Teaching “between”: Reflections on learning inter-organizational collaboration

How can we teach collaborative possibilities that arise between organizations? Given the skills, knowledge, and critical perspectives needed, how can information educators best teach excellent inter-organizational collaboration? It is difficult enough to sustain a service-learning approach where students are involved with one organization; how can we teach savvy navigation between two or more? These questions emerged through the iterative design and teaching of an LIS service-learning course that ultimately grew to focus on the space “between” libraries and related community organizations.

The course, Youth Services Community Engagement, created a curricular bridge between two related library and information science (LIS) areas: youth services and community informatics. Initially part of a grant (Mix IT Up! From the national Institute of Museum and Library Services in the US), this 2-credit service-learning course sought to build this bridge by placing LIS graduate students in volunteer roles at community organizations serving and working with youth. As of summer 2017, 63 students had taken the course in on-campus, online synchronous, and hybrid synchronous formats (joint meetings with some students in a face-to-face classroom and some students online). They were coached to serve as “ambassadors” from LIS to the organization and from the organization to our course.

Students had to choose non-library community organizations. This rule meant that students would reach out, preferably beyond their own comfort zones, and engage with youth-serving organizations that were relatively disconnected from libraries. Students identified opportunities and secured volunteer placements serving youth in juvenile detention centers (jails), youth groups in religious organizations, after-school homework programs in schools and neighborhood centers, reading promotion programs in urban areas, Boys and Girls Clubs, one food pantry, and one school for the Deaf, and many more places. Some students, especially those co-located on-campus, volunteered together at the same organization. Most online students were the only ones from this course volunteering at those sites.

Libraries were more familiar to most students than the organizations where they volunteered. Students often brought to the course knowledge of libraries as organizations from the two required LIS core courses and the elective Youth Services Librarianship. Some students had prior experience with service learning through the elective Community Informatics, which focused on information technologies in communities. But their common knowledge was libraries and librarianship, since they were all LIS master’s students. In this course, they also had in common the experience of moving between graduate school and community organizations serving youth.

How can we teach collaborative possibilities between organizations? In some sense, I learned this from the students. In postings and discussions throughout the weekly live/synchronous course meetings, students analyzed their volunteer experiences. The course assignments led students through a process of 1) identifying a volunteer placement with a non-library organization; 2) serving regular volunteer hours while analyzing the mission, purpose, and practices of their chosen organization from the “inside”; 3) collaborating with small groups of student placed at similar organizations to lead discussions and presentations; and 4) writing a final Youth Advocacy Paper, in which students review their experience, evaluate their service sites, and define their own philosophy of advocacy. I expected there to be challenges in each of these steps, but I did not initially anticipate that steps 2 and 3 would lead to rich in-class discussions about inter-organizational collaboration. Students began immediately began speculating about how their organizations could connect with libraries. By modifying the readings on the fly for that first iteration, and more deliberately in later iterations, the course evolved to address inter-organizational collaboration.

Even the required course texts were changed as a result of conversations with students. The initial required text, From Boardbook to Facebook by Fasik, emphasized the importance of taking risks as a professional, concluding with a section on “making change happen” that encouraged future innovation in library settings (Fasick, 2011). For the second iteration, it was clear that students needed more sociologically-informed readings in order to understand other youth-serving organizations and envision inter-organizational collaboration. The text Between Movement and Establishment: Organizations Advocating for Youth by McLaughlin, Scott, Deschenes, Hopkins, and Newman (2009) was added because it describes a range of organizational types in youth advocacy, from grassroots to institutional. “These groups exist in the middle of a continuum between social movements and stable organizations and institutions” (McLaughlin et al., 2009, p. 8). Reading these two texts together reinforced the mindset of coming from a library-oriented perspective and serving at a non-library organization.

How can we teach savvy navigation between organizations? Readings and discussions gravitated increasingly toward understand what “between organizations” means, both practically and politically. Helpful concepts included theory of information worlds with special focus on boundaries, since students are working at an outer boundary of their graduate program and the organization (Jaeger & Burnett, 2010). We added readings about conditions for successful inter-organizational collaboration. One set of authors in this area understood inter-organizational collaboration as requiring a fundamental shift in how organizations see themselves, from sustaining services to “leading a long-term process of social change” (Kania, John & Kramer, 2011). Related readings helped draw out potential benefits and limitations of inter-organizational collaboration (Kania & Kramer, 2011; Pittman, 2016). All of these concepts both responded to and prompted deeper consideration of how to work between organizations.

However, theoretical approaches generally offered a macro-level social perspective on how organizations can lead change, while most students were contributing at a micro-level (Turner, 2005). Additionally, some youth advocacy organizations are closer to grassroots movements than to the established tax-funded districts or foundations that support many public libraries. Discussions highlighted the importance of challenging cultural assumptions that would tend to privilege stable funding, steady infrastructures, and long-term leadership over variable funding, minimal infrastructures, and high-turnover leadership. As students and faculty, we began to see that it was important to challenge assumptions that long-term collaborations were more desirable than temporary, ad hoc, or situational collaborative partners or partnerships.

We also started to see that these conceptual models miss some other factors that influence inter-organizational collaboration, such as demographic similarities between organizations’ clients or relationships between leaders of organizations. Drawing on recent work on developing cultural competence in LIS (Cooke, 2016), deeper understandings of cultural factors related to those organizations that routinely collaborate with public libraries and those that don’t might reveal new directions in practice. The array of divergent structures, funding sources, leadership roles, and other features of volunteer-run organizations, grassroots movements, non-profits, and other kinds of emergent or established institutions can be dizzying. Students regularly noticed inter-organizational disconnection as well as collaboration. LIS professionals’ attempts at collaboration would benefit from more nuanced theoretical approaches that analyze inter-organizational collaboration, extending models of the development of professional cultural competence to understand the how professionals develop inter-organizational competence to bridge cultural differences.

The final assignment was a paper designed to help students articulate their own vision of youth advocacy. Although it was not the primary focus of the assignment, even in the first course iteration many papers built on our class discussions related to inter-organizational collaboration. One student described the similarities between actions needed to forge individual relationships and relationships between organizations, noting that “consistency and visibility is the pathway to connection and trust both with individual children and in partnerships in the community.” Some students noted how vital partnerships were to services at organizations. “Without these partnerships, the space would have a fraction of the options that are currently available.” Several others identified libraries as “natural partners” for various kinds of community centers, and still others observed that successful collaborative partnerships had “helped both sides immensely.” These reflections, coming from students’ own actions and observations, augmented their available strategies and approaches for forging future partnerships as librarians.

In all of the iterations of this course, the most consistent common challenge in learning about inter-organizational collaboration was that students lacked experience as professionals working in one organization, so that connecting between two (or more) organizations initially seemed abstract. However, by adding more readings and opportunities for discussion about collaboration, they learned to look across organizations analytically and describe alignments of purposes with practices. By analyzing youth advocacy organizational types outside of library settings, students gained insights about connecting library and non-library organizations that they can apply in future work.

Given the skills, knowledge, and critical perspectives needed, how can LIS educators best teach excellent inter-organizational collaboration? One simple answer is: start early. The earlier LIS students begin to understand that there can be substantial shared purposes between libraries and non-library organizations, the sooner they can experiment with forging collaborations as new professionals. More research would also support this work. More studies of partnership (and disconnection) in LIS, particularly among public libraries and related community organizations, would strengthen courses like this. Identifying connections between libraries and other organizations is a key skill in developing partnerships, successful grant proposals, and budget justifications in all areas of LIS. This service-learning approach helped to prepare them to move between organizations in their future careers.