"It’s not surprising that employers find that alt-ac employees need training in skills like project management and collaboration. Employees themselves also recognize that these are by and large not skills that they acquire in graduate school. Even among those who felt that their skills in these areas were strong, they noted that they gained them outside of their graduate program—for instance, through jobs or internships."
It's significant, I think, that author of the essay, Katina Rogers, can assert that the lack of management and collaboration skills among humanities scholars is "not surprising" without further comment: it suggests that all of us in the humanities know that this is a hole in our training. Given the way scholarship in the humanities is carried out, the fact that the hole is there is also not surprising. At least in literature, scholarship often feels like a very solitary endeavor. We conduct our research alone in libraries or behind closed doors in our offices. When we write, it's us, the computer screen, and however many cups of coffee (or glasses of bourbon) it takes to get through. While we share our work publicly at conferences, and appreciate conversations with fellow colleagues engaged in similar work, these moments of contact rarely lead us to work on anything together. I remember being somewhat startled in my first academic job, which was at a small school where I regularly spoke with folk in psychology, sociology, biology, and other data- and experiment-driven fields, to discover how often articles and books in those disciplines are co-authored. I don't think it had ever occurred to me before then that scholarly work could be accomplished that way.
It seems to me that this way of carrying out our intellectual work invades our habits of working more generally, and to our detriment. We see this largely in committee work, in the dysfunction of so many committees and the reluctance to participate on them. In my own experience, in two tenure-track jobs at two different different universities, committee work tends to be extremely unproductive: we talk a lot, and we're good at debating things like procedure or larger "philosophical" issues behind proposed changes or actions, but I've sat on committees that in some cases have accomplished literally nothing over the course of two or three years, simply because we were better at discussing ideas than at acting on them. Faculty meetings sometimes seem to go the same way. (I remember a colleague at my former job, after a particularly unproductive faculty meeting, saying to me, "Why does every decision we try to make devolve into a debate about the nature of democratic decision-making?") If I had a dollar for every time I'd heard--or used--the phrase "herding cats" to describe attempts at academic decision-making, I'd be able to retire.
The fact that we're so willing to describe ourselves as cats says something, I think, about how we think of ourselves. First and foremost, we to see ourselves as independent. This is largely a good thing--our job is to challenge assumptions, to think new ideas, to chart new paths in our fields. But the downside to this is that a lot of us (myself included) also tend to resent or avoid situations that require us to depend on others or to make compromises. This makes us avoid collaboration. It's a peculiar facet of the humanities that so many of us are so bad at--or simply reluctant to--work with other humans. And it shouldn't be this way.
Recent adjunct unionization efforts across the country suggest one way in which academic collaboration is crucial to our professional survival. Quite simply, there's strength in numbers, and what we can learn from these adjunct struggles is what labor organizing has been demonstrating for over a century: we can all get better working conditions if we're willing to come together and pull in the same direction. The attacks on academic standards and academic freedom coming both from legislatures and from university administrations that are the greatest threat to the survival of higher education in this country can best be fended off by working together.
From a pedagogical perspective, however, there is also a strong case to be made for greater willingness to collaborate in the humanities. As Rogers' piece points out, the humanities do not teach collaboration skills, but these are some of the skills most desired by employers. One way to serve our students better, then, is to build more collaboration among students into our curricula, both at the graduate and undergraduate level. But the lesson for students perhaps goes beyond the workplace. For a long time, I resisted all groups projects in my courses because I hated such projects when I was a student. Already a "cat," whether by nature drawn to a discipline of cats or trained into cat-like behavior by the discipline I chose, I resented not having total creative control over my work and having to pick up others' slack. What I realize now, however, was that group projects were an opportunity both to learn from the ideas of others and to learn how to work with others--to motivate them but also to back down, to change my mind, to be persuaded by others. However much I hated them at the time, collaborative assignments tried to teach what is in fact true about the world: that no idea I have amounts to much if I can't engage others with it, and that no engagement with the world can--or should--leave me untouched. I am not an independent being: my existence depends on others, and, if I'm honest about it, I've never really had the control my seemingly solitary work gives me the illusion of having. My own work has always been about and been informed by the work and ideas of others; why should I be reluctant, then, to engage others more directly, to produce work with others rather than just about others?
As a scholar in the humanities, I know well the oft-quoted words of John Donne: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." It's only recently that the real import of these lines for my own work has started to sink in. If Donne was right when he reflected, "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind," then it seems to me that the converse must also be true: that what other human beings add to this world also augments me, makes me more, and what I add to this world has the same effect on others. But how much more can we add, by how much more can we be augmented, if we embrace our connectedness, if we work with it rather than pretend it doesn't exist? And how much more do we teach our students, for their professional lives but also for their ability to engage with others meaningfully in the world, when we model that collaboration for them and encourage them to develop those skills themselves?
In practical terms, I don't have a good sense of what professional collaboration would mean for the work I do. But when I look at pages like Scholars' Lab, MLA Commons, and other such sites, I realize that a lot of work is already being done to enable greater collaboration in the humanities, and so I don't feel like I need to reinvent the wheel (which is, incidentally, one of the great benefits of collaborative endeavors). In terms of classroom design, I'm still doing a lot of thinking about how to best engineer group projects, but I think I've had moderate success in a few things. One change I've implemented in all of my upper-level classes, both undergrad and grad, is some form of presentation/workshopping on final projects. The key things here is that this takes place before the final paper is due. Students present on their research and provide an explanation of the main arguments of their project, but also discuss the difficulties they've encountered and the questions that still remain for them. Their classmates and I then provide feedback, suggesting passages the presenter might look at, ways of handling the difficulties, and sources that might be useful. The idea here is both to have the class learn from the individual work done by each student, and also to have each student get help on their work from the rest of the class. Every student who has ever commented on this exercise, whether to me or on course evaluations, has described the experience as useful. I've also experimented with the various collaborative tools offered by our course management software. I've used the wiki tool to have students create annotated bibliographies as a class, and to create a reference work on a variety of authors of their choice. I've used blogs and discussion boards to have students comment on each other's reflections. Currently I'm looking into websites that allow me to upload a document that everyone in the class or in a specific group can annotate and see others' annotations.
But the best outcome I've ever had from group work came from a semester-long project that broke students into groups that were responsible for a specific section of the course material. In individual projects, they were asked to research beyond the syllabus; as a group, I asked them to develop a study guide for the final exam and lead a review session of that part of the syllabus in the final week of class. Students did not necessarily like the project, but they clearly learned from it; I saw a nearly 10-point average increase on the final exams compared to previous years. And this goes back to the way in which our connectedness is a general asset. When students aren't just responsible for their own learning, but for others' as well--and when they will be held responsible in front of those others--they learn more. Collaborative work doesn't just teach students how to work with each other; it also potentially teaches them why they should work together, by showing them that their individual outcomes improve when they work as a group.
