Large Group Work: Identity Development and Its Significance for Achieving Race Equality

This article examines and analyses the effectiveness of experiential large group work (between 24–35 students) in delivering community and youth work training at Goldsmiths1. It specifically focuses on students’ development and experience in their understanding of racism and identity. The training has refined a model of learning and teaching that combines large group work and experiential learning. It is in this arena that students explore and critically reflect on their life and work experiences. They learn to process and articulate their feelings and understandings across a wide range of issues that come from learning how to inwardly reflect and to develop an awareness of themselves and change. The article explores the experience of group work training and the significance of students’ development of their racial identity in effectively addressing racism. It draws on both the work of Paulo Freire (1972; 1995) on education and Pat de Maré (1975; 1991) on large groups. The article begins by examining some of the literature on both race and large groups followed by an exploration of racial identity and its development in the group work process in terms of distinct phases. It then discusses the importance of the large group and its relevance to development of racial identities. It concludes by highlighting the significance of the issue of racial identity in addressing racism

Understanding Work Practices of Autonomous Agile Teams: A Social-psychological Review

The purpose of this paper is to suggest additional aspects of social psychology that could help when making sense of autonomous agile teams. To make use of well-tested theories in social psychology and instead see how they replicated and differ in the autonomous agile team context would avoid reinventing the wheel. This was done, as an initial step, through looking at some very common agile practices and relate them to existing findings in social-psychological research. The two theories found that I argue could be more applied to the software engineering context are social identity theory and group socialization theory. The results show that literature provides social-psychological reasons for the popularity of some agile practices, but that scientific studies are needed to gather empirical evidence on these under-researched topics. Understanding deeper psychological theories could provide a better understanding of the psychological processes when building autonomous agile team, which could then lead to better predictability and intervention in relation to human factors