7 minute read
Where Great Minds Collide
Collaborative Collision
By Joshua Duke
Many months before the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences began its expansion, faculty members took part in a longstanding FSU tradition of interdisciplinary work at the annual Collaborative Collision. The annual event, which started in 2016, invites faculty members from across campus to consider solutions to major problems facing society. In 2021, former College of Education Associate Dean of Research Bob Reiser and Evangeline Ciupek worked with former Collaborative Collision Assistant Director Mike Mitchell to launch Collaborative Collision 2.0, reaffirming the University’s stance on interdisciplinary research. This year’s theme was Florida and faculty members from the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences took home top prizes.
A Game Of Health
Kani Diop-Lo, a teaching faculty member in the department of Human Development and Family Science, was involved with a team focused on Health Literacy and Education; the project was titled “Playing for Better Health: Leveraging Entertainment and Education to Improve Health Literacy in the Digital Age.” The project was named an Accelerator Finalist and received $25,000 in funding to create a pilot project.
Diop-Lo joined faculty members from the College of Communication & Information, the College of Arts & Sciences, College of Nursing, and the College of Medicine, as well as colleagues from the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems and the Department of Health, Nutrition, and Food Sciences. They wanted to address Low Health Literacy (LHL) in disadvantaged areas of the Florida Big Bend area. Previous research has shown that LHL is an indicator for preventable emergency department visits, so Diop-Lo and her team wanted to create an intervention to educate individuals.
Ultimately, they hope to focus on LHL and pregnancy to reduce maternal mortality rates in Florida.
With the $25,000 received from Collaborative Collision, the team will be creating a board game that will help educate individuals while having fun. Once this proof of concept is in place, Diop-Lo says they hope to scale the project by creating a statewide plan and reach more counties, state departments, and colleges. “We might as well think big!” she says.
A Hub For Stem Education
Vanessa Dennen also is thinking big when it comes to her Collaborative Collision project. Her team won the top prize, taking home $97,521 for their project, “FSU CHOOSE: Collaborative Hub for Outreach Opportunities in STEM Education.” The team views science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers as the future for Florida, and the purpose of their project is to increase participation in these fields through FSU. The ultimate goal is to make FSU a national leader in STEM outreach. To accomplish these lofty goals, the team plans to coordinate with faculty members at FSU as well as educators in North Florida K-12 schools.
Dennen, who is a professor in the Instructional Systems & Learning Technologies program, has gone through Collaborative Collision three times, and each time has been a positive experience. Her previous projects did not take home the top prize, but she reflects on the power of Collaborative Collision in her previous project. “Although we didn’t win, we were encouraged to apply for a seed grant, and we got that, which was just about $100,000.”
Now, as part of the winning team, Dennen reflects on her entire journey. For instance, through Collaborative Collision, she became interested in working with former dean of the College of Communication and Information and current professor of the iSchool, Larry Dennis. The two worked together on the last two projects. Dennen cites Collaborative Collision as the catalyst that brought them together, and despite winning the major prize only once, she says that receiving the seed grant felt like a major prize as well.
A Winning Formula
Dennen believes that the Collaborative Collision process inspires faculty to work together. It starts with faculty mixers, where those faculty members who are interested in participating introduce themselves, their interests, and their areas of expertise. Dennen describes this as a “real-time group brainstorm,” and from this step, project areas are formed. From there, faculty members can choose to participate in these project areas, thus forming the collaborative teams.
However, there’s more to this formula than just throwing together a group of experts. The Collaborative Collision team then provides coaches, who meet with the teams on a weekly basis. The coaches guide teams into creating tangible projects. As these projects form, Collaborative Collision narrows the teams, who refine their ideas further. At this stage, faculty members decide what they would do with funding, how they will roll out their ideas, and what role everyone will play on their team. The final step is a question-andanswer session with judges, then the prize money is distributed, which in many ways is just the beginning for these projects.
Communication is Key
What separates the top teams from the others? Assistant Director of Collaborative Collision, Mike Mitchell, says communication. “You have to be patient and really make sure that you and your collaborators are speaking the same language.” He would know, as he served as the assistant director of Collaborative Collision since the very beginning of the program until 2023. To facilitate better dialogue, Collaborative Collision centers conversations not on a particular academic discipline or research area, but on the challenge itself. “I think this approach has been very effective,” says Mitchell.
Effective communication extends far beyond formal meetings, however. Mitchell has noticed that the most successful teams often engage in informal interactions with colleagues. “Team meetings are great and necessary, but it’s the more casual conversations over lunch or coffee or even the few minutes before or after a meeting where you really get to know people and get comfortable with them.” Becoming comfortable with a team helps conversation flow more easily, and in such an interdisciplinary setting, Mitchell sees a powerful connection between communication and effective collaboration.
THE POWER OF TEAMS
As a specialized teaching faculty member, Diop-Lo is not expected to concentrate on research; however, she felt so passionate about helping hard-to-reach populations that she signed up for Collaborative Collision anyways. To her, this experience was a chance to “rekindle the flame,” and at the first networking event, she became excited at the diversity and wealth of knowledge found in the room. “Right there, I knew I was in the right environment with like-minded colleagues ready to collaborate and tackle our challenge.”
Working with others outside of an academic discipline or even a college can prove challenging, but Dennen sees this as essential to approach research from different perspectives. “I think that collaboration is a great way of approaching things because it’s easy to get locked into your own little box of your line of research. Collaborative Collision projects push you out of that and make you think about how your skills and interest set play in entirely different contexts.”
Mitchell agrees with Dennen. Complicated societal problems can stretch beyond the expertise of a single discipline. “A lot of those challenges are highly complex with lots of different causes and effects, none of which can be addressed in isolation without impacting the others,” he says.
The experience of collaborating is one that should be encouraged and is a rewarding experience all on its own. “Even if you think that you don’t have the right kind of expertise, it just might turn out that you have some valuable expertise for that team.” Her advice to those interested in collaboration is to “have an open mind, plan on meeting new people, and learn about the work that they do. And I think that through collaboration, you will learn about the work that you do in new ways as well.”
