Stakeholder Map

Interviews & Observations

⟶ Chitra

To get an administrative perspective on interdisciplinary collaboration, Chitra interviewed the Jan Roberts-Breslin, the Dean of Graduate and Professional Studies. One of her responsibilities is to work with graduate faculty members to create or change courses, change program requirements, and create new graduate programs. Roberts-Breslin acknowledged that there is consideration and it is possible for instituting collaboration on a programmatic, curricular level, but actually executing this is difficult due to bureaucratic constraints. In order for such a change to occur within a program, it must be initiated by faculty and approved by both the Graduate Council (comprised of all graduate program directors and chaired by Jan) and the school Deans. Another key takeaway from Roberts-Breslin is the impact student voice would have on efforts to provide structural interdisciplinary collaboration experiences, as she notes, “If we really start hearing from students that they want to create more interdisciplinary experiences, we’re going to respond to that because we care.”

Digital space was also observed. Three Facebook spaces were scanned to get an idea of its primary use: Current Emerson Graduate Students group, Emerson College Accepted Graduate Students group, and Emerson College page. The first two pages mentioned are closed groups, meaning it is not open to the public; to join the group, you must be approved by the page’s moderators. On these pages, posts do not need to be approved by administrators. Observations from September 2, 2019 - October 30, 2019 (roughly the beginning of the school year until present) show the Current Emerson Graduate Students group is primarily used to market events. It is only minimally used to inquire about collaborations, with only two requests to collaborate, though the two requests did receive responses. Observations from March 12, 2019 - November 12, 2019 (roughly when students learned of admission status until present) show the Emerson College Accepted Graduate Students group is primarily used to connect with other people within a program. It is also only minimally used to inquire about collaborations. Of the 6 requests to collaborate, 4 received responses from willing collaborators. The Emerson College page is the least conducive for connection, which is understandable, given the nature of the page. Posts need to be approved by administrators. This page is mostly used to highlight alumni success stories, with event marketing coming second. This was observed from September 4, 2019 - November 13, 2019. 

⟶  Rakshya

Rakshya did an observation of the front area of the library. She found that because this space is mostly made up of large tables, it tends to be a place where students meet to collaborate on group work. It did not look like there was much interdisciplinary collaboration occurring, though—it mostly appeared to be students working together within their own classes.  Students were not necessarily working the whole time, though—there was a lot of personal conversations and non-academic discussions happening—suggesting that the library could be a space for informal interactions between disciplines, if designed correctly.

Rakshya also interviewed Cate Schneiderman, who is the library’s Outreach Coordinator, and Tina Dent, who is the library’s Assistant director of Teaching and Learning. Cate and Tina had a lot to say about the library as a collaborative space. Cate noted that there is a space in the library specifically made for collaboration, called the CoLab. This space was designed using a participatory approach, and although not all of the students’ desires for the space were met, it was created to meet as many of these needs as possible. The CoLab has mixed-level seating, couches, whiteboard walls, and a TV to project onto—all to make student collaboration more possible. Cate suggested, though, that because the library is mostly a self-service collaboration model, students are not always aware of what resources/spaces they have for collaboration—and so a lot of what she does as outreach coordinator is to reach out to students with the goal of making students more aware of what’s available. Tina said that library’s policy was to make sure it was student-oriented first—so if faculty or staff want to have a meeting in, for example, the computer lab space, she usually won’t let them, as it’s meant to be available for students who need it. Overall, Cate and Tina suggested that there are a lot of opportunities for collaboration, but that the limited space in the library, as well as a lack of student awareness, may make it harder for students to collaborate.

⟶  Singing

To better understand how Emerson Community can better interdisciplinary collaboration under different background cultures, Singing chose to place her observation at the Halloween event hosted by the Office of International Student and Affair. The theme of this Halloween event was carving pumpkins. For most of the international students who just entered Emerson community, this might be their first Halloween. Therefore, under the organization of OISA, many international students participated in this event. In addition to email notifications, the ELL course’s instructor Jeremy also mentioned this event during class and encouraged students to actively participate. During the event, participants were randomly divided into groups to complete pumpkin carving. Jingzhou, a Chinese graduate student from SMC major, thought that such activities are very meaningful because they can help international students understand the new culture; also, the event provides opportunities to know new friends with different background. Without the encouragement from the professor, we might miss such valuable collaborative activities because of unfamiliar or other excuses, said by Jingzhou, but activities which can help us understand different cultures and engage into the community are necessary and worth attending.

Singing also interviewed a barista who worked at Emerson Café. This café is in Alley, which many people didn’t notice before. Although the space inside is very empty, there is only one row of seats. The barista said that even if there are not many seats, students will come to buy coffee as groups, here is a place they can chat and relax in their busy schedules. At the same time, there will be a lot of faculties coming here. Even if they work very busy, they will have a lot of conversations with students. Moreover, the round tables outside the café provide opportunities for students to sit and chat. Although there are not many events happened in the café, it is a place to promote students’ collaboration.

⟶  Hope

The experience for Hope to observe the dining hall was pretty interesting actually, this was her first time being in the dining hall. So she grabbed some food and explore this space. The dining hall is bigger than Hope imagined before, it is pretty well-designed. There are seats for not only groups but for individuals. Hope believe that it is a perfect place for students to hang out and build up connections with each other. It has two floors, each floor has a different type of food. We have a variety of food, the first floor has food like snacks, fires, coffee and yogurt. Basement has more meals like pizza, pasta and rice. Hope observed that students spend at least more than half an hour in the dining hall usually. She can see many self-initiated collaborations in this space. She interviewed a freshman in MFA, who mentioned she really likes this place. She loves to hang out with her friends in the dining hall. Also, Hope asked more about if there was anything she would like to change in this space, she answered that she hopes the size of each portion could be smaller because it is too big for her, and it is a waste of food.

our group photo when we were doing presentation

Overall Concept

⟶  In creating the stakeholder map, we first came up with the idea of representing our observations and interviews on a map of Emerson, so the location of each space would be evident. We realized the spaces we observed were all in one general area (Walker/Boylston alley), so most of the map would be kind of irrelevant. We also considered the fact that this could showcase the fact that collaboration spaces are somewhat siloed, but then this idea became too cumbersome given the rules we were to follow. So, we pivoted to think about different themes that emerged from our observations, and we noticed that collaboration occurred in two ways: it was either structured and programmatic or it was informal and self-initiated. With these themes in mind, we opted to create a stakeholder map showing a continuum of collaboration. We placed each space observed or person interviewed along this continuum to represent what kind of collaboration they were conducive to, structured or informal. 

⟶ We all contributed to the process of putting the map together—we met a couple times to discuss our ideas of what it should look like; we then agreed on the continuum idea, and set upon making it. Hope got the poster paper from Blick, and Singing—heroically!—drew all of the digital pictures, of which there were 14 in total. Chitra, Hope and Rakshya compiled notes from each location and put them into a Google doc, where they were then formatted to fit onto the poster; Chitra was in charge of measuring/making sure the formatting printed correctly—which, because it was a double-sided, was more difficult than it looks. Rakshya and Hope wrote in titles on the poster and drew the lines connecting the locations/interviews to the continuum. 

Final Creation and Presentation

⟶ After the discussion, we decided to print out the stakeholders' map besides making it digital. We first decided to contain an interactive flip page in our work, we hope people can feel engaged in this work. Using a white, thick paper board as the background, the interactive flip pages on it are more light, making people more easy to flip them. With the background as white, we choose to use yellow as our continuum color and we wanted to use black to highlight the titles of the self-initiated and programmatic. The different places that we have observed are printed on the flip page, we used the color gray to title them and draw lines to connect the continuum, at first, we believed that it can make audiences’ attention more on the painting that represented the place more than the title itself, but after Elisa suggested us to use bright colors to make the whole scene more consistent. We think that it is a good advice, we will take it to the next assignment.

⟶ When we were doing presentation, we chose to explain in the order of showing a continuum of collaboration. We choose to divide the part of our own observations and interviews. The interactive page helps us show our observations more vividly. We have received a lot of suggestions after this presentation, which would help us for the final work.