ICWG Impact: More than Just a Writing Project

ISSOTL’s International Collaborative Writing Groups (ICWG) Initiative brings together academics, professional staff, and students to co-author works on topics of shared interest related to SoTL. Specifically, ISSOTL supports both an Academic track and a Public track of ICWGs:

In ICWG-Academic cohorts, groups focus on academic writing for the SoTL community to produce scholarly articles that are submitted to Teaching & Learning Inquiry. (Read more here.)
In ICWG-Public cohorts, groups focus on writing for audiences beyond the academy to produce public SoTL, or works of public scholarship informed by SoTL. (Read more here.)

The ICWGs provide a structure that supports key goals of ISSOTL’s Strategic Plan by

bringing together an array of international perspectives;
supporting the development of professional SoTL-related products and models new forms of outreach beyond the standard scholarly journal article;
providing a visible model of what SoTL-active and SoTL-interested people can do, including students; and
advancing SoTL discourse by addressing new or challenging themes/frameworks/topics.

ICWGs also provide value and experience for participants through

mentoring opportunities (supporting professional growth of mentors and mentees);
leadership development opportunities within the SoTL realm;
community-building and networking opportunities within the SoTL realm;
group member commitment to and strong likelihood of achieving publishable or public products (traditional journal articles in the ICWG-Academic track, or a variety of other products in the ICWG-Public track); and
NEW in 2022: two different types of experiences via traditional peer-reviewed journal outputs from the ICWGs-Academic and, now, public communication (outreach) outputs from the ICWGs-Public.

During the 2021 summer, we — three Co-Leaders of the third ICWG-Academic cohort — organized a call to previous ICWG participants (leaders, facilitators, and group participants) from the first three cohorts. This call asked participants to share reflections about their ICWG experiences within two of six categories: community, professional development, international perspectives, leadership development, engaging and mentoring students, and growing in SoTL. These categories had been identified through their thematic analysis of feedback from 2019 ICWG participants. Only one person spoke to leadership impact, which suggests that while it was salient when responses were not constrained, it was not among the top two most salient impacts for most of the participants.

We hope these videos (linked to the right) not only serve to document the positive impact of the ICWG experiences, but also inspire others to participate in future ICWG iterations.