During the last couple quarters, the research team has participated in many assessment projects, aimed at assessing the current state of our writing center and our various activities. As a part of the Research Team, we (Chris S. and Graeme E.) were tasked with analyzing interviews of four Collaborative for Multilingual Writing & Research (CMWR) members who had facilitated Conversation & Culture (C&C) meetings. The interviews were conducted by Chris S. and Laura N. We were then tasked with writing a summary and analysis of the interviews.
C&C meetings bring DePaul students and others, especially English as an Additional Language (EAL) students, together to share experiences. The point of these meetings is for attendees to learn a things or two by collaborating with a wide range of people and their perspectives. During our collaborative analysis, we realized CMWR facilitators deemed collaboration as the element most integral to C&C meetings. Both our experience writing this analysis and the experiences of CMWR facilitators in C&C meetings speaks to the importance of the UCWbL’s fourth core belief “Collaboration among peers is an especially effective mode of learning” and one of our core practices, “Communicate clearly, respectfully and honestly.”
Effective Collaboration Strategies in C&C Meetings
All of the interviewed C&C facilitators separately came to the conclusion that the ratio of conversation between facilitators and participants should be at least 50:50. This similarity in outlook became even more pronounced when we noticed that three of the facilitators barely talked during their favorite meetings; they allowed the participants to take the reigns of the conversations. This stepping back may be why these C&Cs were so effective in facilitating the conversation at hand: they saw natural conversations as producing better collaboration than guided conversations. It was best for C&C facilitators to speak only to ask initial questions or prod the participants when “conversation lulled.”
The core of such active conversations came from the easily relatable topics that were discussed, as well as an emphasis and careful consideration of collaboration in these C&C meetings. These meetings aimed to include a wide variety of experiences, and so if unrelatable topics were the at the crux of the conversation, participants can become often limited to what they can contribute to the conversation. As such, food was seen to be a particularly effective topic; everyone eats food, so necessarily everyone will have something to say about a topic on food. Sports in these interviews were seen as a bad topic to facilitate collaboration. In the case of this topic, sports are not universal, so often people will have trouble relating to sports that aren’t popular in their home.
One instance of this was a topic about the winter Olympics. The only participant who showed up for this meeting couldn’t participate in the topic because they were from a country which doesn’t participate in the winter Olympics. As the participants continued to converse, the conversation slowly shifted away from the winter Olympic sports towards controversies surrounding the event, which the facilitators did not intend for. Thus, for C&C meetings it is much better to have easily relatable topics applicable to a wide range of cultures and perspectives, rather than having particular topics that may alienate people from certain cultures or backgrounds because a lack of relatability.
The example about the winter Olympics precipitates my last point for effective collaboration in C&C meetings: more participants is always better than less. All facilitators remarked that meetings attended by a small amount of participants were always seen as performing less as expected than meetings attended by a larger amount of people. In the case of large meetings, facilitators may also desire for them to be attended by a diverse group. Diversity in the participant’s backgrounds and experiences drives conversation, and so it comes naturally that more diverse experiences will bring up new unearthed questions and topics that previously weren’t considered. Thus, a large diverse group is always advisable when aiming for effective collaboration in C&C meetings.
Keep the Controversy, Lose the Confusion
During our assessment interviews, there was really only one point on which tutors majorly disagreed: controversial topics. Some facilitators saw controversy as a way to drive conversation, to learn, and to elicit varying opinions, but others reported that it ultimately led to unorganized conversation which caused the C&C meeting to be unproductive. What all of us facilitators noticed during our assessment of these dissenting opinions (two facilitators for controversial topics in C&C; two against) is this: it was less about controversial topics themselves than it was about lacking a shared understanding of the agenda. Those two facilitators that disliked discussing controversy in C&C meetings cited experiences where (what they viewed as) a non-controversial topic (like the NFL or the Winter Olympics) turned controversial throughout the course of the meeting. The facilitators that did support and sometimes even preferred controversial topics cited experiences where they had planned for the difficulty of controversial discussion.
A topic about the NFL became controversial when facilitators began discussing the problem of concussions. There was disagreement going into the meeting among the facilitators about whether or not the topic should be centered on the controversy surrounding the league or football’s general cultural significance. Some facilitators pushed this conversation to controversy while some were only prepared to discuss the game, and thus it became unorganized and “ended up becoming a chance for all the CMWR members to trash talk organized sports.” This destroyed productive conversation as the facilitators were talking to the participants rather than driving conversation, and there was not much the participants could relate to.
The other example comes from the meeting centered around the winter Olympics which was meant to be uncontroversial, but this time, the transition to controversy was made by the participants. As we previously mentioned, the one participant had little to add to the topic and began discussing the more controversial aspects of the game. The facilitator reported that it was very unorganized with the focus being perpetually shifted from one political topic to another with no clear or understandable transition. To the facilitator, it seemed like it was “political for the sake of being political.” This shift from the Olympics to the controversy and politics further ruined productive conversation as the facilitators were not expecting this shift. As a result, it caused confusion about the topic among the facilitators and participants. As the interviewee after the event stated, this confusion didn’t provide a chance for discussion, but rather frustration: “you can talk yourself blue in the face, but if you’re not on the same page, it doesn’t matter.”
Both of these experiences, which were labeled by the tutors as “bad” or their “least favorite Conversation and Culture,” were labeled as such because facilitators didn’t have an agreed-upon plan going in. In the case of the Winter Olympics, they had no plan to deal with controversy at all. When compared with the positive views of controversy at C&C meetings, it becomes obvious that the collaboration or lack thereof, both behind the scenes and during the meetings, is that which separates good and bad C&C meetings.
To briefly touch on one more instance of this concept in action, we turn to one tutor’s favorite Conversation and Culture, which was on the controversial subject of Consent. It was good to this facilitator, because they all acknowledged that it was a taboo subject before they began discussing it. This metadiscourse about a controversial topic was and continues to be important because it takes some of the pressure off of members who might not be sure where others stand; getting everyone on the same page in terms of a starting point prevents the alienation that can come from immediately jumping into a controversy. People might assume they have to take sides right away.
This session was also effective in terms of driving conversation because a sense of community had been established before the group went into the conversation. All the participants and facilitators felt comfortable in touching on such a difficult conversation because they collaborated openly and honestly. When planning this meeting, the tutors were aware that this subject was a touchy one. This led us to conclude that the problem of controversy in Conversation and Culture meetings is not a problem when participants and facilitators collaborate with transparency and work toward a shared understanding.
What’s the Point?
When it came time to write up this assessment, we split it into sections. Graeme focused on the “Controversy” and the facilitators’ “Least Favorite Conversation and Culture” sections. Chris took the “Wordbank” and facilitators’ “Favorite Conversation and Culture” sections. But this was only after a process of sifting through notes and recorded interviews, collaboratively creating these sections, and talking about similar themes throughout the four interviews. Our collaboration centered mainly how we would integrate our different subjects into the assessment, and relate them to each other. Originally, we had no idea that “Controversy” would become its own section, but the discrepancies between tutors’ opinions on this subject were too stark not to be noticed. We took a lot of time talking (collaborating) about how to approach that section.
We also did a lot of brainstorming about how to approach this blog post. It only seemed right, after collaborating for 6-8 hours on the analysis, that we should focus on the ground for which our analysis, this blog post, and a good bond blossomed.