Cooperative Learning in secondary education: stories about people who lived this teaching approach

Abstract

The Cooperative Learning aims to promote interaction between individuals so that their participation in the group is valued and thus each one recognizes themselves and the other one as someone who promotes knowledge. It is in the context of interaction that the students of the State School of Professional Education Alan Pinho Tabosa, located at Pentecoste, Ceará (Brazil), argue, disagree and learn together since 2011. As we understand that Cooperative Learning works with the student growth and the student, in his turn, when evaluates it, collaborates with the application of Cooperative Learning, we developed this study that, through stories told by the students, seeks to analyze the contribution of Cooperative Learning for student and personal life of those students who, over three years, experience the Cooperative Learning on, at least, ten hours a day because this school is a full time one. At this school there are four classes: Aquaculture, Information Technology, Agribusiness and Academic. In order to get the students’s critical placements, we proposed them to write a text, but initially we apply an instrumental, the map of ideas, in order to get the opinion about all the five elements of Cooperative Learning. Although we have applied the instrumental with all the students, for this paper, we selected one narrative from each class, to try to understand the Cooperative Learning contribution on the student’s lives. We performed an analysis of the positions, and we use Narrative Inquiry (2000), since its assumptions allow express how the researcher and the participants live, have lived and understand the stories. In the present paper, what we think as researchers is deep-seated what the participants, those from high school students, think.