{"id":76473,"date":"2025-04-08T00:42:25","date_gmt":"2025-04-08T04:42:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=76473"},"modified":"2025-04-08T00:42:25","modified_gmt":"2025-04-08T04:42:25","slug":"writing-with-research-partners-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/writing-with-research-partners-part-two\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing with research partners part two"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019m generally concerned about writing with partners. That\u2019s because the power to say what is important, to name and to categorise, to summarise and to draw out implications, happens in writing. And in the writing, power can revert back to academic researchers. Despite our best intentions.<\/p>\n

In some situations where researchers do all of the writing, research partners may not be listed as authors on a research publication at all. Maybe their contributions are acknowledged. However research partners may have been heavily involved in all of the research up to the point of writing. They may well also have read drafts, and discussed and commented on them. The line between writing and not writing can be blurry, despite the apparent clarity of guidelines on authorship.<\/p>\n

But there are researchers who really want to involve their partners in the writing process and to have them credited as authors. And this means academic authors have to think long and hard. They don\u2019t want to make their partners feel angry, or insult them, or break the trust that they have established. So they have to ask themselves hard ethical questions about the purposes and benefits of publication. Researchers have to wrestle with how the shared communication goals of the research can be realised.<\/p>\n

There are some understandable reasons why academics end up writing about a participatory research project. Research partners may not have the time to spend on writing while researchers do. Research partners don\u2019t know the genres of academic writing that are expected by publishers and funders. Maybe research partners can\u2019t be bothered with going through some of the writing practices that researchers take for granted \u2013 for example a trawl of the literatures. And research partners don\u2019t necessarily get any benefits from having their name as author on an academic publication whereas it is crucial for academics to publish.<\/p>\n

But hang on a minute. There is no real reason why research partners cannot write for academic journals. Publishers don\u2019t care. Editors might even see it as a Good Thing, evidencing the ways in which cooperative research was conducted. Researchers can make assumptions about their partners that are incorrect. Perhaps our partners do want to be acknowledged as authors. Have we asked them? Have we discussed the question of who writes what, when and how?<\/p>\n

I remember once being told by a very experienced researcher that it was inappropriate to ask school staff to write as they had neither the time nor inclination. It was our job. I was dubious about this. And some time later I co-edited\u00a0a book series which was largely written by teachers<\/a>. Thirty of them. We paid their schools for release time for them, and supported their writing through editing and some co-writing where it was helpful. To this day, this series remains a bit of an exception in the literatures \u2013 stories of school change written by the people involved.<\/p>\n

It may well be a little harder to write with children and young people or with people who aren\u2019t writers \u2013 teachers after all are professionals with university qualifications and do both read and write as part of their jobs.but it\u2019s not impossible.\u00a0Wilkinson and Wilkinson<\/a>\u00a0say that researchers who research with children should<\/p>\n

develop participatory guidelines pertaining to ownership, authorship, and dissemination; show participants verbatim transcripts of their data and encourage them to make suggestions and amendments, as opposed to asking them if there is anything they are \u2018unhappy with\u2019; share drafts of papers\/chapters with participants for feedback and be prepared to include dissenting views if there is disagreement on interpretation; constantly question whose voice is dominant in written work, and whose language is privileged.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

So Im not alone in thinking that there are ways to write with research participants. I don\u2019t know all of the ways to achieve this by any means, but here are a few ideas:<\/p>\n

Maybe what is required is a\u00a0strategy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Researchers might run specific workshops dedicated to helping participants talk about what is important to write about and generate some text using visual and creative methods (Thanks Kicki Slog for sending me a paper about exactly this).\u00a0\u00a0Partners might annotate researchers\u2019 writings in ways that go beyond simply \u2018feeding back\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0Researchers might write the required genre elements \u2013 writing about literatures and methods for example \u2013 while the remainder of the paper is shared writing. Academics might also work as scribes, taking down what research partners say to produce a first draft for discussion. Partners and researchers might\u00a0write separately and then put their writings together<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Maybe what is required is\u00a0time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

How about a dedicated writing retreat for instance where there are equal parts discussion about the text and generating words. Perhaps we need to make sure we apply for funding for writing time for ourselves and our research partners.<\/p>\n

Maybe a\u00a0different kind of text<\/strong>\u00a0is needed.<\/p>\n

Thinking about alternative publications \u2013 how about a scholarly journal article without straitjacket expectations, or a slowly written book without intense time commitments? Why not a professional publication or multi-media text? There are less traditional writing genres that do get published \u2013 multi-voiced narratives or multimedia texts for example.\u00a0\u00a0See this\u00a0paper by Kate Pahl and Steve Pool<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 a researcher and an artist \u2013 which started as a blog post. And\u00a0this paper by a research team which started by working from First Nations stories of experience<\/a>\u00a0and then continued with co-authorship.<\/p>\n

Maybe we just need to\u00a0rethink our ideas about authorship<\/strong>\u2026<\/p>\n

I am (still) very interested in your experiences of writing with partners. How do you go about it?\u00a0\u00a0Are there some approaches that have worked well for you?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Do let me and all of us all know in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m generally concerned about writing with partners. That\u2019s because the power to say what is important, to name and to categorise, to summarise and to draw out implications, happens in writing. And in the writing, power can revert back to academic researchers. Despite our best intentions. In some situations where researchers do all of the […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[13147],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-76473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-higher-education","tag-authorship"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWriting with research partners part two - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/writing-with-research-partners-part-two\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Writing with research partners part two - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I\u2019m generally concerned about writing with partners. 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