Has this ever happened to you? You are reading online about someone’s work, then discover they are close-by in your own community? When I was looking at the impressive winners of this year’s TAA awards, I was struck by the fact that one SAGE author won prizes for two books. This is a very rigorous peer-reviewed award, so winning twice in the same year is remarkable. As luck would have it, Dr. Callie Rennison is a local.

Back in the halcyon days of last week, when we could actually meet someone in person for coffee, I had a chance to speak with her. I was so impressed by her whole approach to research, writing, and teaching, I wanted to give MethodSpace readers a chance to hear from her. So rather than give you a written exchange, we met in GoToWebinar for this interview.

Tips that resonated with me from this interview include:

• Take a holistic view of your field, including topics other texts don’t cover, and stakeholders whose perspectives are usually missing.
• Write to help students prepare for the messy real worlds of research and practice, not an ideal world where things go according to plan.
• Use real cases that allow readers see the issues in context. By carrying cases through the book, you invite readers to see how situations unfold.
• Suggest writing assignments that ask students to learn how to write in ways that will be effective at communicating with policy-makers, professionals, practitioners who don’t read academic journals.

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Order SAGE books here, order Women Leading Change here.
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Janet Salmons is an independent scholar and writer through Vision2Lead. She is the Methods Guru for SAGE Publications blog community, Methodspace, and the author of six textbooks. Current books are the forthcoming Learning to Collaborate, Collaborating to Learn from Stylus, and Doing Qualitative Research Online (2016) from SAGE.

This article was originally posted on SAGE MethodSpace. Re-published with permission.