Some Thoughts about Collaboration and Reflection

I’ve been doing a good bit of collaborative writing as of late (have to for a couple projects). Can’t say that I am enjoying it entirely. The give and take is fun, but waiting for other folks to “give” is not. Maybe I need to chill out, but I think I am seeing one reason, at least, why the student writers I work with groan a bit when I announce a group project. I’m a pretty good collaborator (at least I like to think so), but I am seeing the limit of my ability to work and play well with others.

My thinking goes something like this. I seem to take a farmer’s approach: I stay engaged as long as I see that a group is building meaningful capacity of one sort or another. That capacity need not, of course, be related to completing a particular task. My grandfather and I used to bullshit about any number of topics that had little to do with getting cows milked or hay bailed. We were building a relationship, taking joy in being together. That’s meaningful human capacity and was meaningful for us. It was worth the time. My grandfather had no interest in, say, knowing which clothes were fashionable (and I follow him here) or writing complex essays (he and I differ here). Investing time in such do involve building capacity but not, for Norm, meaningful capacity. Likewise, my grandfather refused to buy an all-wheel drive tractor with a cab and air conditioner. Such a piece of machinery offered tremendous capacity, but such capacity seemed to him not worth the cost.

Hmmm, so I begin to check out of a group if it has interests that seem not worthwhile or seem too costly. That makes sense to me, but brings me to ask for details. What is worthwhile and how do I know. This seems to me a question my students and I wrestle with. Take, for example, a roundtable assignment some just completed (quite nicely, I might add) or a proposal some just wrote (not quite as smashing). I’m not sure that all of them felt that these activities were worthwhile. I think what they were unsure of was the effort involved in synthesizing ideas, speculating about possible outcomes, and reviewing past effort. What I noticed was folks speaking extemporaneously or free writing. It felt like few had worked up notes (there were some exceptions) or paged through what they had done and free wrote about it before setting to the published project they were submitting or performing. The result were quite nice individual performances and sentences, but roundtables and proposals that were incompletely integrated and that did not really reveal what the performers/writers knew. The roundtables rarely named a central theme and stuck to it; members acknowledged each other but didn’t often get involved with what others said.

So I wonder why. Do I need to spell out even more clearly the value of synthesis, speculation, and reflection? Maybe. Is it unreasonable to ask U.S. students to value these intellectual disciplines? Maybe. If the later is the issue, I’m in trouble. I feel that these disciplines are central to being human (oddly, my farmer grandfather did too). I join groups to pursue these disciplines. I'm not sure that I work well with learners who are uninterested in making connections, imagining alternatives, and listening to others and themselves.

Do I need to?