Abstract
In this issue, we highlight various modes and qualities that illustrate how collaboration has become essential for productive student learning. While notions of collaboration might seem second-hand or almost natural in today’s higher education vernacular, it is important to recognize how radical the idea also can be. Collaboration, as an idea, is counterintuitive to long-standing and powerful narratives of individualism and isolation that form many imaginings of the academy. Indeed, the picture of the lone students sequestering themselves into small cubbies in the library, surrounded by piles of books, volumes, and notepads, continues to circulate and inform our thoughts about how higher education looks and operates. Even in newly renovated buildings on campus, individual workspaces often outnumber collectivist or community-oriented spaces. The image of the solitary scholar burrowed away in a world of ideas still dominates populist conceptions of what higher learning looks like.
All this is to share that collaboration, while perhaps commonsensical to those who focus on student learning and development in higher education today, remains in tension with long-standing and powerful narratives about how learning in college is assumed to happen. This also flies in the face of decades of research from the learning sciences, which long ago demonstrated how all learning is both culturally mediated and a social activity. Yet the individualism of American culture and the hypercompetitive imperatives of global capitalism continues to position collaborative approaches to higher learning in the background. As the articles in this issue help illustrate, collaboration draws from and contributes back to other notions, such as community, care, and mutual benefit. These are the very values that often suffer when we think individually or toward singular benefit.
Within the pages of this issue, various opportunities and examples of collaboration are presented. Some engage externally to the institution, like Savitz-Romer and Rowan-Kenyon’s work on engaging industry. Some focus within classrooms, like Bettez’s piece about community commitments. In highlighting how collaboration can strengthen the capacity of the field of student learning professionals itself, Paige, Oliveros, and Reneau share reflections from their time at the former About Campus writer’s retreat. Finally, Byrne explains how student affairs professionals collaborate across STEM fields and extracurricular activities. I hope you will recognize the collaborative challenge to individualist narratives that I found in this issue’s contributions. Moreover, I hope you will take up the call for more collaborative approaches to higher learning.