2 Collaboration and collective action

It’s widely acknowledged that tackling a challenge as complex as the climate crisis requires collaborative approaches, with people working together across cultures, geographies, subject specialisms and age groups. In this section of the course you’ll explore how we, as educators and learners, can support each other and achieve effective action through collaboration.

Roschelle and Teasley (1995) define collaboration as:

This definition is helpful as it emphasises the nature of collaboration as an interactive process, as well as its expected outcome – to have a shared conception of a problem. The definition also emphasises the importance of coordination and synchronisation in supporting effective collaboration.

There is plenty of evidence about how collaboration between learners can reinforce knowledge, improve attainment, and improve attitudes towards learning (for example, see Johnson and Johnson, 2002; Johnson et al., 2014). There is also an agreement among learning sciences scholars that just allowing learners to work together is not sufficient to get positive results (Kester and Paas, 2005; Slavin, 2014; Dillenbourg, 1999) and that learning activities involving collaboration should include an element of guidance, moderation or instruction (Kirschner, Sweller and Clark, 2006).

Next, you’ll consider how theories of collaborative learning can inform effective climate education.