“the adjourning stage in group collaborations”

I had never thought about this before now, but I can only think of one time, one adjournment of a group collaboration that ended with a pervasive sadness because we did not want it to end. Mostly every other group collaboration, we were participants because we had to. Participation preceded a paycheck or a grade. The event I reference above, as cheesy as it sounds, was when I worked as a residential summer camp counselor, many, many Florida moons ago. This camp was “ancient” and the foundation that ran it based a lot of their orientation training on how-to-team-work.

The entire week prior to the children arriving was all about getting to know each other, other staff and building trust. We did fun activities that included repelling off the side of a wall with someone we just met holding the harness that guaranteed your safety. We stood in candle light and silence and were told to fall backwards with the confidence that someone would catch us before we hit the ground. The majority of us became fast friends. The last week of camp was always teary with the knowledge that this little family we had created for the summer-long, would soon disperse to their own separate parts of the world. Gratefully, we were given the opportunity to engage in closing rituals, aside from the closing rituals of breaking camp for the end of summer. There were special meals, closing ceremonies and special songs devoted to our last “friendship circle.” We  exchanged numbers and addresses and some of these relationships blossomed into pen-pals in these days before social media.

Unfortunately, I have not had a consistent cohort for this program and I’ve only shared multiple classes with one or two of you. I think this is one of the advantages we deny ourselves when we devote our studies to an exclusively on-line program. There was one student I shared two classes with that actually lives only 2 hours away. One way we may share an extended connection post-graduation is through sharing ECE conferences with each other via email and possibly meeting up at one of them in between our two towns.