Collaborate! About Us



	What is Collaborate!? Collaborate! is a website for community college, college, and university faculty, staff, and students who are interested in encouraging collaborative writing and research in higher education. Established in conjunction with the Presidential Forum on "Creative Collaboration: Alternatives to the Adversarial Academy" held during the 2000 Modern Language Association Meeting (December 26-30) in Washington, D.C., Collaborate! was conceived and developed by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford in close collaboration with Corinne Arráez, who designed and maintains Collaborate!
	Why was Collaborate! established? In 1999, MLA incoming President Linda Hutcheon (University of Toronto) established the theme "Creative Collaboration: Alternatives to the Adversarial Academy" for the 2000 MLA Presidential Forum. In an email to the Forum's presenters, Hutcheon observed that "public discourses of conflict, confrontation, and competition . . .[have created] a culture of agonistic argument in which the university becomes more a war zone than a place of learning" and encouraged all involved with the Forum to both explore and enact possible alternatives to this culture. Hutcheon commented that collaborative research and writing pose one such alternative, and she invited presenters-Nellie McKay (University of Wisconsin, Madison) and Francis Smith Foster (Emory University); J. Edward Chamberline (University of Toronto) and Levi Namaseb (University of Namibia); and Andrea Lunsford (Stanford University) and Lisa Ede (Oregon State University)-to explore issues related to "Creative Collaboration." In an effort to extend the work of the Presidential Forum beyond its specific time and place, Lisa Ede, Andrea Lunsford, and Corinne Arráez (Stanford University) developed Collaborate!
	What Does Collaborate! Offer? This site serves as a clearinghouse for information on and productive models of collaboration in the humanities and on best practices for institutional change. The models provided here, as well as the bibliography and links to related sites provide a starting point for those interested in collaborative research and writing.
	How Can You Contribute to This Site? Websites are always works in progress-but this in particularly true for Collaborate! Since institutional change comes slowly, if it comes at all, we must work together to develop the kind of synergistic collaboration that can enable such change. Please contribute to the resources available on this site, including (but not limited to): promotion and tenure guidelines that recognize collaborative work other documents, such as statements by professional associations, that further possibilities for collaborative writing and research information about funding sources for collaborative work effective strategies for various collaborative activities, such as faculty student collaborative research or long-distance collaboration new entries for the bibliography new links For information on how these materials can be added to Collaborate!, click on the "how to contribute" icon on the left margin of each page.