Cooperation/Cooperative Studies

Cooperation was a distinctive educational concept in the field of curriculum during the 1930s and 1940s and much different from today's practices of cooperative learning. The term manifested itself in the classroom as cooperative planning and teacher–pupil planning, in student assessment as cooperative educational records, and in research and school reform as cooperative study. Cooperation and cooperative studies embraced a democratic ideal that participants would work together for a greater good and would maintain a fundamental belief (and faith) that a diversity of perspectives, coupled with open discourse, would serve to better disseminate information as a way to solve problems. [Page 142]Although no structured format or unified theory was developed, the practice of cooperation included a focus on problem solving, the workshop, and the use of implementative research.

The concept of cooperation, though a component of a progressive education ideal of democracy as a way of life, was focused on problem solving and served as a method to attend to achieving already defined goals. Thus, if a school wished to encourage students to become more involved in their own education, cooperation became a method of curriculum development and took the form of teacher–pupil planning where students would become engaged, thereby overcoming the problem of lack of student involvement. Or if educators viewed the purposes of secondary education as in need of revision, a cooperative study project would be established where a group of faculty from varied school settings would come together to examine high school curricula and to discuss and describe ways in which programs could be improved. The defined problem—the need for revision—served to focus the group discourse, and the concept of cooperation permitted expansive and differing approaches that would be considered by others participating in the project. Solutions to problems were not determined and then disseminated to the group, nor did cooperation embrace a conciliatory conception of democracy as giving everyone their say or as compromise. Cooperation represented more of an emphasis upon collaboration and the importance of open discourse.

The workshop served as the social structure for cooperation where large, diverse groups of educators would come together in a setting not for lectures, but to work on developing solutions to identified problems and to explore and exchange possible approaches to similar issues. For national and regional cooperative study projects, workshops could last from 1 to 6 weeks. The cooperative study became a popular method of school experimentation in the 1930s and 1940s and defined a unique form of research for the field of curriculum—implementative research—distinct from the popular and most common status study research (a survey to document current practices), the deliberative study research (a gathering of data to support normative recommendations for educational change), and the traditional controlled scientific research. Implementative research tested no formal hypotheses, upheld no specific models to be implemented and evaluated, and established no set of predefined outcomes. Rather, this type of research, as it was practiced in national cooperative studies, embraced a determined faith in experimentation as an exploratory process to include gathering, analyzing, interpreting, and discussing data for the sole purpose of improving educational practice. Similar to contemporary forms of design research, cooperative studies sought not to prove hypotheses with (today's) conventions of validity and reliability, but to determine and then implement solutions to problems as a form of cooperation and cooperative study.

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