This is a metaphor that I’ve been using lately in talking to people, and it seems to work for my purposes. I almost put it in a paper I was working on this evening, but it didn’t quite fit. I’ll probably work it into a paper somewhere along the line, where it fits more neatly, but I thought I’d kick it out there in this venue to play with it a little more first. I’m going to illustrate it in my particular work context, but it works just as well for other kinds of negotiations and collaborations.
Think of any group of people who might want to work together as an ecosystem containing a number of different species. The key question, then, becomes ‘What do they eat?’
Let me give an example. Researchers in education often want school teachers to work with them on their research projects. The current fashion, furthermore (and there are good ethical reasons behind it), is that rather than swoop in as Greek-godlike1 experts from afar, grab the data and carry it off, we should make the teachers ‘collaborators’ and ‘co-constructors’ of the research project. In return for their collaboration, researchers often offer teachers the chance to co-author the academic papers with them. This is a significant gift from the perspective of the researchers, because publications are what academics eat. Our promotion, tenure and salary are all tied to the ‘research productivity’, which translates to the number of publications in high quality refereed journals. The researchers are often shocked and a little offended when the teachers turn down this magnificent feast and refuse to collaborate.
But that’s because teachers don’t eat publications: they get virtually no benefit, apart from the small thrill of seeing their names in print, from an academic paper. (And, given that an academic paper has to be written in academic language, their role in the writing is likely to be small anyway, and it’s even possible they won’t want to read the paper when it’s done.) Teachers are more complicated than researchers, and they eat a number of different things.
One of those is time. They’re always too busy and too overloaded, so if you can find a way to give them some more time by releasing them from the classroom (buying in a substitute teacher) or in some other way, or even just to reassure them that your project won’t cost them time, that’s likely to work.
They eat standardised test scores too. They feel a bit guilty and frustrated about it, because they know darn well that standardised test scores are empty calories – educational junk food – but their teaching is evaluated in terms of their students’ test scores, so if they want to succeed, in the terms that’s defined in in their world, they need to be convinced that your innovation will serve up a steaming plate of test scores.
They eat student enjoyment and engagement too – if you can show them stuff that’s cool, that their students will think is cool, and that will get their students fired up about learning, they’ll happily eat that up. And finally, and most deeply, they eat students’ deep understanding of their subject. They want to see their students grow, develop and succeed, and they believe that really understanding science or maths or whatever their subject area is will help the students do that.
Determining what students eat is pretty simple, by the way – they find interesting, engaging teaching a nice treat when it’s in season, but their staple food is grades. So if you want them to get involved in your study, it had better promise pretty plausibly to improve their grades. That raises whole other problems if you have a ‘control group’ class that doesn’t get the new treatment, and still other problems if the course is graded ‘on the curve’ so that it’s impossible for everyone’s grades to go up, but that’s your problem as a researcher, not theirs: they eat grades.
So it’s actually not that hard – in any collaboration, you have to make sure that all the participants get fed what they eat, not what is food to some other species, otherwise they’re unlikely to thrive. They won’t die, but their participation and collaboration will. It works for other fields too2 – if you want someone to do something, it’s just a matter of figuring out what they eat…
- I mean their behaviour – all the swan-molesting and shower-of-gold-fornicating and so on, not their looks – I couldn’t carry off the latter, you’ve seen my picture…
- possibly even marriage – won’t be showing Suzie this column!