Rewired: Research-Writing Partnerships within the Frameworks

Colleges and universities tend to be siloed spaces where we work within our own departments, divisions, and units and don't always recognize the connections we have with the work of our colleagues down the hall. Rewired: Research-Writing Partnerships within the Frameworks highlights the clear connections between two important disciplinary documents—the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (CWPA, NCTE, and NWP, 2011) and the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (ACRL, 2016)—and examines partnerships between librarians and their colleagues who are teaching information literacy in new and impactful ways.

Researching and writing are inseparable and interdependent processes, even in activities without a required research/source use component. From disciplines and areas one would expect—English departments, first-year writing programs, and university writing centers—to those perhaps more unexpected, such as the health sciences, courses in music, and summer bridge programs, Rewired features partnerships within a range of institutional types that have built upon the connections between these Frameworks in ways that construct meaningful relationships for students as they develop expertise in research-writing.

The chapters in Section 1, Developing a Shared Understanding, show off the ways we can learn from each other's expertise when we engage in conversation and break down the disciplinary silos that tend to separate us. The range of curricular reforms at institutions across the country showcased in Section 2, Partnering Research and Writing, offer multiple options for how partnerships between faculty members invested in writing in the disciplines and their librarian colleagues might develop in different kinds of institutional contexts. And finally, Section 3, Assessing Writing and Information Literacy, challenges us to think about how we assess students' research-writing development and the impact of the partnerships we develop.

College and research librarians have of course been working alongside professors invested in writing in the disciplines for decades. What is new about these partnerships is how faculty members and librarians are re-imagining their work, rewiring it if you will, for students in a world where writing is both global and largely digital.