Pedagogical models are increasingly part of the vocabulary and practice in physical education. They emerged from decades of innovation that seeks to end the dominance of direct instruction and multi-model curricula. They continue to evolve and that serves as a catalyst for our argument that Cooperative Learning lost a keystone of its development when it was brought into physical education.
Digging into the genesis of Cooperative Learning shows that it owes much of its early intellectual development to the work of John Dewey and Kurt Lewin (Schmuck, 1985). Indeed Cooperative Learning was ‘born’ out of both the epistemology of pragmatic philosophy (Dewey) and the positivist epistemology of developmental psychology (Lewin). However, over time, the legacy of Dewey’s work around cooperation has been marginalised, at best, in the body of work around Cooperative Learning in general education and is conspicuous by its near total absence in the physical education literature. Revisiting the 27 papers used by Casey and Goodyear (2015) in their review of literature shows that Dewey’s name does not appear in a single reference list. This paper seeks to redress the balance and argues that in applying a Deweyan lens of experience to Cooperative Learning we return to Lewin and Dewey shared interest and “pioneering spirit…to improve social interaction and cooperation in schools” (Schmuck, 1985, p. 2).
One of Dewey’s main contributions is his notion of education as growth. For Dewey education is the “reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience” (1916: 76), and in these constructions the person experiencing, the experiencer, as well as what is experienced has a potential for change (Dewey & Bentley, 1949). Such change, however, is not fixed or completed. Instead it is a process of becoming which then promotes further experiences (Dewey, 1938a). Education then does not have an end beyond itself. It is about the conditions of education, and experiences are educative if they promote growth of still even more, richer experiences.
Cooperative learning as a pedagogical model should then be about “…the enterprise of supplying the conditions which insure growth” (Dewey, 1916: 61). This is not in terms of cooperating as a passive adaption into a set of predetermined contexts like for example competitive sports, but cooperating to ensure improved quality of future experiences. It should provide experiences that: “arouses curiosity, strengthens initiative, and sets up desires and purposes that are sufficiently intense to carry a person over the dead places” (Dewey, 1938b: 38).
Using Dewey we can also take critique directed towards cooperative learning seriously, for example, the inability to take power relations of the educational situation into account e.g. sexism, racism or homophobia. Here we turn to Shannon Sullivan’s (2001) use of Dewey’s notion of transaction to address this relative blindness and move beyond dualist notions of experience. Sullivan contends that:
Many times, the reconstruction of organism and environment through their ongoing transactional activity serves only to deepen the grooves of the transactions that came before. Because organism and environment are continually being remade through their transactional relationship, however, significant change is possible. (Sullivan, 2001, 36)
This, according to Sullivan, involves acknowledging continuity as well as difference in experience and in doing so cooperative learning has to be modelled to handle all students experiences since it is in the transaction between the students and the environment the model becomes the model it is.
In conclusion, by taking back Dewey’s ideas around experience and education into cooperative learning in physical education we could focus more on both the process of cooperating and the process of learning taking into account the diversity of students experiences in the complex transaction between content, teaching and learning.
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