Abstract
The aim of this article is to examine collective memory work (CMW) as a method for turning the work-life experiences of adult learners in a part-time master’s program into a collective knowledge resource, thereby strengthening the interplay between theory and practice in the students’ learning processes. CMW is a well-known qualitative research method, but only a limited amount of research has been done on its use in the context of higher education. This article is based on a case study of five CMW workshops executed between 2015 and 2019 as part of the program ‘Master’s in ICT and Learning’ provided by four collaborating Danish universities. The data consist of an educational design, in-class observations, and 103 memories written by students. This study shows how CMW enables students to share and analyze their work-life experiences as a relevant and rich collective knowledge resource, which allows them to discover shared structures between their work-life experiences and strengthen the interplay between theory and practice in their learning. The conclusion is that even though CMW is not designed to be used in an educational setting, the method can be applied with great results to turn students’ work-life experiences into a collective knowledge resource.
Keywords
“CMW creates an egalitarian space for students to ‘raise their voices’ and share their experiences by turning sharing into a collective assignment.”
Introduction
The aim of this article is to examine and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the qualitative research method collective memory work (CMW) when used in higher education, with the purpose of turning the work-life experiences of adult learners into a collective knowledge resource and thereby strengthening the interplay between theory and practice in students’ learning processes.
Collective memory work (CMW) is a qualitative method developed within the women’s movement in the beginning of the 1980s by sociologist and philosopher Frigga Haug (2008). The CMW process consists of three phases: individual writing, collective analysis, and research communication, which are described in the section named “A short introduction to CMW.”
The article takes its point of departure in the five ECTS (European credit transfer system) module “ICT and Learning in Organizations,” which is part of the part-time master program “Master in ICT and Learning’ (MIL), jointly provided by four Danish universities: Aalborg University, Aarhus University, Copenhagen Business School, and Roskilde University. The students at MIL are 30+ years old and most work full-time alongside their studies. To get accepted, students need to hold at least a bachelor’s or professional degree (e.g., as a nurse or a teacher), and many hold full master’s degrees. Furthermore, students are expected to have at least 2 years of degree-related work experience and technical skills in information technology (IT).
Working with adult learners with the aforementioned profile in an academic context makes it relevant and necessary to find methods that can support an educational design with a strong focus on the interplay between theory and practice. Relevant, because this group of learners bring with them work-life experiences that can concretise, enrich, and challenge the theoretical discussions included in a master’s program. Necessary, because this group of students most often study with the purpose of transferring and using the theoretical knowledge gained in their study directly in existing practice, thereby enhancing their practices and/or improving their job opportunities. This article discusses CMW as a possible method.
This article begins with a literature review followed by a general introduction to the method, and a description of the way CMW has been implemented in educational design. Then, an analysis of the methods’ strengths and weaknesses is made based on in-class observations and an analysis of the 103 stories produced between September 2015 and September 2019.
As the authors of this article, we play two roles: teachers and researchers. In the following, we refer only to our role as teachers, as our intention is to support teachers’ and educational designers’ work.
Literature Review
As a first step, a review of literature found in the EBSCO, ProQuest, and JSTOR databases was conducted by looking for peer-reviewed articles, conference papers, and books published between 1990 and 2019 in English concerned with “collective memory work,” “CMW,” and “collective memory work in higher education.” ProQuest showed no results for the search on “memory work,” “collective memory work,” or “CMW” in abstracts, and none of the databases presented articles that included “collective memory work in higher education” in the abstracts. However, an additional search in Google Scholar (as of September 19, 2019) presented 754 titles of articles that included “collective memory work” in the full text, though only a handful of these articles included research in CMW in higher education. SpringerLink showed seven articles about CMW in higher education, but only three of them included CMW as an educational design or method for investigating teaching in higher education.
As a next step in the search for relevant literature, the limited number of relevant articles found in the database search was expanded by a researcher experienced in the CMW method, who pointed out 15 articles that had not appeared in the search. Of these 15 articles, we found nine relevant for the subject matter of this article. Altogether, the literature search has shown that the number of articles concerned with the use of CMW in the context of higher education is limited. Therefore, this article contributes to changing that and putting CMW on the radar of educators, educational researchers, and designers.
The literature included in this review was written by people who hold the double role of teacher and researcher. The articles are therefore all written on the basis of the teachers/researchers’ own experiences with turning the CMW research method into a teaching approach. The review shows that CMW has been used in higher education in many countries (Grimwood & Johnson, 2019; Hamm, 2018; Kokko, 2009; Pattman, 2012) and in a variety of higher education contexts, such as tourism studies (Grimwood & Johnson, 2019; Small et al., 2011), sociology (Pattman, 2012), teacher education (Kokko, 2009, 2012), and political science (Jansson et al., 2009).
A shared purpose across the articles is the wish to bridge the gap between theory and students’ experiences, as well as enable students to recognize and discuss how their experiences are related to societal structures of repression (Widerberg, 1998, 1999). Although the reviewed articles share the wish to bridge this gap, we find differences in the way the method has been adopted across the articles. None of the writers apply the method as it was originally described by Frigga Haug (1987). There are variations in relation to, for example, the time devoted to writing and analyzing the stories, the way the theme of the CMW is decided, and the type of narration and number of stories analyzed. It could be argued that none of the articles deal with CMW, as the original “protocol” of the method is not followed. Instead, the review tells us that the CMW method is flexible and that adaptations are allowed and accepted. As Robert Hamm (2018) formulates it, “Any description of the [CMW red.] method needs to be read as an option, not a rule set in stone” (p. 118).
This review shows that using CMW in an educational context comes with strengths and weaknesses. Some university teachers found that students revealed anxiety when former perceptions were challenged when working with CMW, causing the teachers to change their educational designs accordingly (Gulley et al., 2018). Others found that students could have challenges in working with the method due to emotions that were affirmed or shamed as early as in primary school (Ingleton, 1995). When students utilized CMW for self-research, they expressed that it gave them a way to build community and create insights they could not have generated without it (Lapadat et al., 2010). Grimwood and Johnson (2019) describe how turning the method into an assignment in an educational setting (re)establishes some hierarchies in the classroom that become visible when one person’s story or memory serves to delegitimize others’ personal experiences. This is a situation that forces teachers to break with the ideal of CMW of relating to the students as co-researchers and instead step in as classroom managers. Another article describes how using CMW enabled students to address the teachers’ dilemma of closeness/distance, as using CMW provides the opportunity to get very close to the students as they share experiences, and through the method become co-researchers contributing to the learning process, instead of merely passive receivers of teaching (Alvesson, 2003).
This review also indicates that teachers/researchers sometimes struggle to deal with closeness/distance in the original method with its wish to democratize research challenges and the roles and power relations between teacher and student when used in an educational context. In the reviewed literature, it is only the students who share their memories (O’Reilly-Scanlon et al., 2004; Pattman, 2012), while the teacher/researcher performs the role of referent, making notes of the students’ analysis instead of partaking directly in the analysis (Widerberg, 2016).
Because CMW has been used and implemented in different ways in the articles reviewed, the review does not provide a clear picture of whether it is a good idea to use CMW in an educational context. Instead, it provides an insight into some strengths and weaknesses that educational designers have encountered in different contexts when using the method.
A Short Introduction to Collective Memory Work
The following includes a brief description of the three phases: individual writing, collective analysis, and research communication. For a more detailed description, we recommend the research by Haug (2008), Schratz et al. (1995), and Onyx and Small (2001).
Phase 1 is concerned with recollecting and writing a narrative based on a personal memory. At the start, a group of participants agree on a shared subject of interest. Each participant then spends time recollecting and writing a detail-rich narrative based on a personal memory related to the chosen subject. The narrative must be written in third person in order to allow the author to distance themselves from the content, and enable a collective process of analysis in the group that is focused on the content, not the author. For example, the students in this case were asked to describe a personal experience from their work in which IT provided obstacles or enablers for learning.
Phase 2 consists of a collective analysis that begins when the participants (including the researcher) have read the CMW stories. The participants then express their understanding of the stories in turn, looking for similarities and differences between the memories, as well as elements whose relation to each other is not immediately apparent. They try to identify markers of the “taken-for-granted” explication of meaning by identifying clichés, contradictions, or generalizations, as well as discussing theories or popular conceptions about the topic. The collective analysis is expected to bring new perspectives on the participants’ practices, which may lead to suggestions for change (Haug, 2008; Onyx & Small, 2001). In this case, the students were asked to read all stories and consider similarities and differences as preparation for the collective analysis.
The aim of CMW is not to create one “true” analysis, but to allow participants to share their readings and interpretations of the narratives and create a rich and multifaceted understanding of the written memories. In the process, the narratives should stop being individual memories and become a shared pool of collective knowledge. In this case, the students participated in a collective analysis that included more of their stories that were discussed from the students’ different perspectives, allowing them to bring in their own experiences, questions, or doubts. It is also possible to include a process of re-writing and re-analyzing the narratives in a way that allows participants to go into greater detail of some aspects of the memories.
Phase 3 is concerned with theory building and is conducted by the researchers who lead the CMW. This phase is based on the previous two phases and can be implemented as a co-creative process between the researchers and the writing participants or completed by the researchers alone. It is a process wherein the memories and the collective analysis are related to the existing literature, academic discussions, and theories relevant to the topic at hand. Thus, new theories, hypotheses, or research questions are brought forward (Haug, 2008; Onyx & Small, 2001). The students’ memories could be used for theory building or learning from work experiences based on, for example, practice theory (Gherardi & Miele, 2018), activity theory (Sannino & Engeström, 2017), or communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), but this is not the aim of this article.
One assumption of the method is that the power structures our lives are embedded in are reflected in the narratives we tell, and that by sharing and analyzing the written memories collectively, it becomes possible for CMW participants to recognize the structural conditions shaping their lives across the individual written memories (Onyx & Small, 2001). A second assumption is that theoretical concepts relate to common sense, and that by working with CMW, it becomes possible to bridge the gap between theory and the experiences of everyday life. A third assumption of the CMW method is that it allows the participants to become “researchers” in their own practice, and that this should be seen as a process of empowerment (Haug, 2008).
In the following, we will describe the context in which we have applied CMW and some methodological challenges we have encountered as we fit the method to our educational design.
Designing With Collective Memory Work for Part-Time Adult Learners in Higher Education
We implemented CMW in a 6-week module in ICT and Learning in Organisations offered in the Master in ICT and Learning (MIL) program. The module started with a 2-day face-to-face seminar running from Thursday afternoon to Saturday afternoon. After the seminar, a period of online activities took place.
In preparation for the module, students were asked to produce a written memory of one to two pages following the CMW method. They were introduced to the background and purpose of the method and the writing rules and provided with an example of a CMW conducted in a global company to understand how leaders managed to lead online without meeting their team members physically, as many students find it challenging writing about a memory in third person. The theme was set by the teachers. In our case, it was formulated in the following way: “Write about a personal experience where IT has been an enabler or obstacle for learning and knowledge sharing at your work.” The formulation was aligned with the focus of the module. Students were asked not to put their names on the stories, and they were informed that the stories would be shared with the class and considered a shared pool of empirical material that all participants could draw on. This was done to help students understand the context in which their stories were to be used, enabling them to write about a memory that they felt comfortable sharing.
On the first day of the seminar, a 90-min collective analysis with the whole group of students was conducted. Two stories were analyzed during the session. The purpose was to practice how to make a collective analysis with the aim of bringing different voices, perspectives, and interpretations together in a complex analysis of the data, rather than to create “the right analysis.”
As the collective analysis started, students were given about 2 × 10 min to read through the stories. In line with the subject of the course and the theme of the CMW, we asked students to look for IT as an enabler or obstacle for learning and knowledge sharing in their analysis of the stories.
During the analysis, we, as teachers, took the role of facilitators. The students were encouraged to share their thoughts. We never disagreed with any of the students’ readings of the text, but diligently recorded their words and ideas on the blackboard. As students did not always read and interpret the text in the same way, opposing ideas emerged on the blackboard. After about 45 min, the students generally seemed to have run out of new readings, and we moved on to the next story, which was analyzed in the same way.
Until September 2019, the aforementioned structure of the collective analysis was used. However, we found that even though this provided the students with a shared reference point to anchor the theoretical discussions during the seminar, analyzing only two stories was too meager and left a rich knowledge resource underused. Consequently, we decided to expand the use of the CMW material in 2019, and on the second day of the seminar, we used the stories in relation to introducing three different theories: action theory (Sannino & Engeström, 2017), practice theory (Gherardi & Miele, 2018), and SECI (Socialization, Externalization, Combination, and Internalization) theory (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 2007). From 2019, students were, in addition to the initial reading and collective analysis, asked to analyze and discuss the CMW stories using the theories presented. This work was done in smaller groups of two to six students and allowed for most stories to come into play. Students were asked to discuss how looking at the story with the theories and their central concepts guided their attention. The exercise was designed to allow students to link theory and work-life experiences much more closely, see how theory could enable us to look at and understand our experiences in new ways, and discuss the strengths and limitations of theories in relation to experience.
During all the years, the face-to-face seminars were followed by an online period where students were asked to analyze and discuss an organizational learning problem involving technologies. The students were not asked to use the CMW stories as empirical material, but many did.
As stated in the beginning, the aim of this article is to discuss and examine the strengths and weaknesses of CMW used in the context of a part-time master program as a method for reaching the following three goals: enabling students to bring their experiences into play, thereby creating a common pool of knowledge resources, and making an interplay between theory and practice possible. In the following, we zoom in on these three goals one by one.
The Strengths and Weaknesses of Doing Collective Memory Work With Adult Learners in Higher Education
Bringing Past Experiences Into Play
As underlined in the introduction, it is relevant and necessary in the context described to get students to bring past experiences into play in class, as it is a prerequisite for being able to create a common pool of knowledge resources and enable an interplay between theory and practice. In our five CMW workshops, 103 out of 112 students turned in a written memory and thereby shared an experience. We see this as a strength of the method that facilitates the process of sharing in several ways.
First of all, CMW creates an egalitarian space for students to “raise their voices” and share their experiences by turning sharing into a collective assignment. By asking everyone to write, not only the students with the courage, interest, and abilities to speak up get a voice. Furthermore, as nearly everybody participates, no one is singled out. The anonymity offers some refuge as it shifts the focus from the writer to the content.
Second, the “writing rules” provide students with a scaffold for communicating their experiences; everybody has to write about the shared subject in a fixed form (one to two pages in third person). This scaffolding seems to enable students to think less about “the right way” to communicate their experiences.
Third, in CMW, sharing is not a spontaneous act, but a well-prepared activity where students are given time to recall experiences and reflect on which ones they find relevant and wish to share. Furthermore, the method provides time to find the right words to describe tacit memories that students might not have put into words before. We see the strength of the method in the combination of being a collective assignment, offering anonymity, and providing “writing rules” and time to prepare.
The fact that not all students participated could point to some weaknesses of CMW. One weakness could be that taking part in CMW is a time-consuming activity, requiring time to recollect memories and to do the writing. Time is an issue for many part-time master’s students, as they try to juggle jobs, private lives, and study at the same time. Second, even though the method creates an egalitarian space for sharing, some of our students expressed hesitation regarding sharing private experiences with teachers and peers who they had not met before the seminar. Third, as the method is often new to the participants, it could generate insecurity about what to expect when turning in a written memory. These weaknesses could hold some students back from contributing. As our data show, it was not a big problem, but it is still relevant to consider any barriers that keep students from participating.
Turning Students’ Experiences Into a Collective Knowledge Resource
It is one thing getting students to share their experiences, and quite another to turn the material into a collective knowledge resource. For the stories to become a knowledge resource, it is important to consider both the form and the content of the material.
In relation to form, an obvious strength of the method is that it is based on written words, which means that the experiences are communicated in a form that is possible to distribute among the participants. Furthermore, unlike experiences shared in oral form, written memories make it much easier for participants to hold on to the words, as it is possible to read and re-read memories, highlight parts, make notes in the text, and discover details that are often lost in oral communication.
Another strength of CMW in relation to turning students’ experiences into a collective knowledge resource is the number of memories shared. Because nearly all students turned in a written memory, the amount of data to draw knowledge from was large. Having many stories to draw upon changes the written memories’ quality into a knowledge resource, as the quantity grants students the opportunity to discover shared themes, patterns, and structures across stories. Some shared themes found in the collective analysis in our class included how management can hinder or enable the role technologies play in relation to learning in organizations, how different technological abilities among colleagues can lead to conflicts or hamper collaboration, and how educators have to deal with a growing self-consciousness when their work is exposed online for every colleague to see and judge, for example, a learning management platform.
Finding shared themes in a collective analysis made it possible for the students to see their own reality reflected in the stories of others and realize that they were not alone with their experiences. As one student once said when reading the story of a peer, “this could be my story.” In this process, students recognized that they could learn from each other and that they might share knowledge and research interests. Furthermore, the collective analysis allowed students to see the complexity related to the use of IT for learning and knowledge sharing in organizations. This complexity was not present in the individual stories but became visible when the stories were brought together.
To summarize, by bringing written memories together, we believe that the CMW method can enable the creation of a collective knowledge resource that allows students to identify shared organizational challenges and discover the organizational complexity in which their memories are embedded.
Enabling an Interplay Between Theory and Practice
The last goal of using CMW is to enable an interplay between theory and practice and thereby help students look at their work-life from a theoretical perspective, as well as identify work-life problems worth researching. Here, we only focus on the educational design from 2019, in which we extended the use of the CMW stories and asked students to analyze the stories using the theories introduced at the seminar.
As an example, students were introduced to the Japanese researcher Nonaka’s theory on organizational knowledge creation. Nonaka (e.g., Nonaka et al., 2001) offers, among other things, a theoretical understanding of technologies as not only “tools” but as “spaces” that we work and collaborate in. Asking students to analyze their CMW stories using Nonaka’s theory encourages them to think of the technologies present in their stories as spaces that create openings and barriers for interaction and co-creation of knowledge.
When the students analyze several stories by means of a theory, as illustrated above, their understanding of their stories as well as the theory changes. In the interplay between stories and theory, students get the chance to experience the theory as a pair of glasses that makes it possible to look at a familiar reality in a new way; for example, it becomes possible to see technology as a “social space.” The theory can also become less abstract and more related to practice as the theoretical concepts are applied to the students’ work-life experiences. Furthermore, bringing the stories and theories together also allows students to see the limitations of the theory, such as when it seems more relevant to understand the technology in the story as something other than a “social space,” and other theoretical concepts of technology are brought into play. Last but not least, the interplay between stories and theory sharpens the students’ eye for the possible collective questions worth discussing, examining, and researching both from practical and theoretical perspectives.
We observed after the seminar how questions identified in the seminar were often turned into research questions guiding the students’ work in the online period, and the CMW stories were used as case material. As an example, one group of students worked with the following research question: “How can the management of X [anonymized] organization create a shared space for the employees” collaboration and knowledge sharing, and how can the technology be implemented in a way that supports such a space?
Results
Looking at the analysis presented above, it is clear that the CMW method can be used effectively in the context of a part-time master’s program for adult learners to enable students to bring their past professional experiences into play, create a common pool of knowledge resources, and make an interplay between theory and practice possible. In this way, students are enabled to do research and develop answers to relevant problems from the real world.
This analysis shows that the method enabled students to share their experience in a form that made it possible for most to participate, get a voice, and do so in a way that could easily be shared and interacted with by others. The analysis also shows that because so many students participated, a significant pool of memories was produced and a rich collective knowledge resource was created. This resource allowed the students to look at their own practice from a meta-perspective, discover shared patterns and structures across the stories, and create an interplay between theory and practice. In this interplay, the written memories allowed the students to gain an understanding of the theories by applying them to their own practice. This process not only gave them insight into the theories, it also opened up possibilities for discovering new aspects and understandings of the reality presented in the stories. Furthermore, CMW enabled the students to engage in academic discussions incorporating relevant theories and shared experiences, and some of these discussions led to research questions that the students brought into their project work. All in all, CMW appears to be a powerful method for including adult learners’ work-life experiences in academic master’s study.
Through our account and analysis of CMW use in the context of a formal academic education, we also touched upon some challenges related to the use of the method. In our view, the challenges were not related to the method itself, but rather to the constraints that exist in the educational context to which we have transferred the method. In particular, time became an issue, as we felt a need to make room for other activities in the program to meet the curriculum criteria. This meant that it was necessary to bypass some “rules” of the original method and adapt the method to fit the context and overall course design. However, we believe that both the literature review and our analysis show that the method can be adapted.
Discussion
The original CMW method aimed to challenge the relation between researcher and “informant” by creating a more egalitarian relation where knowledge was produced in a co-creative process. This empowering and collective potential of the method was not unfolded and examined fully in either our educational design or the reviewed literature.
In adult education, students bring with them valuable knowledge resources gained through work, education, and life lived, which enables an equal relationship between students and teachers. If a more equal relation could be created, it could enable a better integration of the teachers’ and students’ different types of knowledge—something that holds the promise of an even more enriching experience.
Future research examining educational designs that use the CMW method to challenge the roles and power relations between teachers and students in adult education could therefore be interesting. It would also be valuable to examine how CMW impacts fields such as social work, online leadership, e-learning in higher education, global management, and other complex processes.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We thank our students in MIL at Aalborg University in 2017, 2018, and 2019 for their great courage and engagement in CMW, which allowed us to learn about this method through experience and discussions. We also thank the steering board of the Master in ICT and Learning for supporting the publication of this article by covering the costs of proofreading. Finally, we thank our reviewers for the thorough feedback that enhanced this article.
Conflict of Interest
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.