Intra-Institutional Collaborations to Promote Research and Scholarship: Examples from the Field

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ABSTRACT Expectations for and rates of scholarly productivity have increased substantively across academic fields, including physical education and sport pedagogy. Concurrent with higher scholarly output has been an increase in collaborative, team approaches to science and fewer sole authored publications. This has led to the development and propagation of different types of intra- and trans-institutional research arrangements. While research laboratories are traditionally associated with the natural or hard sciences, social science researchers can also develop meaningful and collaborative spaces. This can be the case even in environments with limited faculty affiliates or graduate students or minimal or marginal physical space. The purpose of this paper is to overview examples of intra-institutional arrangements that promote scholarship and education while collaborating with outside groups. We ground the conversation in sense of community theory and key tenets of collaboration. Four intra-institutional collaborative groups are overviewed and discussed as illustrative examples and linked to best practices in collaboration. More specifically, we highlight connections to the four components of SoC (i.e. membership, influence, integration of needs, shared emotional connection), highlight the teaching and learning mission of each unit, connect to four pillars of collaborative work (i.e. shared purpose, ethic of contribution, development of independent processes, value and reward collaboration), and highlight trans-institutional collaborations with other researchers and groups. We conclude with encouragement for others to use the examples provided as inspiration for creating or further developing collaborative scholarly groups.