ENGAGEMENTIN COLLABORATION
Introduction
Engagement, a core pillar of collaboration, is the foundation for our manifesto. We collaboratively explored engagement, emphasising how active and meaningful involvement impacts group dynamics. We chose an e-zine format and Gibbs’ reflective model in first-person perspective. Our meetings, weekly leader rotations, and polls on meeting formats, encouraged inclusive decisionmaking, supported by a WhatsApp chat and shared whiteboard. Through tasks and reflective conversations, we addressed challenges in sustaining engagement, including fluctuating commitment and the need for clear goals and timelines.
Evie Corn
Feelings
We’ve experienced a wide range of feelings as a multidisciplinary group of asynchronous learners engaging in this collaboration: anxiety over doing something new, with new people confusion and overwhelm when the brief felt unclear pressure from varied levels of engagement and availability excitement when everything started coming together pride in our efforts and final product
The feelings of all collaborators have steered our course as we’ve done our best throughout to innovate and accommodate, finding ways to work together that could best engage every person.
LisaEvans
Evaluation
Not having an initial meeting with the whole team may have hampered engagement by elongating the process of the group’s overall contribution.
Alternatively, Whatsapp chat enabled us all to ‘attend’ the collaboration, however it may have limited our depth of conversations and discussions of weekly tasks to expand on ideas and further our critical thinking.
Introducing voting on when/how we got together allowed fair decision-making and enabled people to express their preferences so we could work in ways that suited most.
Charlotte Benbow
We learned to demonstrate inclusivity through creative use of the Whiteboard and polls to communicate ideas, express preferences, and make decisions. This was achieved by having a Whiteboard organiser who facilitated weekly tasks and kept everything structured.
Though a safe space was created, we could have had more icebreakers at the beginning of the collaboration, alongside a discussion around goal alignments and motivation for engagement. This would have ensured we were more able to meet everyone’s needs within the group.