The Collaborative Writing Group: creating a writing community

Writing a doctorate can be a lonely experience, but when compounded by a global pandemic, the desire for connection and community became almost overwhelming for one group of people. Their solution lay in writing together. Despite never having met before, the 10 authors of this paper decided to join forces and create something together that was far richer as a result than anything they could have produced on their own. This act of writing worked to shape their identity as a group, by providing a point of contact, allowing individual voices to be heard, and building a trusted space for sharing ideas. By becoming in a sense their own data, they got to know themselves and each other much better, and collective autoethnography has become the standard methodology for the group. The sense of collective ownership of the group has become a sustaining element, giving it life and prompting all the members to go further and write more.  The resources we mentioned Pat Thomson’s blog - Patter https://patthomson.net/  Elbow’s free writing technique comes from Elbow, P. (1998). Writing without teachers. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Syska, A. & Buckley, C. (2022). Writing as liberatory practice: unlocking knowledge to locate an academic field. Teaching in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2022.2114337 Johnson, I. P. (2018) Driving learning development professionalism forward from within. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. doi: 10.47408/jldhe.v0i0.470And the paper we talked about Bickle, E., Bishopp-Martin, S., Canton, U., Chin, P., Johnson, I., Kantcheva, R., Nodder, J., Rafferty, V., Sum, K., & Welton, K. (2021). Emerging from the third space chrysalis: Experiences in a non-hierarchical, collaborative research community of practice. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 18(7), 135-158. https://doi.org/10.53761/1.18.7.9