Group projects are the ones that everyone loves to hate, right?

But why do we hate them? When I talk to people about what they do not like about group projects, the reasons tend to fall into two major categories: inequity and vulnerability.

Inequity is the reason people bring up enough: group projects end up being unfair to the group member or members who end up doing “all the work.” These kinds of inequities can also end up being a demonstration of community norms around who gets work and who gets credit, which means we may get recruited into perpetuating aspects of community and institutional culture we don’t actually want to endorse or support.

Vulnerability is the other, shadow reason: being in a group project can put your grade (or workplace evaluation, or reputation) at risk. Ultimately, you may be evaluated based on the timeliness, quality, or impact of someone else’s work.

Lastly, I think there’s a silent reason: group projects rarely come with any explicit instruction on how to manage a group project successfully. A rubric for a group project usually has explicit criteria for what kind of content is required, format, dates – but says little about how you are to work with each other.

Here’s the thing though: I don’t think group projects should be abolished. Here’s why:

Group projects are the workplace. In every workplace that I have been in, it’s basically a big group project to do, well, something. The “something” in question could be operating a grocery store, creating a podcast, keeping an emergency room running.

Households, marriages and families are group projects. Equitable division of labor and resources, negotiation around culturally ascribed roles, the ability to hold individual goals in mind while meeting challenges together: all of these have an impact on our quality of life.

Group projects create change. ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has’ is commonly attributed to anthropologist Margaret Mead. Community action creates culture and creates change.

In short, skills we gain when we manage group projects successfully can have a major impact on how successful we are in many domains of life: personal, professional, and civic.

So, no: I don’t think group projects should be abolished. What I do think is that we should have more explicit instruction, and perhaps more templates, that would allow us to create shared ideas on how we can work together effectively as groups. Norms about ‘what’s fair’ and efforts to distribute either credit or blame aren’t enough (although they do generate a lot of workplace comedies we can stream).

I’m in the process of creating a zine with an outline for a group project. It’s based on experiences I had in recent grad school classes, where I had an excellent time engaging with my peers to work together. But I also saw that not all of my fellow students were having the same experience, and I thought I would share what I felt was most effective. (The cover will also feature my first linocut/block print).

UPDATE Here’s a copy of that zine if you would like it. If the resulting file doesn’t make much sense to you, here’s a guide to folding and assembling 8-fold zines.