THIS SPECIAL ISSUE of Business Communication Quarterly presents a collection of articles illustrating the challenges of teaching teamwork in management ...
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TEACHING TEAMWORK IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION/MANAGEMENT PROGRAMS THIS SPECIAL ISSUE of Business Communication Quarterly presents a collection of articles illustrating the challenges of teaching teamwork in management and business communication courses. Although managers and teachers may envisage teams and teamwork as “god” terms, for students assigned a group project, they are often “devil” terms. These positions speak to the values and challenges of both teaching and managing team processes and outcomes—relationships, cooperation, and achievement as well as conflict, competition, and failure. In our initial call for papers, we asked for submissions that focused on critical praxis—the critical, relational, and process aspects of teaching teamwork. We especially sought papers that identified and explored the challenges and risks involved in teaching teamwork from a critical perspective, and most importantly, offered inspiration. We were not disappointed. In this special issue, authors were asked to reflect on their own values and critique their teaching of teamwork for the purpose of examining how we can create managers who demonstrate moral, social, political, and cultural responsibility as well as flexibility (Holmes, Cockburn-Wootten, Motion, Zorn, & Roper, 2005). This purpose called for complex and nuanced approaches to exploring the concept and processes of teamwork and how it might be taught in diverse environments. We also sought papers that reflected critical approaches to teaching teamwork, where students were invited to question existing power structures, knowledge, and conditions in the wider society (Giroux, 1997; Pennycook, 2001) and to engage in student/teacher dialogue and coconstructed learning (Brookfield & Presskill, 1999). Communication in this learning context is thus characterized by negotiation, conflict, persuasion, and critique. Teachers Business Communication Quarterly, Volume 71, Number 4, December 2008 417-420 DOI: 10.1177/1080569908325864 © 2008 by the Association for Business Communication
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teaching from this critical stance attend to these aspects of teams with an appreciation of the complexity of teamwork processes, the inherent ethnocentric values of team members, the range of emotional responses engendered by teamwork, and issues of resistance (Linstead, Fulop, & Lilley, 2004; Sinclair, 1992). The five articles presented in this issue address these complexities by providing approaches, strategies, and processes for teaching teamwork that seek to bridge the gap between critical management theory, critical praxis, and practices of team development. For example, a key theme throughout is how teachers actively consider and monitor their own role, values, and processes as well as those of their students. Seibold and Kang, in the opening article, explicitly question what team membership means to students and what processes require attention in teaching teamwork. They identify four areas: vision, roles, processes, and relationships. These areas allow the teacher to focus on where and how they can facilitate teamwork and investigate embedded values and assumptions. Attention to these four areas enhances learning, offers opportunities to reflect on understandings of teamwork, and encourages questioning and reflections of team interactions for both teacher and students. Fredrick’s article begins by comparing workplace and classroom teams to discuss differences in authority and social interaction in these two diverse contexts. In highlighting these differences, Fredrick discusses the challenges of teaching in a collaborative way and suggests how to overcome the social barriers students face with peer authority and evaluating each other’s work. She provides specific examples of students analyzing past projects, making their goals and roles explicit to each other, and taking on the role of “teacher” in their peer discussions. She also suggests how the teacher can intervene and help provide learning spaces for students to discuss each other’s work. These strategies help team members not only to work collaboratively but also to negotiate Western educational institutional barriers of individualism and competitiveness without jeopardizing peer relationships. Ding and Ding’s article was prompted by a struggling and despondent student who was seeking help after experiencing free-riding from other team members. Their article offers specific examples of how to overcome free-riding and conflict that can emerge in teamwork by applying critical praxis and project management tools. The
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authors define critical praxis as the intersection of theory and practice, which includes revision and reflection with the ultimate goal of promoting social change. Project management tools assist teams in overcoming free-riding and conflict because they provide an accountable, transparent process for all involved and include documentation of specific team activities. Ding and Ding illustrate how these project management tools empower students to manage and influence teamwork processes through a discussion of their own teaching experiences. Staggers, Garcia, and Nagelhout draw on experiences in their online business writing courses to offer a critical analysis of team building in an online environment and strategies that can be developed to enhance “knowledge production through technology.” They use Cog’s Ladder and Tuckman’s Stages as a starting point to help students understand team processes and team building. They encourage students to use these models to become more aware of their own actions and assumptions and to critique the usefulness of these models in light of their own team experiences. The authors also discuss different interactive strategies and tools they have applied in their online team courses. For example, the puzzle exercise promotes students’ critical reflections of and discussion about trust and competitiveness and how they value and/or use knowledge to legitimize their decision making. In concluding the special issue, Keyton and Beck’s article provides a Team Pedagogical Matrix that illustrates the common processes of both groups and teams, focusing on ethics, values, and practices. The framework helps make the assumptions deeply embedded in teamwork, particularly in Western contexts, more explicit for students; it enables teachers to compare and contrast different values and communication practices and evaluate team and individual behaviors; it also allows students to reflect on and acknowledge their responsibilities toward team processes and outcomes. This themed issue has therefore allowed us to explore the practical realities that we face in implementing a critical approach to teaching teamwork. All of the articles recognize the tension teachers face in managing the challenge of teamwork collaboration within the context of the individual and competitive nature of higher education evaluation and assessment structures. By making the processes and assumptions of teaching and learning teamwork transparent, the articles illustrate how we can enhance the development of our students’
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critical thinking and communication skills, thereby empowering them to become more responsible, sensitive, and ethical citizens. As Giroux (2004) pointed out, we, as educators, must “provide the conditions for students to learn in diverse ways how to take responsibility for moving society in the direction of a more realisable democracy” (p. 20). The approaches to teaching teamwork underpinned in this collection enable us to work toward Giroux’s goal of responsible pedagogy by empowering students to become accountable for others through their ideas, language, and actions. We would like to acknowledge and thank our authors for their support and collegiality throughout this process. Thanks are also due to the Editorial Board of Business Communication Quarterly for providing us with this opportunity to further debate the challenges surrounding critical praxis and teaching teamwork, as well as to those who provided editorial and technical support. We would also like to thank our team of referees for their constructive and timely feedback. Finally, we hope that you, the readers, find this special issue helpful and that it contributes to your own reflection on teaching teamwork in a critical way. —Cheryl Cockburn-Wootten, Prue Holmes, and Mary Simpson University of Waikato
References Brookfield, S. D., & Preskill, S. (1999). Discussion as a way of teaching: Tools and techniques for democratic classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Giroux, H. A. (1997). Pedagogy and the politics of hope: Theory, culture, and schooling. Boulder, CO: Westview. Giroux, H. (2004). Betraying the intellectual tradition: Public intellectuals and the crisis of youth. In A. Phipps & M. Guilherme (Eds.), Critical pedagogy: Political approaches to language and intercultural communication (pp. 7-21). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Holmes, P., Cockburn-Wootten, C., Motion, J., Zorn, T., & Roper, J. (2005). Critical reflexive practice in teaching Management Communication. Business Communication Quarterly, 68, 247-256. Linstead, S., Fulop, L., & Lilley, S. (2004). Management and organization: A critical text. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Sinclair, A. (1992). The tyranny of a team ideology. Organization Studies, 13, 611-626.
