Writing comprises a significant proportion of academic staff members’ roles. While academics have been acculturated to the notion of ‘publish or perish,’ they often struggle to find the time to accomplish writing papers and tend to work alone. The result can be a sense of significant stress and isolation around the writing process. Writing partnerships, groups, and retreats help mitigate these challenges and provide significant positive writing experiences for their members. Critical Collaborative Communities describes diverse examples of partnerships from writing regularly with one or two colleagues to larger groups that meet for a single day, regular writing meetings, or a retreat over several days. While these approaches bring mutual support for members, each is not without its respective challenges. Each chapter outlines an approach to writing partnerships and interrogates its strengths and limitations as well as proposes recommendations for others hoping to implement the practice. Authors in this volume describe how they have built significant trusting relationships that have helped avoid isolation and have led to their self-authorship as academic writers.

Self-study is inherently collaborative. Such collaboration provides transparency, validity, rigor and trustworthiness in conducting self-study. However, the ways in which these collaborations are enacted have not been sufficiently addressed in the self-study literature. This book addresses these gaps in the literature by placing critical friendship, collaborative self-study and community of practice at the forefront of the self-study of teaching. It highlights these forms of collaboration, how the collaboration was developed and enacted, the challenges and tensions that existed in the collaboration, and how practice and identity developed through the use of these forms of collaboration. The chapters serve as exemplars of enacting these forms of collaboration and provide researchers with an additional base of literature to draw upon in their scholarly writing, teaching of self-study, and their enactment of collaborative self-study spaces.

Effective communication is essential in every organization, including educational institutions. Often, members of the online community work in isolation. Collaboration across varying disciplines and departments can promote unique professional development activities and create a stronger connection to the entire online community. Enriching Collaboration and Communication in Online Learning Communities is a critical scholarly publication that supports communication and collaboration in online settings by focusing on the ways all members of the educational institution can create community to foster personal and professional growth for all. The book takes an in-depth look at communication strategies and challenges including managing conflict, working effectively in virtual teams, critical thinking, intercultural and cross-cultural communication, and online leadership. It is ideal for faculty, teachers, administrators, principles, curriculum developers, professionals, researchers, and students.

Through multiple narratives reflecting the complexity of participatory action research partnerships for social justice, this book sheds light on the dialogic spaces that intentionally support community literacies and rhetorical practices for inquiry and change. Applying literacy as social practice, Larson and Moses tell a story of a unique collaboration between community members and university faculty and students, who together transformed an urban corner store into a cornerstone of the community. Building on the emerging field of community literacies, the book captures the group’s active work on the ground and, on another level, how transformation occurred in the dialogic spaces of the research team as it learned to embrace distributed expertise and multiple identities.

Faced with the ever-accelerating pace of technological change and the restructuring of markets, many firms have been questioning the appropriateness of their own organizational structure and effectiveness. Consequently, we have witnessed much organizational experimentation and the development of new forms of organizing over the last decade. Firms are more dependent than ever on the need for continuous and radical innovations – and often innovations that go beyond their existing businesses. This challenges firms in terms of knowledge and idea sharing, and often necessitates the need to expand beyond the boundaries of the single firm for multi-party collaboration to meet serious challenges and develop creative solutions. Drawing from the Fourth International Workshop on Organization Design, and featuring contributions from an international array of specialists, this volume focuses on the expansion beyond the boundaries of the single firm and multi-firm networks, to include, for example, community-based organization designs. A community is a connected set of firms; the connections can take on many different dimensions. For organization design theory, community-based organizations have many implications. For one, organization design theory has to identify and describe designs that enhance collaborative behavior among firms without restricting the ability of the individual firm to continue to compete within its own marketplace. Moreover, organization design theory also has to identify and describe information processing strategies and designs that allow the continuous generation, sharing, and application of existing information and knowledge. The development of effective collaborative community designs is critically important to the global economy because, increasingly, our future depends on pursuing shared goals and sustainably developing our global commons. Ideally, the ideas and findings in this book will contribute to increased attention to new organization designs capable of meeting 21st-century opportunities and challenges.

Building and Maintaining Collaborative Communities: Schools, University, and Community Organizations is a new and noteworthy volume in the literature on collaboration among schools and universities. It expands the playing field to include both publically and privately funded community organizations and the effects of the interaction of the three on projects in a multitude of settings both domestically and in international venues. Asked to analyze their projects following the Slater Matrix, nineteen examples provide an inside glimpse into the success and limitations of each project. Chapters are organized in order of complexity of type of collaboration. The editors expect this to be a useful guide for university personnel, school administrators, and community organizations wishing to embark or expand on projects involving schools, universities, and community organizations. In a time of short resources and uncertain sustainability, it should serve as a useful tool in making decisions in the planning, process, carrying out, and analysis of each endeavor.

Meeting a key need for qualitative researchers, this practical book presents tools for creating productive partnerships and managing each phase of a collaborative project. The authors provide guidelines for working across disciplines, status differentials (such as professor and student), and geographical locations. Collaboration within particular qualitative traditions--cross-cultural research, duoethnography, participatory action research, arts-based collaborations, and others--is described and illustrated with exemplars of published studies. Readers learn how to build research teams, formulate research questions, gather and analyze data, and assess how collaborations are working. Ethical questions are highlighted throughout: Who owns collaborative research? Who decides what aspects of the findings should be disseminated? How can inequitable power relations be redressed? Within-chapter "Pedagogical Pathways" sections provide practice exercises and opportunities for reflection.