Calls for institutional accountability and curricular coherence suggest that faculty must collaborate more than they have in the recent past to achieve significant and ongoing curricular improvements. In the study reported here, the author and her colleagues asked members of academic departments with a reputation for ongoing curricular renewal to tell them about the role of faculty collaboration in their curriculum development efforts. While their examples of curricular collaboration varied greatly, their descriptions of the nature and context for curricular collaborations shared some important commonalities that might be instructive to other faculty and academic leaders who wish to foster greater curricular collaboration on their own campuses. In addition, these commonalities suggest the need to broaden conceptions of faculty collaboration to validate informal efforts that deviate from common prescriptions for well-managed teams and projects. In particular, many curricular collaborations can be better understood within a framework of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998, 2000a, 2000b; Wenger & Snyder, 2000) than of teamwork, as previous descriptions of faculty collaboration have emphasized (Austin & Baldwin, 1991). (Contains 3 tables and 9 endnotes.)