The American Yawp Project

The purpose of this unit of study is for students to better understand how the delayed entry of the United States into direct, coordinated competition among industrialized nations contributed to the accelerated pace and complexity of its national growth at the close of the Nineteenth century.

Students will work individually or in collaboration with a partner in order to produce a documentary-style video narration of their assigned section of our textbook, The American Yawp. The minimum requirement for this assignment is for the text of their assigned section to be read and recorded in a video, slideshow, or presentation accompanied by images drawn, copied, and/or sourced online. From this minimum requirement, students are encouraged to be as creative as they wish so long as their efforts amplify rather than distract from the meaning of the text. In the end, the students will produce a video that will be loaded onto EdPuzzle where their classmates will be required to view their work and respond to their questions.

• Students are to . . .

  • • . . . work in a collaborative effort as a way to help them develop new skills, reinforce social skills, teach teamwork skills, and increase student retention of the material.

    • . . . collaborate in the planning, research, and recording of your assigned section of the text

    • In order for the students to be successful, they must understand all parts of their assigned section of our textbook.

    • . . . seek to resolve problems with their peers prior to involving the teacher.

• Students are to organize their newspaper staff in a manner that will ensure a collaborative effort utilizing the skills and efforts of all members of your team.

  • What is collaboration . . ? How is it different from coordination or cooperation . . ?

Many contemporary definitions of "collaboration" define it simply as "working together"—and, in part, it is working together. But too often, we tend to use the term "collaboration" interchangeably with cognate terms like "cooperation" and "coordination." These terms also refer to some manner of "working together," yet there are subtle but important differences between them all.

How does collaboration differ from coordination or cooperation? What is so important about collaboration specifically? Does it have or do something that coordination and cooperation don't? The short answer is "yes..."

"Coordination" can be defined as the ordering of a variety of people acting in an effective, unified manner toward an end goal or state.

"Cooperation" is another term whose surface meaning is "working together." Rather than the sense of compliance that is part of "coordination," it carries a sense of agreement and helpfulness on the path toward completing a shared activity or goal.

"Collaboration" also means "working together"—but that simple definition obscures the complex and often difficult process of collaborating.

Collaboration often involves two or more individuals or groups that do not normally work together; they are disparate groups that are not usually connected. For instance, a traitor may collaborate with the enemy, or a business may collaborate with its competitive rival. The subtlety of collaboration is that the two groups may have oppositional goals initially but work together to create a shared goal. Collaboration can be more contentious than coordination or cooperation, but like cooperation, any one of the entities could choose not to collaborate. Despite the contention and conflict, however, there is discourse—whether in the form of multi-way discussion or one-way feedback—because without discourse, there is no way for people to express a point of dissent that is ripe for negotiation.

The success of any collaboration rests on how well the collaborators negotiate their needs to create the shared objective, and then how well they cooperate and coordinate their resources to execute a plan to reach their goals.