Collaborative Working in Higher Education

The Social Academy

Lorraine Walsh, Peter Kahn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135215682
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Collaborative working is an increasingly vital part of Higher Education academic life. Traditionally, university culture supported individual research and scholarship. Today, the focus has shifted from the individual to the group or team. Collaborative Working in Higher Education takes the reader on a journey of examination, discussion, and reflection of emerging collaborative practices. The book offers suggestions for developing practice via a broad overview of the key aspects of collaboration and collaborative working, informed by focused case studies and the international perspectives of the contributing authors.

The book has three main parts:

Part I: Examines the social nature of collaborative working from a practical and critical perspective, focusing on four dimensions of collaborative working: academic practice, professional dialogues, personal and organizational engagement and social structures. It considers organizational models, varied approaches, potential challenges posed by collaborative working, and reflection on the management of collaboration at different stages.

Part II: Focuses on the different aspects of collaborative working, building on the dimensions introduced in Part I, and addressing the crossing of boundaries. It looks at different contexts for collaboration (e.g. discipline-based, departmental, institutional and international) using case studies as examples of collaborative strategies in action, providing learning points and recommendations for practical applications.

Part III: In addition to considering forms of collaboration for the future, this part of the book engages the reader with a though-provoking round-table discussion that itself embodies an act of collaboration.

Collaborative Working in Higher Education is a comprehensive analysis of how collaboration is reforming academic life. It examines the shifts in working practices and reflects on how that shift can be supported and developed to improve practice. Higher Education faculty, administrators, researchers, managers and anyone involved in collaborative working across their institution will find this book a highly useful guide as they embark on their own collaborations.

Part I
Collaborative Working in Higher Education

1
Opening Up Collaborative Working

Biologists would rather share their toothbrush than share a gene name.

Mike Ashburner, geneticist (Pearson, 2001)

Collaboration is rich with potential, and is often seen to offer greater possibilities than solitary working. A set of stock phrases have grown up to give expression to this sense of promise that we associate with collaborative working. Huxham (1996) talks of the ‘collaborative advantage’ that arises when we work together. Kanter (1994) also speaks of ‘creating new value together’ and collaboration leading to a ‘stream of opportunities’. And we could go on to quote numerous other authors. But why is collaborative activity viewed in this way? What does collaboration allow, what does it look like and what are we doing when we collaborate?

At its most basic level, collaborative activity can be considered to take place where two or more parties work together to achieve a common goal, whether those parties involve individuals, groups or institutions. Increasingly, university staff and their institutions are engaging in collaborative working and partnerships in a variety of arenas. The complexity and networked nature of our twenty-first-century world seems increasingly to demand new patterns of working from all of us, while the changing nature of knowledge also affects the ways in which we work, opening up scope for yet further innovation.

So how can this potential of collaborative working be most effectively realized? The fact that several individuals or organizations in themselves agree to ‘collaborate’ is not sufficient to bring forward a useful and creative collaborative venture. Working collaboratively can be very time-consuming. It is challenging, is fraught with potential pitfalls and can result in tensions and disagreements. Opportunities need to be developed to afford and realize possibilities for constructive participation across a collaboration. Language needs to be shared – or created – and understood by all those involved. Effective collaborations require energy, commitment, resource (human and capital), enthusiasm, determination and possibly a good dollop of sheer doggedness to see them through to a successful conclusion. So why do it?

The primary purpose of this book is to assist readers in both understanding and shaping their collaborative practice within the academy. It is designed as an accessible examination and discussion of the world of collaboration and partnership working in higher education and is presented in three sections. In its approach the book bears many similarities to a set of matryoshka – Russian dolls. The largest doll, the book itself, is about collaborative working in higher education. Layer upon layer of this text reveals further facets of what a collaboration involves. We begin in this first part of the book, Part I, with a discussion that opens up to examination the nature of collaborative working. In Part II the issues within the book are illuminated and contextualized by case studies drawn from many countries, which detail a range of experiences of collaboration. And in Part III we include the commentary from a round-table discussion on collaborative working with Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), and Professor Ron Barnett from the Institute of Education, London, and then turn to consider future possibilities and directions for collaborative practice within the academy. Essentially, this book appears to us to reflect the nature of academic experience in the twenty-first century, where collaborative working is fast becoming the norm.

Our examination of collaborative working in higher education begins in this chapter with a discussion of the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ behind collaborative working, addressing both drivers and barriers to such activity. Drawing on the first of the case studies that inform this book, we then explore from both a practical and a critical perspective how collaboration is essentially social in nature. This discussion allows us to introduce a model for collaborative working in higher education, a model that we then use to underpin the book as a whole, informing our discussion of collaboration in relation to teaching, research and administration at individual, institutional, national and international levels. This context of the academy provides an important backdrop for our analysis, taking us beyond much of the existing literature in the area, which focuses either on collaboration in generic organizational contexts or on working together in narrow areas such as partnerships with industry or other educational sectors.

The Promise of Collaborative Working

On one level, then, the advantages of collaborating seem clear: more effective working; improved outputs, produced more quickly and more efficiently; and shared ideas and shared effort. In other words, collaboration represents a philosophy based on the idea that ‘two heads are better than one’. Collaboration offers huge scope for delivering cost savings and efficiencies. One approach has been to create larger, combined contracts to improve service and achieve savings. Similarly, purchasing consortia within higher education represent an area where collaboration is already extensive, and for clear financial reasons.

Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that collaboration, particularly in an educational context, is not primarily about economies of scale, but concerns extending the possibilities for research, opening up new avenues for learning and furthering a multiplicity of aims within the academy. We can thus see such advantages arising from collaborative working as the following:

• a greater resource than just the individual upon which to draw;

• several, rather than only one, potential ‘leads’ to maintain the momentum of your project and to refresh the initiative with new ideas and energies;

• cross-fertilization of ideas and enthusiasm;

• the satisfaction of realizing a significant project that would have been unthinkable, and less enjoyable, without the support of others.

In some cases, also, we can see that collaborative working serves first of all to benefit others rather than one’s own interests. An example of this is provided in an issue of the International Journal for Educational Integrity (2008), where the editorial, in reference to two articles submitted by African scholars, comments, ‘[A]cademics in more privileged institutions have a responsibility to collaborate with our colleagues to ensure that these stories reach a wide audience’ (our emphasis). The idea of a responsibility to collaborate is an interesting one, and resonates strongly with the notion of the academy; and indeed we explore these issues further through a case study in Chapter 4 by Imelda Bates and David Baume, looking at a collaboration bridging the United Kingdom and Ghana that has already spanned more than twenty years.

Another facet of this ‘piggy-back’ approach to collaboration, where one half of the partnership is seen to be less advantaged in some way than the other, can be seen in the idea of ‘cognitive authority’. Pilerot (2006, in Rich & Smart, n.d.: 223) contends that ‘information professionals can gain cognitive authority through working alongside academics [as they are] more influential when seen to be collaborating with academics, and when their contribution is visibly endorsed by academics, than when they appear to work in isolation’. The extent to which this may be smoke and mirrors is immaterial if genuine benefit is derived. It provides a further example of an ‘added extra’ in terms of the collaborative process, where the outcomes of the actual collaboration itself, in this case between academic and information professional, are further enhanced by the added benefit of cognitive authority through association. Furthermore, this mutuality can work both ways. Even though it may be that authority stems first of all from one partner, that partner may themselves gain as much from the collaboration as the others involved – and this indeed may well be the case in relation to the two articles just cited. We see this with the musicians within a jazz band, who improvise together, picking up threads of the riff one from the other as the music develops and builds or meanders and settles; or with dance partners, who in practising new steps must learn to accommodate one another, to alternately lead or follow and to respond to individual strengths and weaknesses. Within both of these examples, mutuality, trust and values are developed, shared and realized.

A key reason to engage in a collaboration is thus to learn. Goals that relate to teaching and research intrinsically involve a social dimension. Thus, for example:

• Teaching primarily involves a social process, where the aim is to catalyse the interest and engagement of the student, rather than to download information into their minds.

• Research is not just designed to lead to outputs that collect dust in a library or languish ‘un-clicked-upon’ in cyberspace; the aim is that others build on this work and learn from it. And such wider learning is more likely to occur if one’s research involved a collaborative process.

Collaboration provides a way to realize these goals for learning, forming as it does a key aspect of academic work for teachers and researchers. We can see that a further benefit arises when staff engage in collaborative working, in that they then model effective practices to their students (Rich & Smart, n.d.: 220). This is useful for a number of purposes – not least the very practical one that collaborative working can support learning among students of differing abilities (see Pilerot, 2006, in Rich & Smart, n.d.: 223) – and also reflects skills expected by the twenty-first-century workplace. One can see why Sachs (2003) identifies a collaborative approach as one of six components of a new activist teacher professional identity.

This may be all very well, but to what extent do research or teaching improve as a result of, as opposed to being facilitated by, collaborative working? Is there any evidence for improvement? After all, we may be asked to participate in collaborative activity by our managers, or may need to justify our collaborative activities to them. In fact, advantages of collaborative working, in terms of improving the ‘mechanics’ of going about research, have been acknowledged for many years. For example, Pelz & Andrews, writing in the 1960s, identified providing new ideas, catching potential errors and keeping colleagues ‘on their toes’ as useful outcomes of a collaborative partnership (Presser, 1980), all of which can help to provide improvements in practice over the lone individual wo...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Case Studies
• Figures
• Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Part I Collaborative Working in Higher Education
• Part II Case Studies in Collaboration
• Part III Developing the Social Academy
• Index