Affective Learning Together

Social and emotional dimensions of collaborative learning

Michael Baker, Jerry Andriessen, Sanna Järvelä

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135088002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In the twenty-first century, being able to collaborate effectively is important at all ages, in everyday life, education and work, within and across diverse cultural settings. People are increasingly linked by networks that are not only means for working and learning together, but are also ways of maintaining social and emotional support. Collaborating with others requires not only elaborating new ideas together, but also being able to manage interpersonal relations. In order to design and facilitate effective collaborative situations, the challenge is therefore to understand the interrelations between social, affective and cognitive dimensions of interactions in groups.

Affective Learning Together contains in-depth theoretical reviews and case studies of group learning in a variety of educational situations and taught disciplines, from small groups working in the secondary school classroom, to teams of medical students and more informal working groups at university level. Contributors provide detailed analyses of the dynamics of interpersonal relations and affects, in relation with processes of meaning and knowledge elaboration, including discussion of:

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• the variety of social learning situations and experiences;

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• social identities in group learning;

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• emotion, motivation and knowledge elaboration;

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• conflict, arguments and interpersonal tensions in group learning.

Bringing together a broad range of contributions from internationally recognised researchers who are seeking to broaden, deepen and integrate the field of research on collaborative learning, this book is essential reading for all serious students of contemporary educational research and practice.

1

INTRODUCTION

Visions of learning together

Michael Baker, Jerry Andriessen and Sanna Järvelä

Prelude

The following is an extract from a discussion between two sixteen-year-old pupils who were working together on solving a problem in a secondary school classroom.

[1] John:	Ok, there, there’s the … /
[2] Susan:	/ … transformer. Do the transfer arrow.
[3] John:	There are several to be done. One there. Should we put another one there?
[4] Susan:	Pprrrttt!
[5] John:	You see, it leaves from a reservoir and it comes back to a reservoir
[6] Susan:	Is that right!?
[7] John:	A reservoir to start with and a reservoir to end with
[8] Susan:	Have we got two batteries, John?
[9] John:	No!
[10] Susan:	Have we got two batteries??
[11] John:	No
[12] Susan:	Then why do you say such rubbish?!
[13] John:	What did we forget, then?
[14] Susan:	But no. I. …You know there, it’s obvious that it’s like that. That’s what I thought. Look, there’s the wire. Wait … Me, I thought it was like that! That the two wires … you see, the energy goes out from there. It goes whooosshh across the two wires and arrives there. You understand? So that the two wires went like that and arrived there. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? I mean that it goes from there, like that: from the reservoir, there’s a wire that goes from the reservoir and it takes it to the bulb, you agree? And that’s the way it is. There’s the other wire, I’d have put it like that
[15] John:	Yeah but that’s not right! Look at what they say: “an energy chain …” /
[16] Susan:	/ I don’t give a damn
[17] John:	What?
[18] Susan:	I’m telling you I don’t give a damn. For me, that’s the way it is.

As we shall explain, this extract is intended to illustrate what this book is about. The way that students try to solve problems together, and what they learn by so doing, depends on the relationships between three dimensions of their collective activity: the task they are trying to achieve and what is to be learned (the cognitive dimension), how they relate to each other (the socio-relational dimension) and what they feel about that (the affective dimension).

What is happening in this discussion? We shall say more shortly about the problem the students are trying to solve, about the school and the students’ background. But we have deliberately chosen to delay giving such information because we believe that it is possible to understand what was going on here on another level, even on the basis of such a rudimentary transcription (for example, it does not give information about non-verbal communication, tone of voice, and so on, apart from conventional symbols of written language such as “!” and “?”.).

When we try to understand what was going on in a discussion between other people, we draw on the fact that we too are human beings: trying to understand other people is not the same as trying to understand physical processes, such as the weather or the malfunctioning of a car. It is not the same because we are also human beings, and can “put ourselves in the place of”, or empathise with the people we are studying, trying to feel and think what we would feel and think if we were in their place. We can not (usually) do this with meteorology and car motors. Moreover, with respect to this example, we assume that the majority of readers of this book were once also girls or boys at school, and so can put themselves to some extent in the place of Susan and John. Such empathetic understanding does not, however, obviate the necessity for finding theoretically founded, systematic and commonly agreed indicators in the dialogue that support our interpretations: we are simply pointing out that it is nevertheless a foundation of our understanding. Our narrative of interpretation of the discussion between the two students, attempting to “put ourselves in their shoes”, is as follows.²

At first, John tries to put forward an idea about the solution to the problem (line 1), but Susan interrupts him, completing his sentence for him, telling him what he should do to solve the problem (line 2). She has lost patience with him by now; he is just too slow, and not very good at these types of problems. John complies, in an apparently neutral way, despite the fact he has been interrupted, pointing out that there is more to be done; but, sensing Susan’s irritation, he is not sure now, and so asks her, in a conciliatory way, if she agrees and what the answer should be (line 3). Susan really finds him stupid; she can’t resist ridiculing his idea (“Pprrrttt!”). John tries to defend himself; but Susan attacks his defence in a particularly humiliating way: instead of simply stating why he is wrong, she leads him to admit something obvious and undeniable (that there is of course only one battery on the table, not two) which shows that what he says must be “rubbish!”. At this point, John is upset and confused about what to say: he has been interrupted, told what to do, then told and led to admit that what he says is basically stupid. However, he controls his emotions, maintains his initial degree of politeness, and asks what Susan thinks. Susan explains her view at some length (line 14), her ideas are gradually becoming clearer to her. During this time, John is still upset; he is aware that Susan’s extended explanation is probably superior to his own; he can hardly listen because of the turmoil inside him, and so unsurprisingly, he rejects what she says out of hand, and sticks to his ground (his previous defence). Susan is now more sure that she is right and that John is wrong; she has no more patience, and does not “give a damn” about what he says. As everyone knows, being told that one is talking rubbish and that the person who one is speaking with does not give a damn about what one says is an aggressive way of being spoken to that is likely to arouse emotions such as anger and sadness.

In one sense, in accordance with our narrative, our question: “what is happening in this discussion?” could be answered quite simply: John proposed an idea, Susan repeatedly rejected what he said, out of hand, in a way that made John feel hurt and ridiculous; so when she presented her own idea, even though he knew he was wrong and she was right, he was not able to listen, only to try to defend himself and hit back. In other words, what is happening here is quite simply the enactment, the manifestation, of a social, interpersonal relationship between two adolescent students in the classroom, with all the emotions that that involves, “around” the solving of a school problem.

We have deliberately chosen to present this type of socio-relational and affective interpretation first, before giving necessary information about the problem-solving task and the educational context, in order to make a point: very often, in collaborative learning research, cognitive aspects have been considered to be primary, and the aspects that we referred to, to be secondary. But what is going on from the students’ points of view? Are students primarily trying to solve a problem, which requires them, secondarily, to get on with each other? Or is it the other way round? Is the knowledge students are supposed to acquire and elaborate in school, as it were, “incidentally” wrapped in a social guise, as presented by the teacher, the textbook authors, the other students? Or is that knowledge inseparable from, situated in, the particular social situation?

That is what this book is about: the study of the relations between, cognitive, social and affective dimensions of interactions produced in collaborative learning situations. It is about redressing the balance, about attempting to consider these dimensions on an equal footing, as aspects of the unified phenomenon of people, human beings, eminently social, in flesh and blood, trying to interact with and understand each other, in order to come to grips with knowledge, as it is presented in societally and historically situated institutions called schools.

In order to add substance to our narrative on the extract, couched initially on socio-relational and affective planes, we now turn to its cognitive and social dimensions. In analytical terms, the distinctions between these dimensions are, we would claim, quite clear in the above extract. For example, in lines 8 to 12 above, Susan engages in an argumentative strategy called reductio ad absurdum: along the cognitive dimension, she uses an interpersonal reasoning strategy that requires John to admit an obvious perceptual fact (that there are not two batteries on the table), then requires him to invalidate his own proposal, as a consequence. But it also seems clear that describing Susan’s statement in line 12 in purely cognitive terms, as a statement concerning invalidation of a proposition, is highly reductive: it is also clear that constraining someone to verbalise the inadequacy of their own views (rather than straightforwardly informing them of this) can be humiliating (cold rationality itself can, in a sense, be personally violent), and that accusing someone of talking rubbish amounts to saying that they are stupid, which says something about the interpersonal relation between them and which also (as can be seen from what ensues) arouses negative emotions and expression of negative affects on the part of John. We propose that all of these dimensions need to be taken into account in understanding what takes place in the dialogue and thus what the students could potentially learn.

Here is some information about the problem-solving task. The students are sitting at the back of a secondary school classroom in the city of Lyon (France), in a class that provides additional but not essential training in science for students who are following a “literary” stream. Each group of two students in the classroom has a simple electrical circuit on the table in front of them, consisting of a battery linked, by two wires (from its positive and negative terminals), to a bulb. They link up the circuit and observe that the bulb lights up. They have been asked to draw a diagram that represents (or models) the circuit in terms of reservoirs, transfers and transformers of energy. The answer that the teacher would like them to discover (see Tiberghien & Megalakaki, 1995) is that the battery is a reservoir of electrical energy, which is transferred via the wires to the bulb, which in turn transforms this energy into light and heat that are transferred to a type of “reservoir” which does not correspond to a tangible object (like the battery), called “the environment”. What is at stake here is the principle of conservation of energy (energy cannot go “nowhere” from the bulb), and the fact that energy can have different manifestations (heat, light, electrical work, etc.). In a sense, therefore, the whole didactical point of this educational task is to lead the students to understand the scientific concept of energy, and to be able to distinguish this from, in this case, electricity. Students often confuse energy and electricity as it circulates in a circuit. In this extract, John proposes that the energy goes out from the battery and back to the bulb, in a circle, which satisfies the requirement that the energy must go somewhere from the bulb. But, as Susan points out, that implies the absurd conclusion that there must be a second battery for the energy of the bulb to go to (there is manifestly only one battery!) and that thus the bulb would never go out(!). Susan is right and John has got it wrong. John has confused energy transfer with circulation of electrical current. Susan grapples with the distinction between energy and electrical circuits; she does realise that although current flows round in a circuit, energy must go “whoosh” in the same direction across the wires from the battery to the bulb.

How does this task-related information relate to or inform the interpretation along the socio-relational and affective dimensions? Assuming that the students did in fact understand the relevant reasoning, this information could enable us to understand why each student rejected the other’s solution, and the extent to which each should or should not have done so, from a normative perspective. But it cannot explain everything about the way in which the dialogue actually unfolded: John could have tried to listen to Susan’s ideas, and to understand her criticisms of his own, in which case the dialogue would have gone differently. But we attribute the fact that he did not do so to the way in which Susan rejected his ideas, to the fact that he was not only defending his ideas but also defending himself, as a person, from an aggressive personal attack on his sense of self-worth, in relation to all the negative emotions that that must have aroused. What students learn from working together will partly be a function of the way that they interacted, the extent to which each was able to understand and address the ideas of others, and to reflect on their own. And the way that they interact will be a function of the inextricable “interactions” between cognitive, socio-relational and situational aspects of that interaction. It follows that in order to understand how learning emerges from collaboration between students, we have to try to understand how cognitive, socio-relational and affective dimensions interrelate. The problem is compounded by the fact that there exist quite different theories of each of these dimensions. Therefore, our aim here is not to produce a single integrative theory, but rather to find more limited and localised bridges between ways of seeing each dimension.

How do interpersonal relations, the circulation of emotions, collaborative problem-solving and learning interrelate? Do emotions always “get in the way” of task performance? Might not, on the other hand, a particularly bland, emotionally “flat” interaction also be uninteresting for learning? Can there not be too much emotion or too little? Might not what counts as too much or too little depend on the nature of the prior interpersonal relationship? Perhaps good friends can disagree and call each other names whilst preserving their friendship (playful insults might be part of friendship), whilst people who have a more fragile, or nascent interpersonal relationship (not to speak of enemies) might not be able to take the risk of (im)polite disagreement?

This book is oriented towards addressing these, and other, questions.

In the rest of this chapter, before introducing the chapters of the book, we try to situate the emergence of the topic of this book within the evolutions of recent paradigms of collaborative learning research, beginning, successively, with views from the cognitive, the social and the affective.

Views from the cognitive

Over the last thirty years, there has been a general shift of focus in educational psychology research, from the study of the individual learner to the study of how individuals learn from working together in small groups (see Dillenbourg, Baker, Blaye & O’Malley, 1996, for a synthesis). Up to the 1980s, the two dominant cognitivist theories — that of human problem-solving as information processing (Newell & Simon, 1972) and that of the development and transformation of cognitive “schemes” in response to feedback on actions from the environment (Piaget, 1964) — were centred on processes at work in the individual learner. In a sense, it seems “natural” to focus on the individual: after all, are not individual students the ones who learn and are who given diplomas? But, on one hand, a focus on the individual does not justify a purely cognitive vision of social beings; and on another, we should not conflate societal needs for evaluating individual educational attainment with the identification of an object of scientific study. Furthermore, as we shall discuss, it is also possible to take the group or even the institution as an object for the study of learning (or, relatively stable transformation). What is at stake here is the question as to whether or not, in moving from the individual to the group and the collective, qualitatively different phenomena arise that require different research approaches.

Each of the theoretical approaches mentioned above has given rise to attempts to extend them, in order to take into account the learner working with others. These developments had different motivations — internal and external to the paradigm — in each case. In the case of so-called “classical cognitivism”, this change was associated with the critique of the theory of situated cognition and learning (Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1990) that seemed to require the broadening of the field of study beyond the individual in the experimental laboratory to the (again “so-called”) “real world” of educational practice, the supermarket and the workplace, where collective activity is the norm. In effect, should the burden of proof be on group activity, to show that it is more effective than learning alone, or should it be the other way around? Increasing awareness of the importance of distributed teamwork, across continents and cultures, within globalised economies, with Internet-based technologies as primary vectors of societal change, were no doubt associated with this recognition that the group, the collective, rather than a secondary conjunction of individuals, was perhaps primary. In terms that were internal to the paradigm, the conjecture according to which detailed symbolic models of individual learners trying to solve limited problems could and would, in principle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: visions of learning together
• Section 1 Foundations: social and affective dimensions
• Section 2 Social relations and identities
• Section 3 Emotion and motivation
• Section 4 Tensions in groups
• Section 5 Argumentation and emotion
• Author index
• Subject index