Learning Wisdom Through Collectivity: The Women Writing Women Collective

Abstract

The Women Writing Women Collective was a collegial and collaborative response to the isolation that is often experienced by women scholars as they pursue their academic careers. For 5 years, a group of women gathered on a monthly basis to share their writing. In doing so, the group members provided a sounding board for each other as they engaged with writing and scholarship through reflective, reciprocal, and responsible critique and curiosity. As a writing collective, we began to recognize and deconstruct specific institutional constraints, practices, and theoretical stances that had influenced our perspectives and experiences of what it means to be women writing in the academy. Within this process of critical reflective practice, our scholarship, our writing, and our sense of community was strengthened. Within this article, we share our experiences of women writing and learning together