Group dynamics and social capitol
19 July 2008
Social capital, according to Niemela (2003), is the ability of citizens to cooperate, to use resources, to create networks, to become engaged with each other, and to take responsibility for issues affecting the community. The degree to which individuals engage with the issues is the degree to which social capital increases.
(from Creating Self-Awareness of Learning that Occurs in Community by Imel and Stein, page 117)
Who can argue with this? But here’s the rub, as I see it in terms of practical application, whether in a traditional classroom setting or in an online class, students are rarely allowed to form their own learning communities. Most often groups are formed arbitrarily by the instructor, thereby potentially negating, in my mind, the most valuable aspect of group formation: the active desire to be a part of that group.
If, for whatever reason, even a single member of the group does not want to be a part of that group then the group as a whole suffers, reducing its social capitol.
Of course, we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater (was this ever really a problem?), so it seems to me that discussion on how to create a “more perfect” situation (a group where members want to belong) out of the inherently imperfect situation that a classroom, virtual or otherwise, presents (people who are there for a variety of different motivations) is much needed.
Certainly in my writing classrooms I’ve formed groups arbitrarily, but this method is only used for short-term (one class period) focused assignments (peer review of essays) where they are given very explicit instructions about how to complete a very specific task. In other words, in these situations creating social capitol is not the primary goal.
But what if it is, or at least what if it’s one of the primary goals, as is often the situation with longer-term group projects involving broader, often somewhat less precisely defined, goals? How can we somehow manufacture what in society occurs organically? This is something I’ve played with in the past and, while nothing has yet satisfied me completely, the tactic I have come to rely on most is a hybrid of my own judgment and the student’s own desire. I almost never form long-term groups early in the semester as there is often just too much instability (the adding and dropping of students, mostly) to ensure a relatively consistent group size. Instead I wait and watch and take note of how each individual student’s personality expresses itself. To get a broader range of observations I make fairly heavy use early on of the aforementioned arbitrarily-formed groups, watching not just for how well the group performs the assigned task but also for how individual personalities play off each other and taking mental notes specifically in regards to which parings seem productive and which do not. Then, in introducing a group project I usually make the focus of each group slightly different and I have the students write down, in order of preference, in which of the three groups they’d prefer to be. Using these lists and my own observations, groups are formed.
Inevitably not everyone gets their number one choice, but it’s actually been fairly rare that someone “gets stuck” with their number three. What usually results is a feeling of having chosen their own affiliation and, because everyone else in the group did so as well, there is an immediate commonality upon which the group can build. This doesn’t always work out perfectly, but it has worked very effectively to address the one situation that I find most damaging to the construction of social capitol—interpersonal conflict within a group.
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