Abstract
The issue of “collaborating to learn” is tackled by analysing a peer-tutoring situation aimed at providing help to students with learning difficulties. The corpus consists of a six-lesson cycle between a 15 year-old student and her 14 year-old tutee who has difficulties with German.
The analysis shows that the tutor and the tutee interactively construct the asymmetry and complementarity of their roles. As a consequence, what seemed at first sight to be the tutor’s discursive and guidance abilities appears, upon closer examination, to be the result of the students’ interactional work. In this particular case, the mode of collaboration which is achieved results in the tutor taking charge of the major part of the cognitive work.
However, we argue that the mode of collaboration which is accomplished by the students is also a sign of the representations the tutor and the tutee have of a teaching-learning situation, of the teacher’s and student’s roles and on German as a body of knowledge to be taught vs. learned. The learning of certain modes of collaboration which might be expected to promote learning should thus be contextualised in broader social and institutional practices.
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Grossen, M., Bachmann, K. Learning to collaborate in a peer-tutoring situation: Who learns? What is learned?. Eur J Psychol Educ 15, 491–508 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03172990
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03172990