6. Working Together Well

Abstract

This chapter interrogates some of the foundational assumptions of student-centred learning environments (SCLEs), with a view to expanding conventional pedagogical models to account for the “distributive” agency of groups of learners assembled in a classroom. In the first part, the author proposes that learner groups be treated as distributive agential networks, braiding together intrinsic, extrinsic and intratrinsic (i.e. motivation distributed between multiple learners) forms of motivation, thereby to sustain both individual and collective forms of agency. It is argued that greater awareness of how motivation emerges across such multi-dimensional agential networks within the learning environment can enable student-teacher and student-student relationships to be established on a more flexible and equitable basis, so that inventive ways of working can be collectively imagined. In the next part, these distributive agential networks are illustrated with reference to the author’s own teaching practice, working with multidisciplinary groups of music students across conservatoire and university settings in the United Kingdom. This section takes the form of an impressionistic vignette outlining a peer-to-peer feedback session using the Critical Response Process (CRP), a group feedback framework for creative work in any media, originally developed by choreographers Liz Lerman and John Borstel. This classroom situation is then analysed as a classroom “assemblage”, to illustrate how pedagogical models such as CRP draw together the bodies and accumulated beliefs of learner groups into a distributive agential network. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how these approaches can lead to a reappraisal of such fundamental academic principles as freedom of expression and equity between learners. Ultimately, it is proposed that the pursuit of creative and expressive freedoms requires that careful attention is paid to the ways in which individual students and teachers can be assembled to form a learner collective.