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Individualistic Appropriation as a Primary Mechanism of Collaborative Conceptual Change: A Case Study

Collaborative learning with cases and problems is characterized by the contribution of disparate knowledge and varying interpretations. The way in which this public knowledge is exploited individually to construct a conceptualization of the problem is examined here. The paper presents a microanalysis of a collaborative case-centered learning dialogue between three learners where a novel conceptualization is constructed re-using selected surface and structural elements contained in a prior conceptualization. How the novel conceptualization is constructed is shown by tracing surface and structural knowledge in the sequence of contributions and by identifying the point-of-view adopted by the learners. We argue that a mechanism of individualistic appropriation accounts for this construction, and this mechanism may be central in collaborative learning. This entails a revision of the notion of coconstruction in collaborative learning.