Repertoires of collaborative practice

This symposium presents results from a coordinated suite of studies on collaborative practices, and the theoretical framework we have developed to account for what is learned from collaborative episodes. We use the phrase ‘Repertoires of Collaborative Practice’ to describe the individual, interpersonal, contextual and community practices that can influence collaboration. We hypothesize that repertoires of collaborative practice are developmental in nature, and that collaborators may become adept at selecting which elements from their repertoires should be implemented in specific situations. The theoretical description is accompanied by four papers applying this framework to examine the collaborative practices in different collaborative settings – online gamers, adolescent musicians, middleschool technology projects, and a comparative study of Quakers and product designers.