Making Connections Meaningful

College football bowl season is drawing to an end, and while some are breathing a sigh of relief, I am saddened as it marks the beginning of seven dismal months until it starts up again. While I bristle when I hear coaches say that they coach young men how to succeed in life, certainly football and life and some similarities, I will acknowledge that all sports have lessons to teach. The best lesson I can see is that in an age where teenagers are accused of being completely self-involved (see The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in an Age of Entitlement), team sports are an area where they are forced to cooperate if they truly want to succeed. Essentially, they have to give up their own sense of self and join the whole in order to secure the big prize, often a championship of some sort, that they could not garner as an individual. (One could easily argue that this is still a form of self-promotion.)

Christakis and Fowler make some interesting observations about individuals’ desires to be part of something rather than alone in their book Connected. They suggest that humans are truly social beings and that “the function of loneliness is to promote reconnection” (56). So we don’t really want to go it alone and here we have contrasting messages. Teenagers want to be the center of attention, but they want to be a part of a network as well. Of course that answer seems clear enough, you can’t be the center of attention if there is no one there to pay attention to you.

Examining this concept of team and taking this desire to be networked brings me to my current quandary. I had the great opportunity this week to give a presentation at the truly amazing St. George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island. Their faculty is clearly top-notch and with all of these presentations, I certainly take away more than I offer. But after presenting many of my ideas on how to integrate technology into the teaching of English, there were some pointed questions. One was about assessment; one was what do you take out (both of these are age old) and the third, (another dinosaur of a question, but still just as relevant today as years before) how do you deal with group projects. Needless to say, I really had no answers to any of these questions, and I took a stab at each. But the cooperative question truly stuck in my mind due to this book Connected as well as the fact that this is why we try to sell technology to teachers. We preach that we can truly generate an authentic audience and better collaboration through the use of these web 2.0 tools and other technology. Terrific, still doesn’t solve the age-old problem of one kid doesn’t do the work and another does. Christakis and Fowler have a label for these collaborators and free loaders and they suggest that a network often doesn’t work without a punisher (220). Now it has been suggested that I have a heavy hand in my classroom, but I really am not interested in taking on the title of punisher in each of the collaborative projects I create for the classroom. (I think the title of grader is certainly more than enough.) So how do we create these group projects so that they don’t need a punisher. The only answer I can see is to create a situation where the students feel like they need each other. They have to see that the only way they can achieve the goal, and the goal has to be attractive enough to all involved that they want to pursue it, is by working together. Just like a team, you can only win the championship when all of the disparate parts are working in tandem, we have to create the same environment in these group projects. Whether it is a combination of skill sets (you need linemen and quarterbacks) or a multiplicity of voices, it needs to be clear that the goal cannot be reached alone.

So how do we translate all of this into group projects in the classroom? First we need to examine all of the projects we have previously deemed necessary as group projects. We as educators seem sold on the value of collaboration, but bristle at the idea of doing it ourselves. So why would students be any different, yet they flock to each other on Facebook. The challenge continues that we must harness the power and desire for a network into projects we deem valuable in the classroom if only for the purpose of teaching the simple lesson that individuals can achieve far more as a collective group than by themselves. As Christakis and Fowler put it, “All of these challenges require us to recognize that although human beings are individually powerful, we must act together to achieve what we could not accomplish on our own…The miracle of social networks in the modern world is that they unite us with other human beings and give us the capacity to cooperate on a scale so much larger than the one experienced in our ancient past” (304). Through this we can thwart the constant bemoaning of teenagers (and adults) of what can I do, I am only one person. Tell that to the Obama campaign or to the protesters of the Iranian elections this summer: One person did quite a bit.