Currently reading: Hutchings & Huber (2026) on “Writing Together: A Reflective Essay on Co-Authoring in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning”

These last couple of weeks, I have been writing. A lot. With 19 different co-authors on several manuscripts in stages that range from first drafts to waiting for proofs (guess not so much writing recently on the latter, but anyway, they count to my “in progress” writing projects, too!). Many of these collaborations are described perfectly by Hutchings & Huber (2026)’s description: “co-authorship is a way to bring new people into SoTL’s big tent“.

They write that “[s]ometimes that involves an experienced scholar inviting a colleague who is new to the work to write together—an occasion for mentoring, as Felten called it in our conversation.” In some of my ongoing writing projects, I am the more experienced scholar inviting people for mentorship purposes, in several others I am collaborating with peers where writing together is peer mentorship, and in others, I am being invited and mentored (thank you, Rachel and friends, I so very much appreciate and enjoy the opportunity!).

Hutchings & Huber (2026)’s description resonates with me a lot: “writing together has its own special powers; it builds up a sense of community among participants and contributes to the generally collaborative and supportive culture of the field. Writing together is one of the ways in which we work together, get to know each other, negotiate our institutional, international, and disciplinary differences, push each other to higher standards, and benefit from each other’s expertise. These collaboratives, whether short-or long-lived, can—at least temporarily—form a community of practice, one of those sites for “significant conversations” that Roxa and Martensson (2009) write about that give practitioners both a sense of belonging and a sense that they and their work matter to the larger enterprise.”

I write to think (for example on this blog), but I also write with others specifically to think together, even though I have never put it in those terms before. It is nice to see this way of working together acknowledged!

I think for me, this works especially well because of the shared goal of

• a piece of writing (so a clearly defined outcome to work towards) that is
• well thought-through (so we need to focus on a topic for a while, rather than browsing everything that sparkles and catches my eye, or at least not as much as I would do if I didn’t have to produce some manuscript) and
• well written (so it’s clear what level of “polished” to aspire to, in contrast to this stream-of-consciousness blog) and
• finished by some due date (so it has a certain urgency before, and is accomplished and can be filed as “done” after).

Writing together keeps me on track, but also keeps my co-authors on task (at least to some extent, most of the time). This is very important since my attention span is not very long, and once I loose interest, it is very difficult to motivate myself to pick something up again (which, of course, I still do since that is my job. But it’s much more enjoyable to me to work in bursts on something and then move on to the next topic). So if I want to do something with other people and be relatively sure that I will have fun doing it, the urgency of writing together creates good conditions for that, and other outcomes (like developing a course, or implementing a teaching innovation, etc, which might be my co-authors primary goals but which wouldn’t have equally clearly defined deliverables or due dates) can be accomplished as byproducts. Win-win!

Anyway, I enjoyed reading this essay after a super nice day of writing together with Rachel (who I already sent a suggestion for the next writing project between coming home and writing this blog post :-D)!

Hutchings, P., & Huber, M. (2026). Writing Together: A Reflective Essay on Co-Authoring in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 14, 1-10.

We have The Best tradition: Writing on the ferry between Helsingborg and Helsingør, here about to leave Helsingborg.

In Helsingør, they have these “show us where you are from” maps everywhere, which are so welcoming! Love them!

And here we are leaving Helsingør. Bow visor coming down and closing soon, promise!

We didn’t visit the cool castle today, but I’m sure we’ll be back next time!

Instead, we went into the library (see featured image)

We went back and forth quite a bit, and stopped over in Denmark for lunch.

What a perfect way to spend a day — travelling between countries, wave watching AND co-writing!

Did I say wave watching? It’s so fun to see how the waves get bunched up to the left of the wake where they cannot run into the high-turbulence area of the wake!

Back in Helsingborg again.

By the end of the day we knew all the flags here. Wonder if I’ll remember all of them next time I am here?

Guess we’ll have to come back to find out! Bye!