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Writing and rewriting Australia: ECR collaboration in designing and delivering an Australian literary studies unit

Collaboration plays an increasingly important role in the academy, and for early career researchers (ECRs) is seen as a particularly central practice for developing community, increasing productivity and building a research profile. Collaborative practices are most frequently adopted in the research space, but we contend that there is also significant value in collaboration between ECRs in unit design and development, teaching-based areas that are traditionally the domain of a single academic. In this paper, we discuss our collaborative approach to the design of an Australian literary studies unit named Writing Australia, in which the Unit Coordinator, a full-time lecturer and ECR, shared the space of unit design and development with the ECR contracted to deliver the unit’s tutorials, a final-year PhD candidate. This approach enabled the unit’s tutor to acquire crucial skills that are required for academics roles, but the collaborative approach also resulted in the development of a unit that was itself far more focused on collaborative, multi-vocal delivery that asked students to engage with Australian literature not as a static body of texts, but as varied, diverse, and ever-evolving discussion about what it means to be Australian, and the ways in which Australia as an ideological edifice is endlessly constructed and reconstructed in our national literature.