Growing the Canadian SoTL Community through a Collaborative Writing Initiative

Recognizing the challenges that often attach to writing for publication, this chapter describes a Collaborative Writing Groups (CWG) initiative that supports scholarly writing about teaching and learning in higher education. This model, which sees groups of scholars from multiple institutions working together virtually and face-to-face to co-author manuscripts on topics of shared interest, has been shown to contribute to building scholarly capacity, community, and collaboration, while also leading to the development of manuscripts that contribute meaningfully to the literature. We describe the model, which was initially developed by the International Network for Learning and Teaching Geography in Higher Education and subsequently modified for the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, outline some of the evidence demonstrating its efficacy, and reflect on our experiences adapting the initiative to support collaborative writing in the Canadian context. While the CWG process was originally developed for individuals working on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), it is also applicable to those in other fields and disciplines. Thus, we situate our discussion within the SoTL literature that shaped the initiative, but also offer considerations and recommendations for those wishing to adapt and apply the model in other contexts.