Becoming Together: Creating and Looking at Collaborations as Learning Products

Collaboration – the performance of working together – is a common construct in the learning sciences, though it is used almost exclusively as a strategy for improving learning of content or process outcomes. We often talk about learning through collaboration; we rarely talk about collaboration itself as learning. Talking about collaboration as learning shifts our focus on acknowledging diverse collaborative arrangements and on the design of the learning space, activities and tools that afford opportunities for the same. Instead of viewing collaborations as a byproduct of attaining a separate outcome, valuing certain collaborative behaviors as “productive”; considering collaboration as a learning outcome allows us to recognize diversity within collaborative styles and values brought into learning spaces, and their affordances and constraints for different activities. In this symposium, we bring together different ways of collaborating, as the object to design for and learn in an environment. Synthesizing these diverse bodies of work under the umbrella of learned collaboration, enables us to identify types and patterns of collaboration, which in turn, can allow us to actively support students to "learn to collaborate; as well as broaden perspectives of recognizing different behaviors as productive collaboration (which are often overlooked due to their lack of explicit service to other learning goals).