The Liminality of Collaborative Publishing with School Partners in an Engaged Scholarship Project

• In Event: Shifting the Boundaries of Literacy: Writing, Identity, and Authenticity in Multiple Contexts

Abstract

Generating new knowledge through public participation that is disseminated in meaningful products is a central tenet of engaged scholarship (Barker, 2004). Products representing co-constructed knowledge arising from engaged partnerships can include a variety of formats; however, collaborative publishing in engaged partnerships is rare. Armer et al. (2020) found of the 1,142 total articles published by The Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, and The Journal of community Engagement and Scholarship from 1994 to 2019, 84 (7.4%) featured co-authors from both university and community backgrounds (p. 5). Further exploration of the collaborative publishing process with community partners remains limited. As a member of a long-term engaged scholarship team, this study delves into the intricacies of collaborative publishing. The aim is to enrich the current literature by exploring the liminal spaces of writing for publication as a collaborative endeavor within a school-university engaged partnership (Author, 2022)

This study drew on theories of the scholarship of engagement (Fitzgerald et al., 2020) and critical literacy (Janks, 2019). Engaged scholarship involves reciprocal learning between higher education institutions and communities, aimed at bridging the gap between knowledge and action (Beaulieu et al., 2018). Critical literacy examines the power structures embedded in literacy practices, highlighting how social constructions of language shape our understanding of the self (Shor, 1999). Both theories guided my examination of collaborative publishing and illuminated how writing can democratize new knowledge.

To embark on this inquiry, I posed the question: Why publish within an engaged scholarship partnership? Through composing reflective narratives on the publishing process, I explored the significance of collaborative writing with the objective of publication in a sustained engaged scholarship project.

In this study, I utilized reflexive writing about my experiences as a means to interrogate the process of leading publishing efforts with school partners. Writing as a method of inquiry presents writing as a way of “knowing” and a means of “discovery” (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2008, p. 923). As such, my reflective writing served as the data for this study.

Themes arising from my reflexive narratives included the following:
Collaborative publishing creates new caveats for what it means to conduct engaged scholarship
Collaborative publishing presses partners into a liminal space that is difficult to predict
Collaborative publishing challenges the cultivation of voice in writing
Collaborative publishing interrogates what it means to be a scholar
These themes reveal the necessity of collaborative publishing to foster transformative knowledge production in engaged scholarship.

Although the goal of engaged scholarship is to disseminate new knowledge beyond the confines of traditional university outlets such as peer-refereed journals, I found working together as a school-university team toward publishing enhanced the depth of the partnership. Collaborative publishing presses all members of an engaged partnership into new professional territory. Thus, collaborative publishing created a liminal space for shared inquiry and knowledge-building. As a university affiliated member of the team, it required me to let go of arcane expert-novice hierarchical identities and paradigms about scholarly writing (du Plooy et al., 2024).

Author

• Mellinee K. Lesley, Texas Tech University