© 2015 Stephen Cole Perry. Some Rights Reserved. Creative

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository © 2015 Stephen Cole Perry. Some Rights Reserved. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) HOW TEENS LEARN TEAMWORK: AGENTIC AND CONSTRUCTIVE PEER PROCESSES BY STEPHEN COLE PERRY DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Human and Community Development with a concentration in Human Development and Family Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Reed Larson, Chair and Director of Research Professor Marcela Raffaelli Associate Professor Soo Ah Kwon Adjunct Assistant Professor Lisa Bouillion Diaz Abstract Teamwork is widely proclaimed as a valuable contemporary skill set. Youth programs provide distinct opportunities for young people to develop collaborative competencies. The current study examines the developmental experiences of teamwork in a residential summer camp setting. This dissertation analyzes youth’s narratives about learning collaborative skills in a service program for teens at Camp Clore. The data for this project includes 50 qualitative, semi-structured interviews with teenage participants in the Clore Corps, who ranged in age from 14 to 16. Modified grounded theory methods facilitated the use of narrative data from the youth themselves. This study examines the conscious ways teenagers learn teamwork, especially in terms of their agentic involvement in constructive processes of learning from peers. The findings address the general question of how youth learn teamwork and the grounded theorization of positive processes in youth programs. Highlighting the roles of agency and peers, the analysis illustrates the rich diversity of ways that youth learn teamwork. Youth reiterated prosocial values as they found many ways to reconcile task challenges with complex interpersonal dynamics. Two categories of learning episodes were distinguished by youth’s orientation toward their peers as they learned: Peers as People and Peers as Exemplars. Each of these sets of learning episodes received its own inductive, within-category analysis on the basis of their shared features. Youth acknowledging the human qualities of their peers was a pivotal motivation for accommodating and accepting in the Peers-as-People learning episodes. This allowed youth to restrain judgment and collaborate successfully with peers. For the Peers-as-Exemplars category, in contrast, youth actively drew on the example of their peers work and evaluated them. The evaluative processes stimulated learner’s imaginative generation of skills, attitudes, insights, and principles of teamwork. A prominent theme across both episode categories was youth’s creativity and strategy as they learned teamwork. Youth demonstrated these qualities by drawing on peers as resources and actively developing teamwork knowledge and skills. Creative and strategic choices, intentions, and courses of action and thought in youth’s teamwork constituted agency in their development. Peers’ input in learning, moreover, was not absorbed or spread via contagion; rather, youth described making use of peers’ involvement to determine their own course. The theme of creativity and strategy across episodes establishes agentic processes in conjunction with constructive peer processes, not despite or in addition to them. The contribution of this dissertation, then, sheds light on how youth learn prosocial skills in a way that is, at once, both agentic and constructively peer-driven. ii Acknowledgements I had a lot of help with this dissertation and owe a lot of thanks. I am first indebted to my mentor and advisor, Dr. Reed Larson, for my intensive apprenticeship in academia, in which he’s invested so much time and effort. My committee has given feedback, encouragement, and space as needed: Thanks to Dr. Lisa Bouillion-Díaz, Dr. Soo Ah Kwon, and Dr. Marcela Raffaelli. My research assistants, Maggie Lidge, Sara Hayden, and Becky Perry saved me from losing my mind transcribing and also did some great theorizing. There’s also a whole host of camp people who made my dissertation possible. 50 interviewees could have been having fun with their friends, but instead entertained my questions, often in the hot July sun. Elizabeth Cochran, who kept letting me come to camp every summer, also served as a mentor for my knowledge and practice at camp, not to mention hiring me to be a Clore Corps leader myself. My pilot interviewees–Kyle, Olivia, Jack, Jack, Alex, Cole, Haya, Sophie, & Carly–played an important role in setting the course for my project! I also appreciated all the people who volunteered (and begged) to be interviewed. To the hundreds of “Corps kids” of mine that impressed me with your insights and energy, thanks for doing your job! And finally, I thank my friends and family for supporting me and making life good. To my parents, who came with me to camp for my first 20 summers there, I could hardly appreciate that more. Thanks for never letting me forget my own abilities. I dedicate this dissertation to the memory of my grandfather, Victor Perry, the first kid to have to cancel a week at “Camp Clore” because he couldn’t afford it and to Brennan Stewart, a camp teen whom I knew for almost a decade before his recent passing. iii Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter Two: Literature Review ................................................................................................................... 4 Chapter Three: Methods .............................................................................................................................. 21 Chapter Four: Findings ................................................................................................................................ 41 Chapter Five: Discussion ............................................................................................................................. 65 References ................................................................................................................................................... 81 Appendix A: Example of a Learning Episode ............................................................................................. 91 Appendix B: Early-stage Interview Guide .................................................................................................. 93 Appendix C: Clore Corps Leader Data ....................................................................................................... 95 Appendix D: Clore Corps Youth Data ....................................................................................................... 96 Appendix E: Late-stage Interview Guide .................................................................................................... 98 Appendix F: Parental Consent Form ......................................................................................................... 101 Appendix G: Youth Assent Form .............................................................................................................. 103 iv Chapter One: Introduction It’s Laura, age 15, and two peers’ turn to run the dishwasher at lunch. Two hundred campers make a big mess and Laura’s coworkers are already arguing. Knowing their behavior is not mature or productive, Laura has something to tell them, but, for now, only thinks it to herself, “OK, you should stop. It’s only wasting time.” It is especially frustrating for her because, from her spot at the sink where she’s spraying down plates, Laura can see the group cooperating to serve dessert. She is envious of their smooth collaboration and thinks, “they all work together because they already know [how to].” She mines their actions for something to take back to her own group: “If you just watch them, you’re like, ‘That looks cool. I’ll try that.’ It’s easier to picture: ‘OK, I can work like that.’” Laura is taking in what is going on with her peers around her and actively determining how she will proceed with teamwork, even in the face of quarrelsome peers and much work to be done. Laura’s example hints at the rich complexity of teens’ developmental ecology. I premise this dissertation on the idea that paying attention to youth’s stories, like this one, we can learn about how they understand their own learning, their own conscious developmental processes. In Laura’s story, I see her active engagement with what her peers do, in order to improve her own collaborative skills. The central topic for this paper is how teenagers do this work of learning teamwork in youth programs. Camp Clore as a Youth Development Program At Camp Clore, 1 the summer camp where Laura is volunteering for three weeks of her summer, 50-odd teens rotate through a dozen different cleaning, serving, and construction jobs. Laura’s days in the Clore Corps program are full of moments like the one above, where—with many models for action amidst complex, real-world interpersonal dynamics—it is up to her to decide how she acts and reacts (or not). Like many other teens at summer camps, Laura benefits from the communal environment and camp-wide focus on personal growth and learning (Fine, 2005;

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