I’m generally concerned about writing with partners. That’s 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 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.

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’t 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.

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’t know the genres of academic writing that are expected by publishers and funders. Maybe research partners can’t be bothered with going through some of the writing practices that researchers take for granted – for example a trawl of the literatures. And research partners don’t necessarily get any benefits from having their name as author on an academic publication whereas it is crucial for academics to publish.

But hang on a minute. There is no real reason why research partners cannot write for academic journals. Publishers don’t 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?

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 a book series which was largely written by teachers. 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 – stories of school change written by the people involved.

It may well be a little harder to write with children and young people or with people who aren’t writers – teachers after all are professionals with university qualifications and do both read and write as part of their jobs.but it’s not impossible. Wilkinson and Wilkinson say that researchers who research with children should

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 ‘unhappy with’; 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. 

So Im not alone in thinking that there are ways to write with research participants. I don’t know all of the ways to achieve this by any means, but here are a few ideas:

Maybe what is required is a strategy.

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).  Partners might annotate researchers’ writings in ways that go beyond simply ‘feeding back’.  Researchers might write the required genre elements – writing about literatures and methods for example – 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 write separately and then put their writings together.

Maybe what is required is time.

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.

Maybe a different kind of text is needed.

Thinking about alternative publications – 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 – multi-voiced narratives or multimedia texts for example.  See this paper by Kate Pahl and Steve Pool – a researcher and an artist – which started as a blog post. And this paper by a research team which started by working from First Nations stories of experience and then continued with co-authorship.

Maybe we just need to rethink our ideas about authorship…

I am (still) very interested in your experiences of writing with partners. How do you go about it?  Are there some approaches that have worked well for you?   Do let me and all of us all know in the comments.