Monday, February 18, 2008

A Failure to Collaborate

By Martin Sanders

Last fall, I reported on a successful scholarly collaboration involving three critics of a British author, the co-executor of that author's estate, an archive, and some good wine. We came, we read, we triumphed -- over notions of academic turf wars, intra-field jealousies, and the paranoia of being scooped.

The success of our endeavor was based on a few ethical propositions: Thou shalt not consider your colleague to be a rival, thou shalt not hoard your ideas, thou shalt practice equality among colleagues across academic ranks.

Lest readers suspect that -- having been blessed with lucky circumstances comparable to a rare planetary conjunction -- I simply lost touch with the realities of academic work, I feel obliged to follow with another report. This one concerns a collaborative endeavor that turned out differently.

Encouraged by the success of my archival summer camp, I wanted to see if the same spark of collaboration could be lit among my graduate students. After all, the lesson I had learned would seem to be universally applicable, confirming the adage that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, especially when it comes to people pooling their resources in the humanities.

Based on that conviction, I designed a final assignment for an English graduate class that required collaboration among small clusters of students. Each group was to tackle a multi-layered research assignment requiring textual decisions, bibliographic work, critical theory, historical research, and editorial design.

When I told my students that 40 percent of their final grade would be based on that project, I could see faces fall collectively. After a brief embarrassed silence, protests began to be heard from every direction: "But what if my group members don't deliver?" someone asked. "I don't want to jeopardize my grade based on other people's poor performance," someone else opined. So much for positive thinking, I thought.

I tried to persuade them: "Don't you agree that pooling your resources is likely to guarantee a better end product, especially given that the project requires putting in place so many individual components?"

Then I tried to cajole them: "Don't you think that it will be fun working together on an interesting project? Haven't you heard that cooperation is supposed to confer evolutionary benefits on any species that practices it?"

I knew it was a losing proposition even while I spoke. A wave of resentment was building inside that classroom, threatening to wash the whole beautiful idea of collaboration down the spout of unsuccessful pedagogical experiments. I like and respect my graduate students, but to incur their collective wrath is not something I fancy. To avert a mutiny, I adjusted my grading mechanism, so that the final project would account for only 25 percent of a student's grade.

My faith in the students' willingness to collaborate was only a bit shaken, but I had reason to become more disillusioned over the course of the semester.

As the deadline for the group projects drew nearer, the distress signals from various quarters grew louder. My mailbox began to fill with calls for help and expressions of frustrations, even as my office was haunted by students airing their grievances.

Because of disparities in ability and commitment -- and also because of well-developed egos, I should say -- it seemed that true cooperation was increasingly unlikely to happen.

What was needed instead was leadership, and in two of the groups, a project manager did finally rise to the occasion to stave off dysfunction and chaos. Curiously, though, after having grabbed the reins of their careening projects, those self-appointed project managers were faced with a surprising amount of apathy, or even resentment, on the part of the other group members.

"She's micromanaging me," one group member fumed. It turned out that what that student considered micromanaging was the leader's attempt to coax the complainer to contribute any work at all.

Some students felt their group leader was monopolizing the project; the group leaders themselves felt exploited by lazy peers who dropped the ball on myriad tasks, from data collection to formatting to writing.

Another group had a different problem -- its members simply never jelled into a functioning unit. They failed to agree on meeting dates and did not go over each other's work, turning in a project that somehow managed to be less than the sum of its parts.

Only one group was coming through with flying colors, making good progress toward delivering a solid final project. Instead of hearing complaints from them, I was occasionally greeted with a cheerful update in the hallway or after classes. They seemed to be enjoying what they were doing, and the dynamic between the group members was reasonably good.

They did not have a group leader per se but named a coordinator who held the strings just firmly enough to increase efficiency without creating an outright leader-follower dichotomy. As I learned from that coordinator, his group had further decided to let their differences become their strengths; instead of forcing one vision down everybody's throat, the final product was informed by a diversity of opinion and a sense of productive dialogue. Pretty mature.

Although all four final projects represented a considerable achievement, given the complexity of the task, and although some students did end up embracing their work with a degree of pride, the degree of dysfunction that attended this experiment was beyond my worst expectations.

Interestingly, the one group that did radiate collective enthusiasm about its project was also the group that produced the best work. The two groups with self-appointed project managers turned in reasonably good work, mainly because of the leaders' tremendous input. Not surprisingly, the most dysfunctional group came in last in terms of its grade for the project.

The moral of the tale?

Liberal-arts programs seem to be doing a decent job of teaching students how to own their work, how to develop an individual voice, and how to be competitive achievers. But they seem to be falling behind the curve when it comes to instilling the worth of a collaborative work ethic.

The sciences are doing much better on that front. As anybody who has ever picked up a copy of Science or Nature cannot help but notice, science would come to a screeching halt if researchers were incapable of collaboration. So why can't those of us in English do the same?

The scarcity of collaborative projects, especially in graduate school, may be partly to blame for that malaise. I also suspect that peer reviewing in the undergraduate composition classes has not made students any more adept at collaborating. Unless properly trained in the task of peer reviewing, freshman composition students tend to be listless, superficial, misguided, unhelpful, and purely judgmental in their critiques of a fellow student's work ("Great thesis, Joey" or "This paper sucks").

Graduate students seem inherently unwilling to accept that others could be as good as they are. Success is based on achievement disparity; hence it feels better to see others fail rather than to build them up to share one's success.

Egalitarian education may be neither feasible nor necessarily desirable. We do thrive on differences, and our market economy, as any business major learns, is based on uneven development. But that does not mean that cooperative-learning experiences should not be vigorously encouraged in higher education. Indeed, as our undergraduates enter the work force, many of them will be expected to function well in cooperative situations and to understand the dynamics of leadership.

Successful work in many professions is based on a symbiotic relationship between leadership and team work. To function well in a professional setting, you need to be either a good leader or a good collaborator. Yet more than half of my graduate students revealed shortcomings in both areas to various degrees: They shied away from taking leadership roles, but most were also poor team players and resistant to being led.

Even the group that seemed to be functioning reasonably well turned out to have its share of problems. At the conclusion of the semester, I offered the members of that group what I considered to be an attractive proposition: Collaborate with me (and other experts in the field), and I will help you bring your project to fruition as a book collectively edited by you.

The first step along that path was to make major revisions based on my constructive criticism, and to re-conceptualize the structure of the project. When I received the revised manuscript, the team of graduate-student editors had already shrunk from four to three, as one contributor had vanished without a trace. But the remaining three seem to be up to the mark and dedicated to staying with the project for the long haul.

So now I have a small number of highly motivated graduate students, an intelligent coordinator, and a network of scholars willing to collaborate with them and help shepherd their project through publication.

What's remarkable is that I started with 16 students, and ended up with just three who were fully up to the task of collaborative work. As batting averages go, that is a meager 0.1875, but then my team did not strike out, and the remaining players may yet produce a work that is a home run.