Repertoires of collaborative practice

Abstract

This symposium presents results from a coordinated suite of studies on collaborative practices, and the theoretical framework we have developed to account for what is learned from collaborative episodes. We use the phrase 'Repertoires of Collaborative Practice' to describe the individual, interpersonal, contextual and community practices that can influence collaboration. We hypothesize that repertoires of collaborative practice are developmental in nature, and that collaborators may become adept at selecting which elements from their repertoires should be implemented in specific situations. The theoretical description is accompanied by four papers applying this framework to examine the collaborative practices in different collaborative settings -online gamers, adolescent musicians, middleschool technology projects, and a comparative study of Quakers and product designers.

Multi‐touch tables and collaborative learning

“…The development of group cognition is usually seen as a process of articulating, negotiating and coordinating the different views of members of a group. In our work, we draw on the Repertoires of Collaborative Practices Framework (Barron et al , 2009), which recognises four overlapping planes of analysis when considering collaboration. This focuses on the importance of each individual in negotiating interactions with peers and about the problem in order to create a shared representation and understanding of the task.…”

Different leaders: Emergent organizational and intellectual leadership in children’s collaborative learning groups

“…Managing participation has often been organized by instructors, either by assigning roles (e.g., Schellens et al 2007), providing scripts (e.g., Weinberger et al 2005), or assessment processes that reward individual participation, rather than allowing groups to manage their own participation (Johnson and Johnson 2009). However, as the field recognizes the importance of attending to group cognition (Stahl 2006;Volet et al 2009), considers the processes of collaboration as important a learning experience as the learning that can be measured by individual outcomes, and thinks about how people become good collaborators (Barron et al 2009), more focus has been placed on the emergent processes which group members use to manage participation. Three notable directions that this work has begun to take are emergent leadership, discussed below, analysis of uptake (Suthers 2006) and group regulation (Järvelä and Hadwin 2013).…”

Creating joint representations of collaborative problem solving with multi‐touch technology

“…In contrast, Joshua, in the first vignette, uses a gesture to indicate swapping of items, which starts the group on the path of representing the solution using the clues. Research on group process indicates that collaborators develop practices to support their collaborations, through prior experiences or direct instruction (e.g., Mertl, ; Barron et al ., ). In these two vignettes, we see that direct instruction from the teacher is one way in which a group developed the practice of using the multi‐touch table as an external representation of their process, and eventually of their solution.…”

“…These situations lend themselves to the development of external representations, both as a way to manage a complex task and in order to ensure a common understanding of the problem. The choice to use a representation to support the group process, however, requires the availability of tools or artefacts to create representations, the knowledge of the value of this practice and either implicit or explicit negotiation within the group about how to create the representation (Barron et al, 2009). Schwartz (1995), in a study of dyads reasoning about turning cogs, found that some dyads converged on the manner in which to represent the cogs, and that those dyads were more likely to develop an abstract representation of the problem, thus coming to a solution more quickly when given a more complex problem.…”

“…These situations lend themselves to the development of external representations, both as a way to manage a complex task and in order to ensure a common understanding of the problem. The choice to use a representation to support the group process, however, requires the availability of tools or artefacts to create representations, the knowledge of the value of this practice and either implicit or explicit negotiation within the group about how to create the representation (Barron et al ., ).…”