In any successful collaboration, each person working together needs to have the emotional intelligence to understand how they are perceived in the group. As a professor of film sound and music, it is my responsibility to share what I have learned about the nature of collaboration with my students. I began by observing and assessing how students work together on projects. Often these projects go well and other times they fail simply by the lack of collaborative skills. These skills include strong communication skills, empathy, patience and an understanding of the dynamics of the group. While all of these collaborative skills can be learned, I have discovered that my students often do not have the ability to see themselves through other people. This is the key element missing in many failed collaborations that I have experienced in the classroom. When I had an opportunity to collaborate with my students on a virtual exchange), I knew that I was going to be able to dig deep on the nature of collaboration. As these collaborations were all group based (a group of three to four DePaul students would work with a group of three to four students at Abertay University in Dundee Scotland and on another GLE with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia), I was able to assess how the DePaul students collaborated locally but also how they worked with their international partners. Beyond the assigned collaborative projects (sound designs and film scores) in this virtual exchange, I chose a reflection video at the end of the project so that my students would have to come to terms with their personas and their roles in the collaboration. The outcomes have been elucidating. What a video presents is personality, how we physically communicate and how we present our knowledge and experiences to others through image and sound. There is an immediacy to the presentation that is not easily reflected in a paper.

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Abstract Summary
In any successful collaboration, each person working together needs to have the emotional intelligence to understand how they are perceived in the group. As a professor of film sound and music, it is my responsibility to share what I have learned about the nature of collaboration with my students. I began by observing and assessing how students work together on projects. Often these projects go well and other times they fail simply by the lack of collaborative skills. These skills include strong communication skills, empathy, patience and an understanding of the dynamics of the group. While all of these collaborative skills can be learned, I have discovered that my students often do not have the ability to see themselves through other people. This is the key element missing in many failed collaborations that I have experienced in the classroom.

Authors:
Robert Steel, DePaul University, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Professor Robert Steel is a University Professor/Principal Lecturer at DePaul University in United States

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