Over the last seven years I’ve thought a  lot about how groups of people work together, I’ve  regularly contributed to cross-campus collaborative teams, and I have brought faculty from many backgrounds together around common concerns. I’m convinced the university community is strongest when it breaks bread regularly, explores ideas together, and tackles hard problems with an eye to new solutions.

In 2013 I reflected on the way the Learning Studio was attempting to enrich the campus environment, regularly drawing students and faculty into community, through its focus on teams in our Year Two Annual Report:

We’ve often said the Learning Studio was designed with groups in mind, and that’s true. Every room and piece of furniture was selected to enable students to work together, and many of the projects we’ve taken on over the last two years have us working with talented faculty across campus.

Authors like Stephen Berlin Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From have observed how unique habitats from the coral reef to the English coffeehouse have fostered innovation by bringing together a wide range of possible solutions. He reflects, “What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.”

The makerspaces and hackerspaces we visited last spring reminded us again of the unique energy of creative spaces. From the fertile chaos of NYC Resistor to the professional design studio at School of Visual Arts, innovative spaces may look very different but each leverages the power of groups to give its members access to a much wider range of possible solutions.

Keith Sawyer emphasizes this super power in his book Group Genius: “We’re drawn to the image of the lone genius whose mystical moment of insight changes the world. But the lone genius is a myth; instead, it’s group genius that generates breakthrough innovation. When we collaborate, creativity unfolds across people; the sparks fly faster, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

So much of our work in Year Two was focused on enabling groups to come together around shared experience or expertise. We’re energized by exceptional students and faculty and the ideas they bring in the door, and continue to look for ways to sharpen those ideas and give them the broadest possible audience. (33-34)

In my work since 2011 in the Learning Studio and long before that in the English department and the Adams Center, I’ve sought to build strong relationships with colleagues from across campus. In 2010, we offered our first digital photography workshop and have since added multi-day training in digital storytelling along with other software focused events and in that time I’ve led or contributed to workshops with 115 participants drawn from 26 different departments and divisions. Faculty members and strategic support staff from the following areas have invested entire days of their own time without any type of stipend incentives to build skills and develop relationships with their colleagues.

I’ve guest lectured regularly for colleagues on literature, film, and storytelling subjects. I’ve worked with Jim Nichols, Phyllis Bolin, and Jennifer Shewmaker to help welcome new faculty to campus in a range of roles and venues.

I also have regular opportunities to work with campus offices and support staff through our work in the Learning Studio. During campus tour season, I work directly with Enrollment Marketing staff and student guides leading dozens of tours to prospective students and campus visitors. We’ve found ways to make the studio available to University Marketing and PR and media staff on campus. Since the early days of mobile learning, I’ve worked well with IT and web services folks to support platforms that don’t sit squarely in any one corner of the institution. In our work promoting FilmFest with students, I have regular conversations with Student Life and we have contributed to a number of media-related programs through Chapel and Summit.

We typically think about collegiality as academics working well with academics, but I continue to look for ways to build productive relationships across campus as well.

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