowledge transfer. For instance, in the previously-mentioned English Composition course, one of my students told me that she enjoyed the research on autism in my class, and that this experience has helped her to decide to work with people with autism in her career. Another student in my science writing class applauded the collaborative assignments he completed with other students in biology, marine science, and nutrition and exercise sciences because he said he had so few other opportunities to write with others dedicated to science during his time at the university. These responses echo those less eloquently expressed by other students in my composition classes, such as one who stated that the group work made her revise her habits of procrastination. Collaborative learning demonstrates the vital role that community plays in skills acquisition. Because they share their writing process with each other, students are more willing to take risks in their writing. Taking risks in writing is vital to improvement because the process of writing is a process in self-development.

When the students learn to view each other as a community, they are better equipped to understand that academic writing is about joining in an ongoing written conversation. In this, I agree with Kenneth Bruffee when he argues that “in understanding writing as a collaborative, conversational process, we understand that” rather than seeking to “distinguish ourselves” by writing, we are actually “trying to do the opposite” (55).⁵ By listening to each other, and closely reading texts, students begin to see themselves as belonging to an academic community where writing is a vibrant conversation that interests them, and one in which they also seek to participate.

¹Erika Lindemann and Daniel Anderson. A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers. 4^th edition. (Oxford UP, 2001): 260-261.
²Peter Van Bogaert, Olaf Timmermans, Susan Mace Weeks, et al. “Nursing Unit Teams Matter: Impact of Unit-Level Nurse Practice Environment, Nurse Work Characteristics, and Burnout on Nurse Reported Job Outcomes, and Quality of Care, and Patient Adverse Events—a Cross-sectional Survey.” International Journal of Nursing Studies, vol. 51, 2014, pp. 1123-1134.
³Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy. Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2022.
⁴Mary Louise Pratt. “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession, 1991, pp. 33–40.
⁵Bruffee, Kenneth. Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge. 2^nd edition. John Hopkins UP, 1999.