Business Communication students stare down the barrel of group work with general disdain and resentment. The main questions I receive, (paraphrased for readability) particularly in reference to assignments where students are working together yet graded individually, are:

• Why do I need to do this?
• How can I get this assignment done if my team members refuse to communicate?
• My groupmate keeps copypasting a single image of a 3d clipart smiley face into the report, which screws up the alignment, so we have to take it out and realign it but then they do it again and again and it’s taunting me with its white pixel teeth and abnormally bushy eyebrows, what do I do?

At times it feels almost herculean to pull together scattered groups of careless adolescents, and soon enough, I start asking those questions of myself. Why do we need to do this? And how am I ever going to get through this without building a dependence on migraine medications?

Why do I need to do this?

In a word, perspective. In project creation, tunnel vision is incredibly common. A student can doggedly focus on completing one facet of a project without realizing that other considerations are equally as important. This is where teamwork comes into play.

“When students work in cross-functional teams to support others through cross-pollination of knowledge and skills, they offer different perspectives to spur innovation and challenge conventional practices,” says Duin et al in the piece The Rhetoric, Science, and Technology of 21st Century Collaboration.  Not only does group work allow for the integration of different skills and perspectives- it can also be excellent practice for fostering communication in an increasingly hostile world. In both daily life and administrative arenas, we are constantly witnessing the weaponization of inflammatory rhetoric in lieu of nuance and rhetorical awareness. In fostering nuanced communication in the classroom, we may be able to encourage students to better interact with differing opinions, stances, and trolls.

How can I get this assignment done if my team members refuse to communicate?

There’s not a whole lot of incentivization for students to communicate with one another in group projects where they are graded individually. Even if they are graded summatively, many students will choose a zero over social interaction. I understand this- in my freshman year of undergrad, I was similarly skittish when faced with such situations.

The concept of  “good” and “bad” work is often informed not by what is best for the individual but by what is best for the establishment for which the work is being completed. The accepted concept of what a “productive” individual acts and looks like is a melange of societal, capitalistic, and euro-colonial ideals. But therein lies the rub. This concept is “accepted,” meaning that most institutions and corporations beyond the classroom will expect a specific standard of work from employees.

So we have an issue here; to penalize students for “bad” work seems unfair, particularly in regard to physical participation or vocalizations, but students should understand that collaboration will be expected beyond the classroom.

We should acknowledge these frameworks as well as prepare them for a world built upon these frameworks by providing students with examples of how collaboration is accomplished in the professional world. And for the moment, make sure to let students know to get at least two forms of contact information- I’m almost certain that many of them have no idea that their email inbox exists.