TASKs for democracy

Equal participation
“What if some of the learners are not able to accomplish their assignments?
What if they simply cannot do the suggested learning activity?”
Although the principles described above can help a great deal to enhance participation, equal participation
in itself has emerged as another important principle of co-operative learning. When a teacher asks a question
in a frontal lesson there is a chance for only one person to answer. In unstructured group work situations
one or two learners can easily dominate and completely ignore what the other group members think or do.
Therefore, it is important to work in learning structures where every single learner has a specific role in the
process and has the right and duty to contribute. With the help of in-group co-operative structures teachers
can ensure equal participation.
The members of the micro-group work individually to begin with (e.g. by listing three different characteristics
of their selected animals), but their next task is to share their findings within their micro-groups,
each in turn, item by item (roundtable). The characteristics of the animals that overlap are listed. There
is one important rule: as the learners take turns in sharing their research results, it is always the group
member sitting on the right of the speaker who notes in the group’s common document what is being
said. In this way every group member has the opportunity to share, explain, listen, understand and write
down ideas. In our example members of the micro-group collate the characteristics of their animal in any
way they find appropriate – in their first language, or with pictures instead of words. These steps increase
the accessibility of the learning process.
When we integrate learners’ diverse abilities, discrimination and inequity are eliminated or reduced and access
to learning and achievement is equally attainable for all learners. In this context, it is the task of the teacher
to create opportunities for equal access and participation, by offering appropriate resources and the kind of
support that is organised and structurally adapted for each individual learner.
For example, in a country where the learners’ native language is not the language of schooling, equal participation
can be assisted by allowing the use of all the languages spoken by the learners in the micro-groups to
ensure equal participation. This will help learners appreciate each other’s language competences and benefit
from the diversity in the classroom.
Most often in schools, it is only verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical proficiencies that are in focus –
there is no emphasis on different visual-spatial, musical, kinesthetic, naturalistic or intra- and interpersonal
competences, for example. There is a dynamic of inequity, in which learners coming from families with a
cultural-social background closer to the cultural-social inherited tradition of mainstream schooling are privileged
while others are discriminated against.
In the roundtable structure, when learners are sharing ideas, they will inevitably ask for clarification. When
during a roundtable activity the teacher asks learners to list the occurrences of a given item, in our example
the question is whether and how many times a single characteristic of a given animal overlaps with that
of another. At this point every group member should participate in the discussion to answer the question.
They will then clarify how the given characteristic should be written down, which animals have the same
characteristic, whether the characteristics the group members have mentioned are really the same, etc.
Co-operative structures like the roundtable create an opportunity for increasing access to the learning
process through discussions in the micro-group: the resources and the instant “helping hands” are the
micro-group members themselves. The teacher can provide books or websites with detailed texts on the
important features of animals, or s/he may suggest different matrixes or schemas for the collection of
characteristics to help create a clearer overview of the selected animals.
The teacher can send one micro-group to another so the groups can learn about each other’s successful
learning behaviour. In the process, they will mobilise not only their verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical
faculties, but also their spatial, visual, intra and interpersonal aptitudes.
TASKs for democracy Page 26