As a student, I often dreaded group projects. The idea of giving up my own individual control over something that I turned into my instructor made me uncomfortable because I didn’t necessarily have faith that everyone would do the project the way that I would have wanted it done on my own. I enjoyed working with friends, and I had friends I trusted well enough to feel confident that they could get something done with me, but I still always preferred working on my own. I suspect that a lot of other students felt this way and I never quite was able to shake myself of the distrust or concern towards other people’s work… at least until I got to graduate school.
Only when I started to understand that writing was rarely, if ever, fully an individual construction did I understand the power of working with and creating ideas with a group. The way I had studied authors, books, and creative works was from the sole perspective of attributing that work to one individual genius who, through their own rigorous study, seemed to have created things that popped fully formed out of the ether. The mechanisms of school and assessment reinforce the perception that is up to one person, and one person alone, to prove themselves and come up with something brilliant.
The fact is, of course, that no intense creative project is ever truly created in isolation. I remember the scores of parents who helped with all of my school projects, for example; I remember my own parents joking about how much the work I did for school was as much as theirs as it was mine. Those kinds of comments peeved me at the time, even though I know they were true, because I wanted to believe that I could do everything on my own, that my work emerged from my own agency and creativity, and that I was the one responsible for all of my successes. Yet everything I’ve ever done has only been possible because of all of the people who helped me build, think about, write about, and respond to my ideas.
Writing is a collaborative activity regardless of whether your particular piece of writing is authored only by you or not. When I write, I may be the person tapping out the ideas on the keyboard, and I may be the one transcribing particular thoughts down, but those thoughts are never mine alone: they always appear and they’re always only possible because of the collaborative forces that helped shape the impressions that form the foundation of what I write today.
I think we need to see reading in the same way. Reading is always already a social act because it is a way of entering into a conversation with a bunch of other people. This thought is nothing new; Kenneth Burke constructed the notion of the “Burkean parlor,” which is basically the theory that reading arguments from different authors is a lot like entering into a “parlor” where people are in the middle of a conversation. Academic inquiry, in his estimation, is kind of like coming into the parlor mid-way through a conversation and then leaving the conversation even before it is over. All conversations have various interlocutors at various times that interject when they feel it is appropriate and then leave, allowing the party of thoughts to carry on without them… at least until the next person intervenes.
Reading can feel like a static artifact, often enough, in large part because it may not engage in the same way that a conversation can. Indeed, reading can sometimes feel a bit like listening to the teacher in Charlie Brown: wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Words can wash over us, particularly when those words are arranged in ways that we don’t expect or when those words introduce new concepts and new thoughts to us that are challenging to understand. But ultimately, those words come from a person, a person who interacted with a lot of other people to create what you’re reading in front of you.
Why do I think it’s so important to remember that reading is a social act, a text constructed from a group of people? Because I think that when we understand, remember, and make visible all of the social work that goes into being able to deliver a message, we importantly recognize the strength of our communities in empowering individuals to create new things. Indeed, I am still an individual writing this blog post; there are no other people literally adding their words into this post with me. But all of the conversations I’ve had at this institute, all of the informal hallway chats in between our seminars and workshops, all of the phone calls I’ve had with family members and friends from home, all of the tweets I’ve read from afar, these conversations are the ones that shape what I choose to write about every day. And by reading this post, you are seeing all of those voices, faces, feelings, and thoughts reflected in this place. I’m the messenger and the curator, putting everything together. My job, as a writer, is ultimately as a synthesizer more than anything else.
I hated group projects, I think, because I felt frustrated by how other people would work with me and I expected everyone to co-create. I wouldn’t necessarily go back in time and tell my past self otherwise, but I wish I had known sooner that everyone needs help with their projects, everyone needs to talk through and get feedback from others, and everyone can contribute something to a project, even if that contribution takes a number of different forms. I don’t mean to condone laziness or inattention (there were plenty of group projects where group members truly did not contribute because they weren’t motivated), but I wish I had understood sooner that asking for help, that building things with other people was not a sign of limitation or incapacity. Rather, building new ideas with others is just building. Period