Professional collaboration in higher education to support academic writing : Benefits and challenges

At Södertörn University, Sweden, a collaboration model has been developed from the theory of academic literacies, aiming to support students’ writing development. In this innovative way of working, university librarians and writing teachers collaborate with lecturers to integrate a teaching element on academic writing (including searching for, appraising, reading, and writing texts) into existing university courses. In this article, we describe and discuss our experiences of implementing this model in nursing education. We observed that the collaboration made it possible for all professionals to share their knowledge, both in a theoretical and practical sense. Among other things, the lecturers appropriated several linguistic tools which they were able to use in their continued teaching of academic writing. However, challenges regarding the collegial sharing of knowledge were also experienced. If the lessons learned are to be implemented in the organisation, both resources and a mandate from the management are essential.