Developing a scholarship community

Abstract

Purpose: To report the results of a multidisciplinary, interinstitutional writing support group established to facilitate faculty scholarly productivity. ORGANIZING CONCEPT: The road to scholarship can be filled with many obstacles, among them time constraints, teaching and meeting demands, student needs, office interruptions, and lack of colleagueship. The problems associated with lack of colleagueship, in particular, can be compounded for faculty who work in isolated contexts with few, if any, senior faculty to serve as mentors. METHODS OF DEVELOPMENT: The Western Writers Coercion Group evolved over a 2-year period from a small group of nursing faculty at a single institution to include, by its second year, 21 faculty from five western university campuses and three academic disciplines. The group met biweekly via teleconference with the objectives of defining and accomplishing realistic individual scholarship goals and providing a forum for the critical exchange of ideas.

Results: The ongoing support and mentoring of the group led to significant writing outcomes in the form of manuscripts submitted for publication, abstracts submitted for conference presentation, grant proposals developed, and collegial relationships formed.

Discussion: Although the benefits of group participation varied somewhat for faculty at different points in the career trajectory, they seemed to accrue at all levels of development. Group members underscored the many less quantifiable advantages of group participation: exposure to broader professional perspectives, the formation of key professional relationships, the enrichment of multidisciplinary input, and individualized assistance with time management, goal setting, and actual drafts.

Conclusions: The structure and experience of this group, which continues to meet regularly, might be a model to guide other groups of scholars who face geographic isolation and who struggle with balancing time and work and finding motivation for the process of writing.

Figure

During its second year, as many as 21 faculty were members of the group, with an average of 10 to 12 participating at each meeting. The figure shows the three-state area of the project; the cumulative distance between sites is 1,187 miles/1,912 kilometers.