Written version of RIME paper (GCID) for MER, Exeter 2007
collective task. Without each person’s particular input, the task as a whole would
disintegrate. Some theorists refer to this kind of activity as ‘cooperative learning’,
‘collaborative learning’, or more extremely, ‘co-cooperative learning’ within a
‘learning community’. It is at this end of the spectrum that the informal music
learning project is situated. For whilst there is the possibility that a member of a group
may make only a limited input, the role of each individual nonetheless contributes an
integral part to the overall musical product.
I can imagine you might be thinking ‘But what about the coaster, the free-
rider, the child who sits and does nothing?’ I don’t have time to go into this today, but
I would ask you to take it on faith that there were actually very few occurrences of
this kind of thing. Where they did occur, in nearly every case, the individual
concerned was gradually drawn into the activity by others in the group. I would also
like to suggest that just because a pupil is sitting apparently doing nothing whilst
music plays and others use voices and instruments around them, this does not
necessarily mean that they are learning nothing. However, there is no time to go into
that argument more deeply today.
The teachers expected group cooperation to be a problem. They anticipated
that pupils would waste time, muck around, break equipment, and argue. However,
within the first one or two lessons, these opinions changed quite radically. Overall,
teachers came to agree that application, responsibility, motivation and cooperation
were better than normal; and furthermore, they observed that in general these
continued to improve as the year went by. They expressed some considerable surprise
about this.
At the end of the first, 4 to 6-week stage of the project, we conducted semi-
structured interviews with 200 pupils in 40 small groups across 7 schools. We asked
only open questions, and did not prompt replies. One question was: ‘How well or how
badly did your group cooperate during the task?’ Only five groups indicated that they
had experienced problems, although in most cases this was restricted to the first
couple of lessons: ‘Some of us didn’t cooperated [sic]’; ‘We didn’t get our work
together quickly’; but in the end, ‘we knuckled down, and then we done it’. Amongst
the remaining 35 groups the response was invariably that cooperation had been ‘easy’,
‘very easy’ or ‘fine’. Let us consider the types of group cooperation that were
involved.