Report on process related to AR topic: Dispositions for Community Building

Preparing for a future in which I create my own supportive community obviously means thinking beyond the actual taking of CCT classes and trying to distill what I enjoy and value about the CCT Program: the conversations I’ve had with instructors and other students; being involved together on projects (e.g. Art of Dying Project for PBL class); the pleasure in thinking about issues and topics in the articles/books I’ve read, etc. In other words, finding and maintaining a connection that lasts beyond the particular class or project is what building a support community would look like for me.

The fact is that this doesn’t happen often – reasons? People’s lives are way too busy. The class may be an oasis for them in their otherwise extremely full lives with family, work, and other interests. It is easy to connect while engaged together for a limited time, but what would it take to keep that connection alive after the class finished? As we are all still in the CCT Program, that connection still holding us – but what will happen when we graduate? As I go into this AR session, it seems to me that much will depend on the strength of the friendships that we have formed by then.

On the other hand, connections based not so much on personal friendship as on professional interests are obviously possible. For instance, the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) has a student section composed of the Graduate Scholar Exchange, a Listserv, the North/South Book Project (doesn’t look like it’s been updated in a while), and a link to Student Participation at the Annual Meeting. Many other discipline and education-related organizations must also strive to ‘mentor’ or keep graduates interested in their respective professions. Are there factors that contribute to the success of such organizations and factors that inhibit their success?

I began with the following proposal:

• Knowledge Claim: that learning about the qualities, attributes, and dispositions of people who join or develop support communities can help CCT students plan for their own post-graduation support community. In the KAQF exercise, I continued with:
• Action
• Confirm through a literature search that there is empirical evidence to back up this claim (or not).
• Follow up with people who have experience in starting and maintaining support communities.
• Use that information to educate oneself and others about the long-term advantage of remaining engaged with others, specifically fellow students and colleagues in CCT.
• Questions
• What does social psychology say about group processes and how that might relate to joining or developing a support community?
• Are there successful groups on which a post-graduation support community can be modeled?
• Who cares about this kind of knowledge? What purpose can it serve?

After completing the activities in class, listening to other students’ ideas, and going through the KAQF, I decided that instead of doing a survey of some kind, I would opt for an approach that was more theory-based. Why? Two reasons: I don’t see the need for another survey/questionnaire since that is what a number of classmates are pursuing. I want to pick an angle that I could accomplish in the window of time available (creating decent survey questions that can address the scenario, sending out the survey, and collating and interpreting the results might be difficult to do in the time frame for this assignment).

I conducted numerous searches in scholarly online databases and on the Internet but there seemed not to be any literature or studies about post-graduation professional (or personal) support. There was literature related to volunteering (and the characteristics of people who volunteer) and mentoring. Somewhat tangentially, I also looked at group dynamics to see if that would lead me to the reasons why people join groups. I had hoped to find publications that address WHY certain people are more motivated toward engagement than others. My original motivation in choosing this approach was to come up with a collection of articles from which I could synthesize a profile of personal characteristics. This information could ultimately be used for recruitment by CCT as well as for events and activities well before graduation that reinforce the idea and value of community (not that that doesn't already happen with the Open Houses, CCT Directory, and other events!).

I tried keeping the perspective in front of me that this is ACTION research, which seems to imply actively working with other people to solve some problem generated by the community involved. In terms of this class, the problem was not generated by the community (e.g. our classmates) but rather was suggested by the instructor – so there was a re-orienting process or mind shift that had to occur. Given that there were only three weeks to spend on this it was understandable, but in terms of the “ownership” angle, it has made a difference, I think.

I soon found that one of the outcomes of my original choice of approach – as far as building a constituency goes (i.e. people I actively engage in my proposal or line of research) - is that there really wasn’t one! For a while, I thought that I might have gone about this in the wrong order; perhaps I should have first surveyed Nina, Peter, and the teaching faculty to see if they would be interested in my proposal to find out the qualities/attributes/dispositions that characterize people who seek to join or develop a support community for themselves, and then gone ahead with that constituency in mind. Although this was an indirect way to think about developing a post-graduation support group, I thought that my findings could still contribute to that general goal.

Later on, following discussions in class and feedback, I feel that I misread the scenario in the first instance, because it really does ask what we would do, personally, to prepare for a post-CCT future in terms of building a support community. The CCT program and instructors don’t really even come into it. I think that the reason I resisted this direction to begin with was that it made assumptions that would have to be dealt with first: (a) all CCT students need community - before going on to address the second point: (b) CCT students can help each other prepare for their own supportive communities. Basically I took a) and b) as read – leaving only the how such communities could be created as the main question.

Although I initially opted not to do a survey, I found myself thinking later on that it might have made more sense to survey my current classmates, first, in order to find out whether they could use the information I came up with: if they knew that, for example, forming a “critical friends” group while still in the CCT program would strengthen their post-CCT future efforts to build community. As it stands now, I chose the angle of research first and then had to scramble to find/invent a constituency to be interested in the results of that research! The connection between my research and a constituency never did really solidify for me.

Going through this process has been instructive, especially because in the course of my research, I had occasion to find out about communities of practice, critical friends groups, and the writings of the 21st Century Learning Initiative group. I think that by taking the detour I did, I have gained a sharper appreciation for what longer term action research will entail (it has also helped that I have been reading Greenwood & Levin’s Introduction to Action Research: Social Research for Social Change all along – great book.)

Original page by jrc