Within Juha Suoranta 2008 article (Teaching Sociology/ Toward Collaborative Social Relations in Educational Situations. Critical Sociology 34 (5) pp.709-723) I have found this excellent comparative table exploring features of collaborative learning in comparison to a Banking Method of learning; an idea developed by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Food for thought. Certainly supports principles explored within my own work and is an interesting way of opening up an exploration of Power as a structure within the Collaborative Group Learning process.
| Table 1 Collaborative Learning and Banking Method (adapted from Suoranta and Moisio 2006). | |||
|
Being Mode of Learning (Collaborative Learning) |
Having Mode of Learning (Banking Method) |
||
| Concept of Reality | Changing and negotiated | Static and given | |
| Concept of Knowledge | Dialectical, socially constructed knowledge | Bird’s eye view, encyclopedic knowledge | |
| Learner as | Agent (students and teacher as subjects) | Receiver (teacher as subject) | |
| Range of Studies | Relatively open-ended | Relatively closed | |
| Form of Questions | Authentic and open-ended (answers are not known) | Unauthentic and closed (answers are usually known) | |
| Group Interaction | Subject-oriented | Performance-oriented | |
| Aims of study | Emphasis in conflicts, new questions and insights | Emphasis in consensus, reproduction of existing knowledge | |
| Subjects of Study | Students and teachers | Teachers | |
