12 Collective action and collaboration: What is in it for us?

Inspired by and reflecting on a conversation with Professor Anne Tallontire about collaboration, I felt the desire to capture my related meandering thoughts, which grew further after our conversation. So thank you, Anne.

Being with others

As human beings we enjoy the company of others. We seek to be with others when we feel happy and excited, unwell or down, but also when we realise that our life experiences are so much richer and we can achieve so much more when we are part of something bigger than ourselves, a diverse group, a community, or even a movement… with a purpose. Can something similar be said about education and learning?

Learning is relational, at least for many of us. We regularly search for learning relationships of trust with our peers, students, and researchers. But also, with others outside a course we study: friends, family, and work colleagues, as well as connections in our discipline or professional area, the place we study, work, and live, and the environment. Digital networked technologies, participatory media, and open educational practices create new opportunities for human connection beyond boundaries and geographical limitations. We can meet others and we do, regularly, and harness opportunities for human connection, for sharing, for growth.

Shared purpose

While we must acknowledge the important role our inner glow and drive to learn, develop, and progress play. Feeling part of something bigger, where our contributions matter and having a shared purpose and contributing to the wider good will propel us further. It can bring personal and collective fulfilment and create a sense of dynamism, agency, and empowerment that will make everyday life more joyful (yes, full of joy!) and meaningful, and do I dare to say happy and hopeful? We see this in the open educational movement and open scholars who are united by social justice. Young people also seem to be motivated to make a real difference to the world they live in. In a study conducted in the UK for example, young people expressed their desire to learn together creatively and across disciplines when at university to solve some of the biggest challenges of our times (British Science Association, 2022).

Collaboration brings harmony

Collaboration, while often seen and experienced as challenging and still under-used (Jisc, 2023), is the vehicle that can lead us to a life that places our collective interests, curiosities, imaginations, priorities, and gains before individual ones to achieve something we wouldn’t be able to on our own. Nobody says it is easy. But it is worth it and can be so rewarding! In a world where competition is king and primarily individualism is celebrated and rewarded, collaboration may seem like an impossible endeavour, something that could easily and quickly be reduced to wishful thinking, an idea we should abandon.

However, we can model a collaborative alternative throughout education (it is our choice) and illuminate what is possible and the real difference it can make to us collectively. When we stop thinking about what is in there for “me” and what is in there for “them” and start thinking and focusing on what is in there for “us, me and them, all of us, collectively, we may be getting to a new place. Will such an approach enable us to move beyond expected reciprocity, perceived obligation, and blind loyalty? It may sound like a utopian proposition, but is it? Does it have to be? Should it be? Remember, we are all here for a little while only… travellers, explorers, and adventurers. The true richness in life is not really what we accumulate, that turns to dust anyway (we easily seem to forget this!), but what we give, what we share… and the experiences we have together. The memories we co-create. Our smiles, our tears, our ups and downs. The difference we can make to others when we work and live together in harmony.

Opening up to genuine connection, otherness, people, perspectives, experiences, and ideas is vital for collective growth, freedom, solidarity, and respectful and equitable communities and society. We are all unique, and that is the real beauty, as Treviranus (2016, 7) highlighted that “it is this variability that gives us collective strength.” When we focus on what we have in common, what unites us instead of what divides us, and celebrate our differences as opportunities for enrichment, could this help us also to co-create a more respectful, caring, and compassionate world and a healthy, embracing human race and planet for current and future generations?

Let’s work towards a more collaborative higher education, a higher education for good (Czerniewicz & Cronin, 2023), and harness the power of diverse togetherness instead of territoriality, egocentricity, exclusionism. How can we genuinely transform higher education into a fountain for and of more diverse and boundary-crossing collaborative experiences and model a way of being and becoming that is truly embracing of otherness within the curriculum as well as in co- and extra-curricular learning experiences we co-design and offer with and for all our students, staff and the wider community to make a real difference and positive contribution based on equitable togetherness, collaboration, and mutually beneficial partnerships?

Note: An earlier version of this article was published as

Nerantzi, C. 2024. Collective action & collaboration: What is in it for us? Knowledge Equity Network blog. 8 August 2024. https://knowledgeequitynetwork.org/casestudies/collective-action-collaboration-what-is-in-it-for-us/

References

British Science Association 2022. Future Forum: Creativity in STEM: Young people’s views on using collective collaboration to build a better future. British Science Association in collaboration with Unboxed Creativity in the UK,  https://www.britishscienceassociation.org/News/future-forum-report-2022-published

Czerniewicz, L. and Cronin, C. (Eds.) 2023. Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures. Open Book Publishers. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0363

Jisc (2023) Student digital experience insights survey 2022/23. UK higher education (HE) survey findings. Bristol: Jisc. https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/9224/1/DEI-2023-student-he-report.pdf

Treviranus, J. 2016. Life-long learning on the inclusive web, Proceedings of the 13th Web for All Conference, Article 1, Montreal, Canada, April. 11-13.  https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2899476