Unless an inclusive situation is structured for cooperative interactions, participants without disabilities often feel discomfort and uncertainty in interacting with peers who have disabilities. Furthermore, if a setting is not structured for cooperative learning experiences, then negative competition is likely to emerge and may actually socialize children without disabilities to reject peers who have a disability (e.g., Rynders et al., 1993). What does it mean specifically to structure an activity for cooperative interactions?

Usually, one to three models of activity structure are used when groups of people are learning something: competitive, individualistic, and/ or cooperative. Each is legitimate and has strengths in particular situations. Furthermore, they often can be combined in a program.

A competitive learning structure, in its traditional application, leads to one person in a group winning and all other group members losing. If it is used in a group in which one of the members has a disability that makes successful task participation difficult, it will be likely that the participant with a disability will "come in last." An example of competitive structuring from the world of camping is to imagine five children, some of whom have movement-related disabilities, lining up at the edge of a lake for a canoe race. Each has a canoe and a paddle to use. The recreation leader tells them that the person who reaches the other side of the lake first will win a miniature canoe paddle. It does not take much imagination to realize that children with movement disabilities (e.g., coordination problems, low muscle tone) have little chance of competing successfully. Informed program leaders would not use a competitive goal structure in this manner, of course; they would either modify the competitive situation or would rely on one or both of the other structures instead.

In an individualistic learning structure, each member of a group works to improve his or her past performance. Potentially, every member of the group, including members with a movement disability, can win a prize for improvement if the target for improved performance is not set too high or is not inappropriately matched with a disability condition. Using the canoe example again, suppose that the recreation leader lines up the group on the shore of the lake and tells them that when they paddled across the lake last week each person's crossing time was recorded. Then, the recreation leader says that each person will win a miniature canoe paddle if he or she improves his or her time, even if the improvement is very small. Now everyone can be a winner. This structure often is used in amateur athletics in which a child is encouraged to "beat his or her own past best time."

A cooperative learning structure (if handled properly) creates a natural, socially positive interdependence because the group's attainment of an objective, with everyone contributing in some manner, is the quality that determines winning. Using the canoe illustration, the recreation leader might have the five children climb into a group canoe, give each person a paddle, and tell them that they each are to paddle as well as they can and that they all will win a miniature canoe paddle if they work together to keep the canoe inside some floating markers (placed in such a way that perfection in paddling is not required). The recreation leader will need to paddle alongside to determine that everyone is paddling and to encourage them to support and assist one another.

To promote positive social interactions between participants with and without disabilities, the cooperative structure will nearly always work better than the other two. Why? Because in a competitive situation, each child is concentrating on paddling the fastest; he or she doesn't have an incentive for interacting socially. Similarly, in an individualistic structure, each child is concentrating on bettering his or her own past performance; again, there is no incentive for interacting socially. In the cooperative structure, however, each person is inclined to encourage and assist every person in the group to achieve the group goal. This promotes positive interactions such as encouragement, cheering, pats on the back, and informal assistance.


References

Rynders, J., Schleien, S., Meyer, L., Vandercook, T., Mustonen, T., Coland, J., & Olson, K. (1993). Improving interaction outcomes for children with and without disabilities through cooperatively structured, recreation activities: A synthesis of research. Journal of Special Education, 26(4), 386–407.