Group Learning
Synonyms
Definition
Considered as a whole, the literature on learning has directed relatively little attention to learning by multiple entities such as groups or teams. This situation is explicable by the fact that discussions of learning typically make the tacit assumption that individual persons (or other organisms) are the locus of the learning. This crucial, but little noticed, assumption reflects the fact that most educational literature is pre-occupied with formal education systems, and their near universal focus on sorting, teaching, assessing, and accrediting of individuals. Hence the possibility of group learning is rarely considered. When it is considered, the clear bias of the learning literature toward individual learning encourages the reductivist assumption that the learning by the group is nothing more than the sum of the respective learnings by the individuals that are members of the group. (“The whole is but the...
References
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