Abstract
As social and cultural psychologists of learning, we are persuaded of the crucial role of interaction in development and learning. But how do we experience this assumption in our own research practices and in our collaboration with colleagues? Taking as our object of study our own participation in a European Research and Development project that aimed to enhance interactive and argumentative skills in learning settings, this study shows how collaboration among project partners is not something that is to be taken for granted, but something that is elaborated and evolves in time, takes diverse forms, and is mediated by multiple tools. The psychological processes—more particularly tensions and negotiation—involved in collaboration are developed and discussed. The study explores the processes of establishing collaboration and, through the analysis of specific zones of tensions, sheds light on the way new knowledge (on how to do research, how to communicate, how to work together) is constructed. It contributes to the understanding of the issues and conditions for the development of a community of practice.
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Notes
Since we were both participants in the project and observers of the psychosocial dynamics occurring in it, in this paper we assume this two-side position in using the personal pronoun “we”. Like ethnographers who try to become members of the group they wish to understand, we take benefit of our inner familiarity with the rules and implicit knowledge that were in use in the project, and try to learn the culture and to account for it “from the inside out”.
The Technical partners developed a platform, called Oasis, in which the main tool, Digalo, is a graphical editor that allows the users to create and handle argumentative maps. Fed by the users’ written contributions, these maps increase through discussion and provide a picture of its evolution—who said what, when, to whom, etc.—while notifying the argumentative form and structure of the discussion (Schwarz and Glassner 2007).
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Acknowledgements
This research was carried out in the frame of the DUNES Project. DUNES is a European project coordinated by Professor Baruch Schwarz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and funded by the Vth Framework Programme of the European Commission (IST-2001-34153) (www.dunes.gr). We would like to warmly thank all the partners involved in this project and other partners involved in COCASE (Collaborative Case Studies For A European Cultural Psychology) community (funded by European Science Foundation Exploratory Workshop) for their comments and reactions. We are grateful to Tania Zittoun, Flora Cornish and Alex Gillespie for their stimulating invitation. We thank Denis Hilton for his careful English revision of the manuscript.
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Tartas, V., Muller Mirza, N. Rethinking Collaborative Learning Through Participation in an Interdisciplinary Research Project: Tensions and Negotiations as Key Points in Knowledge Production. Integr. psych. behav. 41, 154–168 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-007-9019-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-007-9019-6