Title: Thinking collaboratively
Description: Collaboration is crucial to success for citizens, workers and leaders in the multi-cultural, interdependent world of the 21 st century. Many see service learning as a vehicle for promoting a collaborative mindset and skills, and are investing millions in proliferating these opportunities. And yet there is little research to inform ongoing development of programs to maximize this particular return on the investment. Past research suggests that collaborative strategies enter our repertoires in early adolescence. In interviews for this study, 92 middle school youth articulated 10,872 strategies for changing things they wished were different in their schools and communities. Only fifteen percent of these strategies involved collaboration. Yet more than 90 percent of study participants considered at least one collaborative strategy, reinforcing that they have the capacity, if not a propensity to do so. Half the study sample participated in a service learning program. Half did not. Using multiple regression analysis, I found positive effects of program participation on the frequency with which participants considered two types of strategies, both building blocks to collaboration. The effect of program participation on the first, persuading others to see one's point of view, was consistent across age. The effect on the second, taking in others' ideas to inform one's own view, was greater among older participants. Both these strategy types involve perspective coordination, a skill that young adolescents are in the process of developing, with the latter requiring a more complex form of that skill. This suggests that program participation boosted the frequency with which participants considered strategies they were ready to consider.

Qualitative analysis of interviews in which eleven participants described their experiences in the program suggested that multiple opportunities to interact with diverse community members offered occasion to practice and come to value perspective coordination. And yet different individuals described somewhat different experiences in the program and exhibited different changes in the strategies they considered. This suggests we need to learn more about the interplay of multiple factors in order to maximize the potential of service learning programs to promote development of the collaborative mindset deemed crucial for success in the 21 st century.
Subjects: Adolescent Psychology, Service learning, Social change, Case studies
Places: United States