collaboration

Introduction

That the "teacher-writer" exists or "teacher-modeling" works is familiar to readers of professional literature in composition studies. Parallel to the field's interest in the writing context during the entire 1980s, philosophical and theoretical discussions of positioning have also popularized the term "student-writers," which, together with "teacher-writers," were eclectically used and generally understood as participants of writing workshops.

“We didn’t stage this just for you,” Alma said to me after the most dramatic night of my work observing and participating in the community-based writing group to which she belongs. I became associated with City Writers as part of an ethnography seminar. I am interested in extra-curricular writing in part because of Ann Ruggles Gere’s work, particularly “Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms” (1994).

“[T]echnical things have political qualities. [. . . M]achines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions of efficiency and productivity, not merely for their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority.”

— Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”

When professional writing students collaborate, even if they do not use specific software designed for electronic collaboration, they use technology as part of their writing and collaborating processes: writing outlines or drafts, building Gantt or PERT charts to manage longer projects, searching for information on library databases or on the Internet, creating visuals for reports or web pages, sharing documents or information via email, or responding to one another’s documents, for example.