JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS EDUCATION - naspaa
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS EDUCATION - naspaa
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS EDUCATION - naspaa
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Badgers & Hoosiers: An Interstate Collaborative Learning Experience Connecting<br />
MPA Students in Wisconsin and Indiana<br />
Deal, 2003) feel when they are given a task to complete with little direction, an<br />
absolute deadline, and no indication of what the final product should look like.<br />
The IUN and UWO classes participated independently in this exercise and only<br />
the instructors compared notes on the outcomes. Both agreed that the exercise<br />
would have been more valuable for the students if they had communicated<br />
directly with each other. Thus was born a plan to involve our classes in a<br />
collaborative project to interact directly with each other.<br />
LITERATURE REVIEW<br />
Our search of Public Administration and general literature produced no<br />
results on education for inter-program collaborative projects that involved<br />
master’s-level students. However, there was extensive literature, going back a<br />
half-century, on the value of shared-learning experiences for students from<br />
kindergarten to college, as well as detailed instructions on how to conduct and<br />
evaluate them. After reviewing voluminous amounts of research on collaborative<br />
learning in the classroom, Barkley, Cross, and Major (2005) conclude that<br />
“Virtually all of the compilers and synthesizers of research findings regarding<br />
group learning come to largely positive conclusions” (p. 17).<br />
Because the literature gives small-group learning projects many different<br />
names and definitions, the authors debated about what to call their pedagogical<br />
experiment. For example, Dr. L. Fink describes small-group projects as casual,<br />
cooperative, and team-based (2004, pp. 5-8). To Fink, casual small-group<br />
projects are relatively ad-hoc exercises that require little or no advance planning.<br />
Meanwhile, the other end of the continuum offers team-based learning, with<br />
small-group work as the primary in-class activity. In between the two extremes<br />
are carefully planned, cooperative-learning projects that incorporate structured<br />
group activities.<br />
To Barkley, Cross, and Major, there is a primary distinction between cooperative<br />
and collaborative projects (2005, pp. 5-7). Cooperative projects require students to<br />
work together on a common task, while the teacher retains a traditional dual role as<br />
a subject-matter expert and classroom authority. In collaborative situations,<br />
students also work together on a shared goal, but the teacher’s responsibility — as<br />
well as the students’ — is to become a member of a community in search of<br />
knowledge. Considering these distinctions, we chose to use the term “collaborative<br />
learning,” rather than adopting Fink’s (2004) cooperative learning label, because we<br />
felt the former term more appropriately conveyed the idea of students working<br />
with instructors to accomplish a shared learning goal. In Collaborative Learning:<br />
Creating Knowledge with Students, Matthews (1995) stresses the importance of the<br />
faculty and student partnership in creating knowledge, a concept Fink (2004) does<br />
not address when describing cooperative learning.<br />
Journal of Public Affairs Education 351