I have recently noticed over and over again that many teachers tell us that they would love to work more collaboratively, that they are craving community, that they would like to talk through their course with someone who can provide a very different perspective on, for example, sustainability, yet it is not happening. Everybody is overworked and barely hanging on, so things that aren’t strictly necessary in the short run tend to not happen, or at least not as much as people claim they want it. Collaboration does not seem to be perceived as necessary in the short run: structures within universities are generally focussed on individual success and are often at odds with collaboration. Kezar (2005) presents eight key organizational features of institutions that support collaboration, so let’s see what we can learn from that!

Here are the eight key features that support collaboration:

1. A campus mission that stresses the importance of collaboration and that is actually lived. For example by mentioning the mission and its focus on collaboration continuously at formal events or in hiring processes, structuring courses around it (so for example in academic development courses use group projects rather than individual ones), and making it part of informal conversations
2. Networks of faculty and staff. Collaboration requires forming relationships first, so if there are existing networks and relationships in place already, this threshold and necessary time investment is lowered. Networks can be formed through orientation events for new staff, continuing education events like seminar series, social events. Networks can also be supported through incentives, like funding for people collaborating across faculties or other typical “divides”
3. Structures that support collaboration. For example academic development or other support units that support cross-institutional work; units/groups/project that are set up to work across institutions, and accounting systems that make it possible for people to collaborate or team-teach, for courses to assign credits, for splitting research costs, …
4. Incentives or rewards for collaborative work. So this means not just “requiring” collaboration on paper, but actually rewarding it for example in promotion and tenure cases, even though it costs time to set up in the beginning so successes might not be immediately obvious. Rewards could also be mini-grants or whatever makes sense and is seen as attractive in the given context
5. Actual importance put on cooperation by people in senior-level positions. This means they should model cooperation in their own work (their research, their committee work, how they come to decisions, …), in addition to mentioning it in all strategy documents and also in conversations.
6. Pressures for collective efforts from external groups. In many cases, universities listen closely to what external groups want and expect from them. Those could be societies, foundations, accreditation boards, industry, … So maybe one way to change things inside university is to work on what kind of pressures and demands are put on it from the outside
7. A distinctive set of campus values. That are not only written down somewhere, but explicitly referred to and used to guide decisions etc. If they aren’t talked about explicitly, how would one know what they are? I only recently discovered the core values for Lund University (and no, they do not include collaboration)
8. Initiatives to learn the value of collaboration. For example hosted by the academic development units through lunch meetings, … Or to actually require collaboration in the courses already!

It is maybe not surprising that most of the *organizational* features that support collaboration come mostly top-down, so are harder to influence for me in the short run. But what I find interesting is the importance of values and their communication. I recently started a discussion at my work about how I think we should write up what we stand for in terms of what our teaching philosophy is (inspired by Karolinska Institutet’s “principles for quality education“). I see that as a great boundary object that people can have a look at when they are deciding whether they should approach us and how, that we can use to point to in our workshops, that should also guide how and what we teach. This, in the first step, wouldn’t be a university wide statement, but could maybe be used as a starting point for discussion. Collaboration would naturally be a key theme in that document. I’ll share my draft here, probably long before it is ready… :-D

Ardianna Kezar (2005) Moving from I to We: Reorganizing for collaboration in higher education, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 37:6, 50-57, DOI: 10.3200/CHNG.37.6.50-57