The Benefits of Collaboration: From Curriculum Mapping to a Community of Practice

Abstract

Collaboration is commonly viewed as a valuable and necessary yet complex and challenging aspect of faculty life in the contemporary academy. The value of collaborative efforts is often tied to tangible, measurable outcomes as a principle marker of success (e.g., increased publications, larger grant awards, and closer conformity to defined learning/project goals). Yet, what of the intangible values? What intrinsic value does collaboration hold for individuals, programs, and project teams? In an effort to explore these questions, we detail a collaborative self-study as a culminating component to a yearlong Curriculum Redesign Grant funded by our University. From our self-study, we forward a view of collaboration as a valuable process precisely because it necessarily moves beyond the tangible, formalized outcomes to involve the emergence of self-awareness, community, belonging, and the formation of heuristics capable of furthering group functioning in other endeavors. Ultimately, we suggest that collaboration is a process, one replete with ambiguity and uncertainty, but one that can yield additional sustained outcomes in the form of a community of practice.

Keywords:

• Collaboration
• self-study
• curriculum mapping
• community of practice

Notes

Notes

1 Wherever first person singular is used in brief reflective vignettes, which punctuate this article for the sake of bringing the relevance of our discussion to an intimate, personal level, it is written in and as the voice of the first author. Elsewhere “we” is used to indicate the collective thoughts of the first three authors of this article. Note: all the five authors of this article were involved in the process we describe herein; however, the first three authors completed the analysis and are conveying their collective interpretations in this article.

2 Here, “we” is meant to indicate the five faculty members of the six who were involved in the curriculum redesign project who desired to follow up with a self-study of the collaborative process. Of our initial six faculty, only five participated in the study that is represented herein.

3 This “we” refers to the five members (authors named on this article) of our initial six-member team in the curriculum redesign project who elected to participate in a self-study of the process of collaboration.

4 In this instance, “we” is intended to indicate the first three authors named on this article. Although there were six faculty who participated in the curriculum redesign collaboration, only five participated in the self-study that followed. Of those five, the first three authors of this article are responsible for the analysis and interpretations that are represented herein.

5 Again, this “our” is intended to indicate the analysis and interpretations of the first three authors of the present work.