Improvising to learn

This study explored how and what a group of six fifth-grade instrumental music students learned during group improvisation activities over eight sessions together with the researcher as participant observer. Students’ learning was investigated through the lenses of musical fluency and collaborative emergence. Findings related to multiple understandings of students’ musical fluency and students’ rhythmically driven displays of collaborative emergence. Implications of this study include the ideas that (a) students’ musical fluency is individual and personal in nature and improvisation gives students a space to explore these personal decisions; (b) young improvisers can be overwhelmed by free improvisation and may create boundaries to aid their playing; (c) without teacher direction, young improvisers can make pedagogical and music making decisions relevant to their interests; and (d) young improvisers can successfully create a collaborative emergent during group improvisation.

The collaborative emergence of group cognition

We extend Smaldino's approach to collaboration and social organization in cultural evolution to include cognition. By showing how recent work on emergent group-level cognition can be incorporated within Smaldino's framework, we extend that framework's scope to encompass collaborative memory, decision making, and intelligent action. We argue that beneficial effects arise only in certain forms of cognitive interdependence, in surprisingly fragile conditions.