Now that student teams have submitted their proposals, it is coming to light that not every team has made their team communication transparent to Carmen and I.  In some cases, teams are lucky that their communication was of high quality and did not lead to problems.  But when one team proposal was late and the team had insufficiently open communication records, I had no way of ensuring that everyone had input into the final version.  I needed to apply a late penalty fairly, and I did not feel it was proper to penalize only the editorial coordinator for what may have been a systemic problem of team communication and distributed responsibility.  Perhaps the lateness could have been avoided if Carmen and I had been included and had seen signs that the team did not have a backup system and appropriate internal deadlines in place. 

However, private team communication can lead to other problems besides late assignments.  Individuals and teams can go off track in conceptualizing assignment purposes and requirements, and more is at stake than their individual grades if this is the case.  Including us in their correspondence allows us a little window on things so that we can steer them away from problems in advance.

Normally in group projects students keep their labor behind a veil.  But normally -- in other courses -- students are working with library or internet research rather than with real human data and sensitive documents.  Normally students are not working on a project that involves the partnership and collaboration of community partners, and a level of public display of the process and product on a website.  Therefore, in a course like this, Carmen and I need to be included in ongoing team correspondence (other than teams' personal/social interaction beyond the topic of their project, and their private struggles, which we don't want to intrude upon). 

Including instructor and learning coach in team communication is one of the "counter-normative" and collaborative, socially accountable aspects of service-learning.  This is one way we see the transformed role of instructors discussed in our assigned reading by Clayton and Ash.