Transforming Teaming: Designing More Equitable and Effective Teamwork

Workshop Description

Research shows that team and project-based learning has multiple benefits for students. However, our research, and that of others, shows that bias and stereotyping on teams can eliminate these benefits and reduce student learning. Drawing on asset-based approaches to education, we have developed several tools and modules to help students and faculty identify, manage, and mitigate these issues. Asset mapping and team asset charting are two tools we have used with over 500 students on project teams. Our research shows these tools can help to enable more equitable and effective teamwork by helping begin to overcome stereotypes, building student confidence, and minimizing task assignment bias. Workshop participants will engage with these tools on teams as their own students would. They will fill out asset maps and discuss their assets (backgrounds, experiences, interests) with their team members. Team members will then determine who will take on what parts of a sample project based on each member’s assets and areas they want to develop. Workshopping the tools will enable participants to adapt them to their own classes, assignments, and projects.

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Speaker Bios

Geoff Pfeifer is Associate Professor of Philosophy and International and Global Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and specializes in social and political philosophy and theory, global justice, and critical pedagogies. In addition to a number of book chapters, his work can be found in journals such as Philosophy and Social Criticism, Globalizations, Human Studies, The European Legacy, Crisis and Critique, Continental Thought and Theory, Contemporary Perspectives in Social Theory, The Journal of Global Ethics, The Journal of Multicultural Education, and conference proceedings of ASEE. He is also the co-editor (with West Gurley) of Phenomenology and the Political (Roman and Littlefield International, 2016), co-editor (with Agustin Columbo and Edward McGushin) of The Politics of Desire: Foucault, Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (Rowman and Littlefield. 2022), and author of The New Materialism: Althusser, Badiou, and Žižek (Routledge, 2015).

Elisabeth (Lisa) Stoddard is a human-environment geographer and an Associate Professor of Teaching in Environmental Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Lisa teaches in WPI’s Great Problem Seminar Program, a first-year project-based program, and she directs WPI’s Farmstay Project Center, where she advises 7-week junior-year projects on-site. Lisa’s teaching and research focuses on different areas of social justice, including environmental, climate, and health justice, as well as social justice in STEM education. She has been the recipient of multiple grants to examine issues of bias and stereotyping on undergraduate student project teams and the impact this has on student learning and experience. Through this work, Lisa, and colleague Geoff Pfeifer, have developed a set of modules and tools to create more equitable team dynamics for use by both students and faculty. These tools continue to be tested, analyzed, and modified with support from our graduate research team. Some of this work and associated resources can be found in Stoddard, Elisabeth; G Pfeifer. 2018. Working Toward More Equitable Team Dynamics: Mapping Student Assets to Minimize Stereotyping and Task Assignment Bias. ASEE Paper ID 22206. This work can also be found in a book chapter by Pfeifer and Stoddard in Stoddard's co-edited 2019 volume Project-Based Learning in the First Year: Beyond All Expectations, from Stylus Publishers. This work is also forthcoming in an article that has been accepted for publication in 2023 by the Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.