What if the purpose of learning is collective transformation and well-being? If we set up classrooms, workshops, and educational spaces and processes based on collaboration rather than competition, what different ways of knowing would be encouraged and created? If educators promoted collective and cooperative values over individual success, how would learning outcomes change? How would the culture of human beings change? Reading Michael Thomasello’s book, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999), sparked these questions, though I have been pondering similar ones for a number of years. Indeed, I am drawn to academic and activist work that acknowledges our deep need for collaboration, and the fact that our inherent abilities to collaborate may be the key to personal, social, and political transformation.
While Tomasello’s book is not explicitly about educational processes, it offered me a new perspective as an adult educator, specifically, that humans learn differently than non-human primates in unique ways. The book explores our species’ unique abilities to learn, including the history and evolution of human understanding and intelligence. In addition, the author examines how humans compare cognitively, socially, and culturally to other primates, with a focus on the origin and development of language acquisition processes.
Tomasello argues that humans are fundamentally different from non-human primates because of our ability to understand the intentions and mental states of other humans. We also develop within a unique socio-cultural environment, as young babies imitate their parents, and toddlers see others as the same as they are, motivated by the same goals and intentions. Non-human primates, on the other hand, do not exhibit these capacities. The unique human capacity to do all of this allows us to accumulate our ancestors’ experiences and innovations that have been tested and built on over centuries, something Tomasello (1999) calls the “ratchet effect”. This allows humans to constantly build on new knowledge and transfer it through culture to generate invention and transformation that allows us to survive and thrive.
Tomasello looks at how the human race has collaboratively combined biological adaptations, cognitive ability, and unique cultural intelligence to prosper on this planet. His innovative research looks at how children form joint goals, how they decide to do something together, how they then plan together to make it happen, and share in the resulting outcomes. Tying this back to evolution, he demonstrates how we have benefited over time from our collective intelligence. He asserts that “It’s not that humans can read one another’s minds, but they put their heads together to collaborate to do things that they cannot do alone…and humans maintain the collaboration over time, while other non-human primates cannot” (2010, 2:36).
When our species walked out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, our ancestors used collaboration to learn, survive, and thrive. We continue to do so innately rather than intentionally, and one example of this is our public education system. The curriculum is not based on collective goals or collaborative processes, instead it focuses on individual achievement and competitive advantage. Drawing on Tomasello’s assertions of our unique human capacities to learn through collaboration, perhaps we can imagine collaborative learning spaces, where students are not pitted against one another, but rather build on one another’s intelligence and ideas to reach new outcomes. What could humans achieve if this was the case? Could we solve climate change issues, tackle poverty and intolerance, or create a world where 99 percent live sustainably, abundantly, and harmoniously? Certainly we have the technological capabilities to do these things, but lack the moral mindshift we’d need to get there.
I believe we need to tap into our species’ unique collaborative process that allows us to ratchet learning, success, and innovation to create this shift. Richard Sennett (2012), sociologist and author of Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation, suggests that since our world is more interconnected than at any time in its history we must learn the craft of cooperation if we are to make our complex society prosper. And he reassures us that we can do this because the capacity for cooperation is embedded in human nature. While his motivation for knowledge might be distinct from Tomasello’s, they come to the same conclusion, that we need to pay attention to how humans collaborate.
References
Heineken Prizes. (Producer). (2010, November 18) Heineken Prizes - Professor Michael Tomasello. Retrieved January 20, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dtf2btmfPgw
Pagel, Mark. (2012). Cooperation, the secret weapon of our species, New Scientist, http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2012/01/cooperation-the-secret-weapon-of-our-species.html
Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Interesting and definitely a great way to implement our learning capabilities and the way its in sync with various thoughts and ideas put together to form one huge collaboration. I strongly beleive that we learn much more effciently from each other just like I am learning from your blog. I would have to agree with Tomasello when he states that institutions, objects, and tools were created and developed by not just one individual but more than one indviduals and ideas are continuous as we can observe today with collaboration humans have evolved. We move from Televisions that had antennas and knobs that we had to spin to change channels, to HDTV now remote controlled, we can record our favourite shows, play it back. Hence Collaborative Learning has allowed us to defintely develop a "rachet" as Tomasello would put it, we no longer live in the past.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of our mindshifting to change the issues we as Humans developed I still think we are in denial that those issues were created by us and we are not sure how we can implement learning to an extent where we can accept those responsibilities and work collaboratively to correcting such problems.
Great Blog Corrie looking forward to learning more from you.
Corrie
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your blog. It prompted me to think about how many women in society have been successful in collaborative learning when managing the care of their children and/or elderly parents by supporting each other, sharing their experiences and learning from each other's successes and failures. These collaborative skills have been fine-tuned over the centuries. I hold out hope for humanity when I read of the empowerment of girls and women in developing countries through education. Linda
Corrie, I think this is a fascinating point to raise about the ethics of collaboration. I had similar reservations about Tomasello's rather cut-and-dried interpretation of social interaction and its role in children's cognitive development: he seems to take for granted that joint attentional skills play out in the same way, with the same results, for all human infants. To my mind that is too pat an answer - what about interrupted dialogue, or emotional tension, or repeated frustrated efforts? All of these can have a meaningful effect on Tomasello’s argument for cognitive development that appears to be so straightforward, and taken together raise questions about collaboration and its part in learning development. As adults, so much of our institutionalized training is about individual accomplishment; yet, for those activists like yourself (and I salute you for it), the commitment to joint efforts and shared rewards is what helps realize political and social goals. One has to wonder whether institutions (universities, corporations, etc.) are behind the times in recognizing that collaboration offers a greater potential for learning, or if the wave of the future, as far as activism is concerned, is a move towards the unique contributions of its members; I can see the pros and cons of both shifts. I similarly think the ‘ratchet effect’ should have led to a more socially- and ethically-conscious society by this point in time, if we are truly building on the best knowledge and cultural innovation of previous generations. Thanks for a thought-provoking post!
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