Garrison's Leading Collaboratively (Part II)

¡Hola!

Last week's entry started my reflections on Garrison's "leading collaboratively", as discussed in his book "Thinking Collaboratively: Learning in a Community of Inquiry" (Routledge, 2016).  As I mentioned, his ideas and the course EDDE-804 Leadership and Project Management in Distance Education, taught by Dr. Martha Cleveland-Innes, are changing my perspective not only on leadership in higher education, but also on my research interests for my future dissertation.  In this post, however, I want to share a little bit further of Garrison's views on the subject, as included in Chapter 8 about collaboration and bureaucracy.

Thus, Garrison talks about the importance of organizational culture in order to provoke change within "a climate of free and open communication" (p.102).  Communication technologies have contributed to the opening of new possibilities for collaboration among individuals and teams in a university, including faculty and administrative staff.

Regarding bureaucracy, it can actually impede fruitful collaboration: "Bureaucracies result in a diffusion of purpose, building empires and hiding incompetence.  This is the antithesis of collaborative leadership... Universities have been expanding their administration and support personnel with the result that 'institutions of higher education are mainly controlled by administrators and staffers who make the rules and set more of the priorities of academic life' (Ginsberg 2011, p.1)" (p.103).

Here, what Garrison points out coincides with Keller (2008) in his observations about the worrisome growth of bureaucracy in universities, resulting in rising costs and further administrative complication.  This, however, will be addressed in a future blog entry.

All of this has resulted in disconnection among the parties involved: "while faculty control the academic content and dynamics in the classroom, the operation of the institution is conducted in relative isolation from faculty and often serving the narrow interests of bureaucrats.  The reality is that collaborative thinking and learning are not the primary concern of senior management in higher education... they give lip service to improving the quality of the learning experience but spend most of their time with budgets, fund development and ceremonial duties" (p.104).  This in fact, is true not only in North American universities but also in universities in Latin America: many managers are appointed to high administrative positions because of internal or external political influences, rather than due to true academic or managerial merits, let alone a sincere interest in improving education (of course, there are exceptions to this tendency).

How can we solve this situation? How can leaders within the university foster collaboration and collaborative leadership, such as distributed leadership or shared leadership? Although we will discuss these two types of leadership theories in coming entries, suffice it to say that for the time being, it is a constant aspiration of both academic and administrative personnel, individual leaders and teams to achieve this coordination and collaboration.

We'll close with Garrison's urgent call to action: "The only path for leadership is to collaboratively engage others in addressing important problems, setting direction and then correcting course as issues emerge.  This is the means for sustaining worthwhile change and innovation" (p.106).  Since my interests as a teacher and researcher are leaning towards collaborative leadership and creating CoI environments, my conclusion is that these "others" should contemplate as well faculty, management, administrative staff, students, and the community as stakeholders of the learning process in higher education.