Collaborative Learning in Higher Music Education

Helena Gaunt, Heidi Westerlund, Helena Gaunt, Heidi Westerlund

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409446828
• eBook ISBN: 9781317164401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

In higher music education, learning in social settings (orchestras, choirs, bands, chamber music and so on) is prevalent, yet understanding of such learning rests heavily on the transmission of knowledge and skill from master to apprentice. This narrow view of learning trajectories pervades in both one-to-one and one-to-many contexts. This is surprising given the growing body of knowledge about the power of collaborative learning in general, underpinned by theoretical developments in educational psychology: the social dimensions of learning, situational learning and concepts of communities of learners. Collaborative Learning in Higher Music Education seeks to respond to the challenge of becoming more conscious of the creative and multiple dimensions of social interaction in learning music, in contexts ranging from interdisciplinary projects to one-to-one tuition, and not least in the contemporary context of rapid change in the cultural industries and higher education as a whole. It brings together theoretical papers and case studies of practice. Themes covered include collaborative creativity, communities of practice, peer-learning, co-teaching as co-learning, assessment and curriculum structures. Chapters illuminate reasons for enabling collaborative learning, and provide exemplars of innovative practice and designs for collaborative learning environments in higher music education. A central purpose of the book is to scaffold change, to help in meeting the rapid changes in society and to find constructive stepping stones or signposts for teachers and students.

PART I
Theoretical Perspectives and Research Studies

Chapter 1
Mapping the Research Ground: Expertise, Collective Creativity and Shared Knowledge Practices

Kai Hakkarainen

Creativity appears to be a necessary virtue in an advanced knowledge society that requires mastery of increasingly sophisticated knowledge and expertise. Creative human capabilities are becoming more and more important in an innovation-driven society or ‘creative economy’ in which people have deliberately to generate novelty by acquiring new competencies over and over again, and by breaking through the boundaries of earlier knowledge and competence. Instead of relying on expertise acquired once, people have to move repeatedly from one environment of professional activity to new ones, and to transit from one occupation and professional career to another, thereby breaking boundaries of their earlier established capabilities. A significant proportion of people are working with complex knowledge-creating tasks and projects that originally were thought to depend on specific innate talents. Within this development, enhancement of intelligence and creativity has become an economic and societal necessity rather than a mere theme of academic discussion.

Our advanced Western society has a cultural belief according to which people have fixed, inherited creative and intellectual powers that determine their success in learning and work: when an actor succeeds exceptionally well or fails, it is assumed to take place because of inborn intellectual characteristics that are minimally transformed by this person’s own efforts, education or life experience. It is assumed that creativity relies on pre-given gifts and talents that are only trainable to a limited extent (for criticism of such a view, see Howe, 1999; Howe et al., 1998; Levitin, 2006). Francis Galton (1869/2009) assumed that everybody is born with certain inherited cognitive limitations he or she cannot exceed or circumvent whatever efforts are invested: a participant’s maximal performance is ‘a rigidly determinate quantity’ (Colvin, 2008: 62). Such conceptions are a part of uncritically adopted everyday social representations (Moscovici, 2000) according to which fixed and pre-determined talents determine what a person can learn and what he or she is able to attain. Such categorical notions are in an obvious conflict with the logic of an advanced knowledge society focused on deliberate pursuit of novelty and innovation.

The purpose of this chapter is to problematize such biased and individualist notions of creativity that still have a great deal of influence in our culture in general, and in academic education in particular. Rather than seeing creativity as an unexplainable individual gift, I see it to be based on deliberately and systematically cultivated personal and collective expertise, embodied in expert cultures and networks. By providing higher education students with access to the creative practices of expert communities and networks, their academic achievements are fostered by collective rather than mere personal creativity. Students of higher education arguably spend too many years exclusively in acquisition-oriented and teacher-centred studies without undertaking their own work in genuine advancement of knowledge (Mandl et al., 1996). On its own, successful achievement in traditional higher education studies often fails to provide students with competencies to solve the complex and ill-defined problems of professional life. In order to overcome these challenges, it is crucial to bring cultures of schooling into closer contact with professional cultures and, thereby, engage students in deliberate creation and building of knowledge from the beginning of higher education (Bereiter, 2002; Hakkarainen et al., 2004).

Expertise: A Cognitive-Cultural Operating System of Creative Activity

Expertise may be defined as mastery of a well-organized body of usable knowledge that a participant can (and does) utilize to focus selectively on the critical aspects of a complex problem and, thereby reach an exceptionally high level of performance (Chi, 2006; Ericsson 2006). Investigations reveal that experts are able to produce better solutions than novices, identify more complex and meaningful patterns, analyse problems qualitatively, reflectively assess their own reasoning processes, and utilize sophisticated strategies by relying on minimal intellectual efforts (Chi, 2006). Expertise is always domain-specific, so that experts have exceptional competencies only in their trained domain of activity. An expert’s knowledge represents cultural-historical evolution of the domain of activity and is embodied in social practices of expert communities and networks. Gradual socialization to practices of an expert network augments a newcomer’s cognitive capacities to the point where they are enabled to solve significantly more complex problems than would otherwise be possible.

By following Donald’s (2000) line of thought, the development of expertise may be interpreted as a process of acquiring a cognitive-cultural operating system that the cultural environment of activity requires as it evolves over time. I am using the metaphor of an operating system because rather than involving mere acquisition of cultural knowledge, growth of expertise appears also radically to transform the basic mechanisms of intellectual activity. Across the development of expertise, culture literally reformats and re-programmes the student’s cognitive architecture (Donald, 1991, 2000); as a consequence of extensive cultural reshaping, cultural resources become internalized as a part of the human mind and drastically affect the available cognitive resources at many levels. Such capacities are best not thought of as individual characteristics, but rather as the appropriations, within individuals, of the capabilities of the culture in which they live.

Expertise is a matter of long-standing, effortful and deliberate processes of socialization to practices of an expert culture (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Accordingly, expertise requires approximately four hours of daily practice across ten years. This means about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice; that is, practice intentionally aimed at improving one’s competencies (Ericsson et al., 1993; on deliberate practice in music, see Levitin, 2006). It is not a mechanical process but involves a great deal of thinking and reflection for analysing, conceptualizing and cultivating developing performance, and directing future training efforts in a fine-tuned way to the dynamically evolving level of performance. It often takes place under the guidance of old masters who have already gone through a similar process, and have gained a great deal of experience (Gruber et al., 2008). So, for example, in the musical domain it appears critical for one to undertake solitary practice to improve specific aspects of one’s performance. Apparently, only ‘perfect practice’ skillfully tailored to one’s dynamically developing level of accomplishment makes one perfect (Ericsson, 2006). Human performance improves through extensive practice without any pre-given limitations; at the further stages of practice one may just have to invest more training in relation to each step of improvement (Ericsson, 2006). People do not become aware of the radical modifiability of their competencies because they give up deliberate training after achieving a satisfactory level of performance, which often takes place after a few tens of hours of training.

Studies by Ericsson and Lehmann (1996) indicate that the length and intensity of (masterful) deliberate practice alone explains exceptional performance and masterful accomplishments. We do not have to think (and there is no solid evidence) that even the highest performers and top masters were at the outset categorically different from other people (Ericsson, 2006); that is, were natively endowed with specific gifts or talents that would explain their excellence. The top performers have often started their practice earlier than those attaining a moderate level of performance, and they have practised much harder and more systematically (having several thousands of hours more of deliberate practice than their less accomplished colleagues; Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996). All measures indicate that superior experts engage in more intensive training rather than discovering mysterious short-cuts to excellence based on their gifts. There are, further, no reliable means of distinguishing those who will become elite performers during training; while many initially promising candidates fail, some of those who do not initially show any promise may start excelling later on in training. Experts’ activity does not always involve deliberate practice; thus there is only a weak link between level of expertise and length of professional experience (Ericsson, 2006). Some professionals are called ‘experienced non-experts’ (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993) because they have not achieved excellent performance in spite of a long training and extensive history of working in the domain. Many studies have, however, revealed that there are adaptive experts (Hatano & Inagaki, 1992) who are characterized by their creative, that is, inventive and flexible performance rather than mastery of routine solutions. Adaptive experts invest a great deal of effort in understanding problems in depth and develop novel procedures and practices by reflecting on and generalizing their experiences. Moreover, they deliberately work at the edge of their competence and seek challenges that assist and elicit their learning, development and creative knowledge advancement (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993). Rather than reducing novelty to routines, they deliberately engage in social practices involving pursuit of complex and varying problems that require innovation and exploration, conceptualization and reflection on various aspects of performance.

Through sustained participation in an expert culture’s practices and deliberate efforts to stretch capabilities, maximal cognitive adaptation (Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996) takes place; that is, the flexible and dynamic transformation of an agent’s cognitive system according to constraints of frequently encountered problems. The participants are stretching their cognitive competencies in order to fine-tune their evolving cognitive-culture operating system for tasks that they are pursuing. A beautiful example of cognitive adaptation is the formation of so-called Long-Term Working Memory (LTWM; Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995) that allows a participant to use his or her long-term memory as an extension of working memory; that is, retrieve information as rapidly as it would be in his or her working memory. It is a kind of virtual memory based on fully internalized cultural knowledge structures. Activated areas of one’s long-term memory based on such internalized cognitive artefacts allow retrieving information as fast as that stored in the limited-capacity working memory. Doing well in a demanding examination, writing a thesis or a book are likely to rely on LTWM that emerges through an extended educational enculturation. This virtual memory system assists in the expertise-related breaking of the boundaries of human cognitive limitations, and appears to play a crucial role in creative activity. Through developing expertise very special kinds of minds emerge. As a consequence of sustained cognitive adaptation, human thinking transforms towards those modalities that the expert is using in his or her work (that is, thinking linguistically, visually, musically, mathematically, or in terms of embodying ideas in design of artefacts; Weisberg, 2006).

Expertise is a Socio-Materially Distributed Process in Nature

Mainstream psychological research on expertise has traditionally focused on individual mental processes. From the perspective of a student working at cultivating his or her expertise, it is, however, essential that the human mind has permeable boundaries so that it can merge, fuse and integrate with various external artefacts and other minds in a way that augments cognition and elicits creative achievement (Clark, 2003). There are three aspects or dimensions concerning the distributed nature of human cognition (Hutchins, 1995; Pea, 1993). First, it is materially distributed in respect of creating, using and developing various external artefacts that significantly transform our cognitive competencies and make complex problem-solving involved in creative expertise possible in the first place. Second, it is socially distributed; people share their efforts in various communities and networks, and create collective cognitive systems together. Third, it is temporally distributed; human cognitive efforts always capitalize on intergenerational emergence of innovative knowledge practices as well as personal and collective transactive processes.

Human minds, with their limited cognitive characteristics, attain vastly greater power when they are integrated with heterogeneous networks of tools and artefacts, and with the other minds of humans in their communities (Donald, 1991, 2000, 2001). Our intelligence is not only inside the mind but resides in multifaceted networking connections and is downloaded to various peripherals; that is, artefacts that can be understood as cognitive prostheses (artificial limbs) that expand and augment human creativity and intelligence in significant ways (Clark, 2003). Accordingly, human beings are ‘cognitive overachievers’ (Donald, 2000) whose intellectual and creative achievements are piggy-backed on cultural invention of technologies of external cognition. By appropriating instruments of the domain they are studying, newcomers are able to stretch their creative powers far beyond natural limitations. Radical innovations are likely to emerge when ordinary minds start creating, developing and using novel types of instruments and associated social practices eliciting extraordinary creative achievements.

According to Donald’s (1991, 2000, 2001) analysis (see also Olson, 1994), the emergence of literacy profoundly transformed the human cognitive architecture. Writing and visualization allowed human beings to externalize, objectify, and materialize their thinking and reasoning by creating various external representations and establishing a conceptual culture based on gradually accumulating External Symbolic Storage Systems (ESSSs). Production of knowledge by writing on sand, paper or a digital surface opened up an External Memory Field (EXMF) in which complex ideas and associated epistemic systems could be extensively refined in a way not attainable for unaided human mind. The cognitive-cultural operating system of expertise required by modern society capitalizes on the EXFM that brings about a profound architectural transformation of cognition. Human cognitive evolution has not ended but continues through creating instruments and practices for radically collectivizing cognition; that is, thinking and reasoning by deliberately creating conceptual and material artefacts and capitalizing on epistemic systems (for example, symbols, notations and frameworks) that embody cumulating knowledge and competence.

Innovative Knowledge Communities as Collective Subjects of Knowledge-Creation

The other side of distributed cognition is the fusing of minds in social communities and networks (Hutchins, 1995; John-Steiner, 2000/2006; Pea, 1993). Even if individual experts’ cognitive resources remain limited, collective activity allows specialization, cognitive division of labour, and sharing of intellectual efforts that provide qualitatively stronger creative resources than would otherwise be humanly possible. Significant human achievements span differing domains and appear to be based on social distribution of cognitive efforts; on collective merging and fusing of cognitions into higher-level systems. In spite of tensions, ruptures, and disagreements that characterize all collaborative activities (Kramer, 1999), partners of collaboration create mutually supporting structures that allow them to do something that they would not be able to do on their own (John-Steiner, 2000/2006).

From a sociological perspective, expertise is seen relationally as connected to a role in a workplace community (Hakkarainen et al., 2004; Mieg, 2001; Stein, 1997) needed for solving emerging and partially unforeseen complex problems. Adaptive expertise may be regarded as a competency associated with a specific role that a participant has adopted within a social community. In professional organizations, expertise is examined relationally by assessing whether professionals complement one another’s expertise (that is, have sufficient heterogeneously distributed expertise; Johnson et al., 2000) so that they are able to capitalize on productive division of labour and collectively master strategic competence. Hakkarainen and colleagues (2004) have developed a framework of ‘networked expertise’ for examining higher-level cognitive competencies that arise, in appropriate environments, from sustained collaborative efforts to solve problems and build knowledge together. Networked expertise emerges from the tailoring and fine-tuning of individual competencies in relation to specific conditions of the environment of the activity, and it is represented as a joint or shared competence of communities and organized groups of experts and professionals. In many cases, key experts are not only centrally located within their own professional community (or close to other central actors), but also engaged in keeping up rich and multifaceted personal social networks extending to various external communities and organizations (Hakkarainen et al., 2004; Palonen et al., 2004).

Together with my colleagues, I have proposed that a central characteristic of experts’ collective activity is systematic and deliberate pursuit of knowledge-creating learning (Hakkarainen et al., 2004), rather than mere individual acquisition of already prevailing knowledge (a knowledge-acquisition metaphor of learning; Paavola et al., 2004) or participation in and assimilation of practices of a stable social community (a participation metaphor of learning; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Sfard, 1998). While individual experts often have a critical role in the pursuit of novelty and innovation, this takes place on fertile ground that is provided by collaborative activity (Paavola et al., 2004). It is important to consider the nature of communities that nurture such activity. Currently, creative activity takes place more and more often in specific kinds of social communities and increasingly complex expanded networks to support knowledge-creation efforts. It is therefore appropriate to look further at the context of knowledge creation in institutions and communities. Such settings are socio-cognitive systems of knowledge creation (Tuomi, 2002) that have been variously designated: activity syste...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editors' Preface
• The Case for Collaborative Learning in Higher Music Education
• Part I Theoretical Perspectives and Research Studies
• Part II Practitioners' Reports and Narratives
• Bibliography
• Index