Overview
This workshop Core Conditions of Collaboration: a shared reflective inquiry, led by myself and Poojitha Lal with support from Adam Ramejkis was originally conceived of as part of the Academic Support Who Do We Think We Are (WDWTWA) conference in June 2022, aimed at both students and staff. It was postponed as Adam came down with Covid that week in June, until Wednesday, 9 November at Chelsea College.
Signing up for the workshop
Information went out about the workshop via the official channels available: the UAL-wide Academic Support email as well as in the Post-Grad Community Newsletter.
Seventeen people signed up for the workshop, information that only Adam has access to as a staff member since Poojitha and I are students. I am not sure if the invitation went out to staff members in the same way it had for the WDWTWA conference. It was interesting to experience the other side of information distribution: we handed over information through the official channels and let them do the promotion work. We didn’t have an opportunity to email participants before or have any other contact with them.
Attendance
As a result, only 2 participants out of 17 made it to the workshop. I would be interested to know the stats on in-person UAL-wide attrition for workshops, in general, to see how this compares. While this didn’t diminish the quality of participation, and there may have been other factors like the maze of Chelsea College (see directional poster below). One was a staff member who is doing her PGCert and one was a student at Chelsea.
This lack of participation from students is something that staff members have noted to me in conversations before. To me, this is more indicative of the comms style and access for students than a reflection on the desire for events.
Development
Poojitha and I had outlined the workshop over several meetings and had slides to keep things organized. Because of a new technological interface, we couldn’t use the screen in the room and had to present using the computer, rendering the slides less useful. The presentation deck can be seen here:
The workshop
Poojitha and I opened with introductions and drawing representations of how we felt on post-it notes to share as a way to holistically incorporate and acknowledge people’s emotional states upon joining. We then outlined our backgrounds, and why we thought it was important to discuss collaboration as a skill that can be learned rather than something that is assumed to function, particularly at UAL.
We then moved to group discussion and brainstorming, providing pens and a large sheet of paper to write on and then opening those ideas into the conversation. Having something to visually and kinetically engage with is helpful as a method to accommodate and encourage creativity and multiple modes of learning.
After a lively discussion of people’s expectations of the word collaboration and their experiences of collaborating, we moved into thinking about what people think are the core conditions of collaboration, what makes a good collaboration to them. This also prompted an engaged dialogue. Things like forced vs. chosen collaborations (or group projects vs. organic collaborations), how sometimes collaborations fail because they are time-consuming without any result, to process vs. product, forming friendships as a collaborative model, and the importance of motivation, communication, and difference in collaborations.
We then shared the resource https://designingcollaboration.com and discussed the findings from that site and potential for usage in future collaborations, particularly as a way for participants to understand their own preferred style of communication and open vs closed and flat vs hierarchical models of collaboration.
Finally, we had colored paper, pens, and scissors for people to model their own style of collaboration in visual form. We then closed with another post-it drawing of how people were feeling at the end and compared those with how they felt at the beginning.
We shared a padlet link with participants as a place to record people’s experiences and with the hope of using this padlet as a resource on the Academic Support website in the future.
Feedback
We received a feedback form from one of the participants, sharing her reflections on the workshop:
The only negative feedback was not enough time working towards collating the group’s list of core conditions of collaboration, which was an exercise we cut a bit short because of time issues (because of attendance the workshop began late).
Conclusions + Further Steps
This was an interesting exercise in many ways. To go through the official channels was tricky and we had a high attrition rate for participants. There were generative discussions that took place and impact doesn’t only depend on the number of attendees. Poojitha and I asked Adam to become a participant in this session, which was a novel experience for him as he leads workshops.
Because of the number of workshops of Adam’s I have attended, participated in, and helped facilitate, it made me appreciate his pedagogical stance as I led this one with Poojitha. I commented to her that we’re really learning effective ways to teach.
I think that narrowing in on the fact that collaboration is a vague term that is used in the university system to mean a variety of things is an important one. The distinction between forced and organic collaborations is a key point. And the need to think about collaboration as a skill rather than only as something that can happen naturally is at the core of the message. None of those underlying issues have changed and they are elements of supporting cross-disciplinary exchange.
What wasn’t as successful was the communication channels about the workshop leading to low attendance. I think that these workshops could be more effectively embedded within courses as almost all courses have collaborative units. I’ll touch on this issue when I meet with Rebecca Wright, head of collaboration as CSM, this week.