On a team

I was in prison the other day (just visiting for a teaching observation).

My student and I were just beginning our post-session discussion when one of his colleagues knocked on the classroom door to remind him that the morning team meeting would begin in a couple of minutes. He asked whether I wanted to attend. I wasn't sure it would be appropriate, because I was an outsider, but I needed an escort to get back to the gatehouse and no-one would be available until after the meeting, so I acquiesced.

I was so pleased I did. It only took ten minutes, and nothing exciting happened; some nagging about locking doors (of course), some reporting back on "incidents" last week which some people may not have known about, with a clarification of reporting procedures...

There were a dozen or so people present, most of them standing up, in the dingy outer office. About four or five people spoke in response to the chair's invitation for anything to share.The "manager" was not even there (and I'm sure she's not happy with her formal label--she was a student of ours several years ago) but it all happened regardless. I have no idea whether anyone took notes. I hope not, because there is nothing more toxic to teamworking than having an eye to an audit trail.

I was the outsider, and stayed physically on the periphery. But I felt totally at home.

It may be that working as a teacher, in a prison, focuses one's thinking on the clash of educational and custodial values.  (Although it does occur to me that these meetings may be part of the standard operating procedure and that the prison officers on the wings do the same thing... I don't know enough to have a view on that.)

But what really struck me was the sense of team membership. Interdependence counts in an uncertain environment (although in practice of course prison education is much less hassled than in any open environment). It's the culture I have spent most of my working life in, and although not a demonstrably sociable person, it's one I value enormously.

And it is almost totally absent in most teaching in higher education*. (Big generalisation, carefully qualified, and of course not properly evidenced... B-?) It exists in research teams, sometimes very powerfully, but not much in respect of  teaching.

I think there is probably more of a sense of being a team amongst staff teaching on a professionally-- rather than academically--oriented programme. The modules of a professional programme are jigsaw pieces rather than free-standing units**, and (apart from notorious instances where the staff are at vicious loggerheads with each other) the staff need consciously to work together. Numbers of students and of staff are probably more manageable, too.

On academic programmes, particularly those such as humanities where there are few prerequisites, the structure (and options) of the course typically follow the individual interests of the faculty. ("Fred's retired, so we'll have to drop 'Origins of the novel' this year, but Gabby needs some hours, and so we could offer 'Queer theory and early 20th century poetry' instead...")

Academe has an ambivalent relationship with teamwork. It's both a highly individualistic environment and highly mutually dependent (and the extent depends a lot on the discipline--the more equipment you need, the more you have to depend on each other). But it's a tremendous and yet little explored resource.

Incidentally, real Teamworking has absolutely no connection at all with what Human Resources departments think it is, with their obscene expenditure on external "team-building" consultants whose only impact is to unite the potential "team" in visceral hatred of HR and probably management in general. It has to be a bottom-up phenomenon (and of course as such it can--for better or for worse--interfere with top-down initiatives) but when it comes together it is transformative.

On "write-only" documents again

I did write about this earlier, on 16 October 06 to be precise, but it's worth a re-visit.

I met a couple of former colleagues in a bookshop this afternoon, and after a few moments of obligatory skirmishing about the intellectual street-cred of the items in one's basket. [Note; the sole copy of Slavoj Zizek's (sorry, can't be bothered with the accents) latest hardback has continued to sit there, face out, for at least six weeks...] Sorry, after those few ritual moments, we caught up on the state of play at the factory (aka university) and what happened to some course proposals we had been involved in validating.

One of them had participated in the validation of an earlier version of a course which I largely wrote and which of course never recruited or ran. I knew it was fairly unlikely it would ever see the light of day, so I sprinkled the documentation with "easter eggs" as programmers call them--hidden gems which are only revealed to the dedicated few who really dig into the program. Of course no-one ever noticed

I think she was a little taken aback that I could be so cavalier with the university's sacrosanct quality assurance procedures.

Yet another example (to set alongside the collected works of Slavoj Zizek) of documents whose sole virtue is their existence. Perhaps we could try simply pasting "lorem ispum..." into required forms and seeing if anyone ever notices...