Collaboration

Collaborative practices serve as another important link between design and postpedagogy. The distributed knowledge that emerges from collaboration prevents students from relying on the linear transfer of knowledge from teacher to student that both postpedagogical and design-oriented theories resist. We found collaboration in design studio contexts to be implicit, an assumed structure for acting and learning. Additionally, as we illustrate below, collaboration in design studio contexts seems to be an intensified and more extensive version of the collaborative practices one might encounter in a writing classroom (even one that is postpedagogically-inclined). During our research, we identified three primary kinds of collaboration: 1) student-student collaboration, 2) student-faculty collaboration, and 3) student-jury/clients collaboration.

As writing and rhetoric instructors, student-student collaboration was the most familiar to us. The students we observed worked in teams and often performed peer assessment.

Mechanical engineering teams at work. In the classroom at UMBC, students talk in groups of four to five, while two clients sit by themselves off to the side, taking notes.

However, this kind of peer work went well beyond a single project or activity. Frequently, teams of students work together on multiple projects throughout the semester. In some cases, student collaborations continue from one semester to the next. For example, as Martin, a student from the LEEDlab, explained to us in this interview clip, a student team might continue to work on the same or another student team’s project from a previous semester. The coordination of learning, in this instance, extends across space and time.

Martin: “We do, we inherit the work from the prior semester. And then we do our portion, and then we pass the baton to the next group of students next semester.” Pavesich: “Yeah.” Martin: “We’re not gonna be in this class next semester. So what we have to do is first find out exactly what it is we’re doing based on the information we’ve been given, we’ve inherited, and then try to leave some little bit of a legacy to the next group of students to move forward with.”

In terms of student-faculty collaboration, the classes we attended presented a rigorous model of distributed authorship. Sometimes, for instance, instructors worked with students on particular aspects of their projects. While teachers continue to provide guidance and mentorship in student-faculty collaboration, they also contribute to projects in ways that may not be recognizable to most humanities faculty. The fact that professors are willing to step into the role of collaborator changes their relationship with students. As LEEDlab student Joanna describes in this clip, students feel that there is a “mutual respect” that is carried throughout the semester, which changes the classroom dynamics.

Joanna: “But also speaking of the—and you brought up professors—and how we all are working toward the same goal, something particular in our architecture school and maybe it’s across the whole world, I don’t know, but you become on the same level as your professor. Like you call them by their first name; it’s not Mr. whoever. And there’s—I keep using this word—but there’s a collaboration between the two of you, mutual respect, and that carries the room. And I feel the same way, it’s very natural that you just go in, you work with these people that you have to work with, and it’s also something I’m guessing that we’re taught, well I’ve been here for six years, so, something that I’ve been taught through the architecture school, that we will always be working with other people and learning to kind of put yourself on that level.”

To cultivate this kind of working relationship, however, Joanna’s peer Martin adds that everyone— including professors—“checks their egos at the door.”

Martin: “Everybody kind of walks in the door and leaves their ego and titles and majors—all their different backgrounds, and that gets checked at the door and you’re immediately a team as soon as you step into the doorway.” Pavesich: “naturally?” Martin: “I think so.” Joanna: “Yeah.” Martin: “It just happens that way. At least from my point of view, that’s the way I’ve always treated it. I walk in the door and everybody’s an equal, whether you’re an undergraduate first-year, a graduate last year, or even a professor. And because you’re all effectively working toward the same goals, everybody brings this diverse viewpoint, which is terrific, because that makes everything richer.”

In addition to peers and faculty, students work directly with clients and jurors. In these situations, jurors are not merely critical evaluators but often collaborators as well. They push on and expand student ideas and offer new suggestions or possibilities.

Jurors and students collaborating during a crit at the Urban Studio.

In the photo above, jurors who are industry experts in architecture and urban planning circulate among student teams. During this critique, we observed jurors leaning in close, tracing lines with their figures, speaking familiarly with students, offering criticisms and possible solutions, and—in one notable instance—taking off a pair of high heels and stepping into a model of a multi-block site in order to kneel down and point out a particular change that would enable smoother flow of delivery traffic.

Jurors also bring interdisciplinary perspectives that necessarily extend and complicate the student team’s knowledge base, as Joanna explains in this interview clip.

Joanna: “Right, that’s something interesting I think you mentioned about architecture is that, when we were sitting in our group, is that, architecture in particularly has to go out and find other dimensions in other fields to kind of do what they’re doing and so with this it’s more collaboration and, and kind of stepping back and not thinking . . . Like I know nothing about . . . well, I know this much about demand-response and they know this much and so I have to come in and get their knowledge and I can provide them with my knowledge.”

In this sense, jurors serve as unofficial team members. Further, they sometimes have multiple points of interaction, since the same jury will often make more than one appearance in a semester.

In addition, some clients, like the person shown in the wheelchair in the picture below, are essential collaborators.

One of Rothman's design teams standing with their client who is in a wheelchair and wearing the product, an adapted lacrosse helmet.

Without this client’s input about his needs and desires, as well as his physical interactions with the prototypes, the student engineering team at UMBC would not have been able to design suitable equipment that would allow their client to thrive as a wheelchair lacrosse player.

We want to acknowledge that these complex forms of collaboration are challenging and they are sometimes met with resistance. For example, they require logistics that can be time consuming. Students also might worry about who their partners are and whether or not they will get stuck with an unfair amount of the work. More broadly, as UMBC mechanical engineering professor Neil Rothman stated in our interview, students are not used to the kind of freedom and responsibility associated with “active learning.”

Neil Rothman: “A number of faculty use, um, we’ll call it more active learning. And that’s especially for engineering, I mean, you have to do this. Because this is the world of engineering. Yes, you do some stuff on your own but you’re always part of a team. You have to learn how is it that you’re going to be working with other people. You know, you can be an individual contributor, that’s usually the individual contributor on a team kinda thing . . . so, the first time that students are introduced to that, it’s really bad. It’s because they’ve been used to, except for the minority who were involved in some sort of stem/engineering things in high school or other kind of things . . . is they’re used to sitting there being lectured to, turning in their assignments, and that’s it.”

One way that Georgetown’s Studio Collaborative responded to student concerns about collaboration was through a peer and self assessment tool. Articulated as part of the overall grading strategy, students were asked to reflect on their own and their teammates’ contributions to the project.

Studio Collaborative grading

This additional writing assignment, completed individually, allowed students to feel like faculty could take each of their voices into account—to avoid being completely subsumed into their team. From the faculty side, the peer and self assessment tool is simply another way of creating interaction, or to coordinate different experiences into possible learning.

Finding ways to overcome the challenges of collaboration is vital, a point that Cathy Davidson stresses throughout The New Education. Davidson writes that “institutions should foster deep, integrated learning . . . by cultivating the difficult and increasingly necessary skill of collaborating with those whose expertise and cultural background may be radically different from one’s own” (232). Because this kind of collaboration can be so complex, it is essential that students have opportunities to reflect on how collaboration works. For example, Rebecca, a Georgetown student, reflected on her collaborative path by illustrating this map—though of course it was not only her path, as her map makes quite clear.

One student’s map of her team’s experience in Pavesich’s Introduction to Rhetoric Course in the Studio Collaborative.

Rebecca depicted her team’s collaborative work throughout one semester to better understand the various elements that made this collaboration effective. Consider, for example, as an instance of faculty-student collaboration, the notation for February 29 in which Rebecca includes a text exchange with her teammates about a conversation she had with Pavesich. As an example of student-juror collaboration, note the email with a juror on April 14, a date that falls between midterm and final crits, where the juror suggests a particular model for the project. On a larger scale, Rebecca’s map demonstrates the ebbs and flows that occur when collaboration serves as the foundation of learning experiences.

The reflective practices discussed in the above examples mirror Lynch’s call to adopt a Deweyan notion of experience: “experience includes both the raw data of everyday living as well as the reflection on the experience that shapes our understanding of the future and (re)shapes our understanding of the past” (Lynch 75). This metacognitive assessment of collaboration is key to helping students gain knowledge about what successful (and unsuccessful) collaborative processes look like—knowledge they can apply to future collaborative opportunities.