Collaboration, Cooperation and Spirit

It is hard to say what makes people collaborate well, and what makes collaboration difficult or problematic. I think this is the one area I most want to explore as I am taking a Cooperative Learning class. But there is still a lot left unsaid in the literature. I almost would like to explore it from the perspective of the recent Chan workshop.

Cooperative Learning is essentially the idea that learning is done with the aim of helping all learners to achieve a shard goal. I could see the parallel with compassionate action. If I truly take it that you are not separate from me, then your achievement of a desired goal would affect me positively as well. Conversely, your inability to achieve a goal would also negatively or adversely affect me. So, from that perspective, “I” help “you” in much the same way that my right hand helps my left hand to perform a task. Because there is no separation between the notion of “I” and “you”, this process is quite natural. It isn’t really encumbered by an artificial sense of self. Cooperative Learning doesn’t quite work that way, because there is still a sense that there is a goal or a time frame to which individuals are held accountable. In other words, Cooperative Learning still takes the “I” and “You” to be separate, with the aim of ensuring that each self takes personal initiative and responsibility for ‘doing their part’ of the work that requires doing.

Cooperative Learning seems make a whole lot of sense, for many reasons. It intuitively gels with people’s culturally entrenched notions about “enlightened” self-interest (“I scratch your back and you scratch mine”), as well as with the notion of being held accountable for oneself in the context of a group.  But in meditative practices in Chan, there is no sense that there is a separate self to be held accountable. For one thing, I go back to the analogy of the incense twirling around in a circle. The light appears to make a complete circle. In reality, there is no complete circle at all, but only separate instances of the same light twirling in motion. In the same way, from an ultimate perspective, I can’t really say there is a concrete ‘me’ who is accountable, because the self is not permanent. In fact, no experience ever dwells in a permanent condition. When I take it in this way, I am never at any time ‘taking on’ or ‘owning’ anything, because neither myself nor the phenomena around me are ever permanent. Drops of water don’t ‘own’ other drops of water, even though basically they belong to the same ocean.  A challenge with the paradigm of Cooperative Learning is that it emphasizes ‘separate’ selves, yet claims these selves have accountability to a greater whole. Why, though?  I think this is also a burdensome dilemma to the Cooperative Learning movement, because there will always be students who will ask, “Why should I contribute?” They haven’t recognized their inter-being with others, so they wonder what this ‘personal accountability’ is really all about.  No matter who sincere or enthusiastic  you may happen to be about Cooperative Learning, you (as a teacher) are always going to have that one student who refuses to cooperate. And there is no amount of ‘social engineering’ or guilt mongering you can do to ‘get that student’ to do your bidding or the bidding of the greater group. Is this good or bad? It is stating that the Cooperative Learning is going to bump up against the same realities that Rationalism (its predecessor) had encountered a century ago in the writings of Dostoevsky (see Notes from Underground) and other writers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. People are simply not just rationalists, and rationality is only one part of a greater whole that is within my being. If my ‘reason’ is interacting with others’ ‘reasons’, this is fine for small issues (like getting the washing machine to work), but for the greater scheme of how people live together, I am afraid it won’t quite work all the time or even most of the time.

If I start with the argument that I cooperate with you because we should both be equal or work equally, I might still ask, but why should I do that? There is always a lingering question: why work in groups when one can just as effectively work alone? The Cooperative Learning approach focuses on utilitarian reasons, such as studies which show that cooperation has beneficial effects on overall functioning and cognitive learning. This is fine, but there is always going to be that one incredibly honest student who will still ask, but why? And perhaps they would be right to ask, because deep inside, human beings have an ontological issue that they need to sort out (or existential) before they can be somewhat placated by these utilitarian arguments. It is the question of : what does it mean for me to work with you, to achieve a shared goal? Does this mean we are the same, or we are different, or neither, or both? What does that experience of working together signify? If the purpose of this cooperative effort is only to ensure individual survival or greater resources, then there will always be someone who gets away with cheating that arrangement. It is because deep down inside, people hunger for an ontological experience of who they really are, which is not linked to identifying ‘me’ with ‘my name’, ‘my role’ or ‘my body’. Some people just don’t care whether they are doing 50%, 20% or 100%. And that is not because they are necessarily bad people. It is because their hearts are elsewhere. In my opinion, I believe that Cooperative Learning will be somewhat doomed to stagnate or fail unless those spiritual questions are addressed (somehow) in the way people interact.

When I talk about ‘spiritual’ questions, I am really suggesting that collaborative learning inquire into the roots of how and why we interact, and who is interacting in the first place. If I am unable to understand this deep existential question, I am evading something and creating more pain for everyone. How would you feel if you were an elephant and someone tried to stuff you into a jar? You would feel miserable. And that is what happens to those students who don’t want to cooperate. Their refusal is a heartfelt search for the something else that drives pretty much the whole of human existence. If education does not in some way address that ‘something else’, it ends up substituting over-controlling ‘coercive exercises’ such as complicated rubrics and checklists, in its anxiety to ‘make people cooperate’. So, I think that we need to ask ourselves over and over, why do students refuse this? They do so not because of ignorance or lack of rationality. They do this because the true meaning of collaboration (inter-being) is not in the formulaic checklist of ‘whether I listened to everyone’, ‘whether I contributed equally’, ‘whether I did the same as others’, etc. And that checklist will only create more eye rolling and resistance, because the students know they are more than just a to-do list of items.