METHOD OF STUDY

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The Document Analysis design will be used for this study complemented by the Focus Group Discussion method.  These methods best demonstrate the historical Co-operative discipline known as “associative intelligence,” also referred to as Co-operative Learning  -

Co-operative education in its glory years was also concerned with what was called by some at  that time  "associative intelligence,"  a belief  that there  is  a special kind of knowing that emerges when people  work together effectively;  a conviction that  people through  working together  could learn skills that would make collective behaviour more  economically rewarding, socially beneficial  and personally satisfying... But how can we begin to understand this dimension of co-operative learning? According to the more characteristically laboured ways of our times, we would earnestly produce a list that deconstructs the words into their most obvious emphases. Perhaps the list would include the following aspects of education: the dispensing of information, providing training, encouraging reflection, creating knowledge and facilitating learning.​

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Education as Dispensing Information​

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Like any movement, like any institution seeking to establish a relationship with its supporters, the co-operative movement and its organizations have an essential need to distribute information...​

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Education as Training​

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One of the most obvious needs people face when they start co-operatives, from the nineteenth century to the present time, is the need for training in the kinds of competencies required for the adequate performance of their duties. In the formative period of the movement in each country, the volunteer leadership, often drawn from segments of the society with limited formal education, needed to learn the skills and understandings required to run meetings, engage members, carry out simple business practices and communicate effectively. The results were remarkable programmes in adult education; indeed, the main reason why the flowering of co-operative education occurred...​

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Education as Encouraging Reflection​

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There has always been a tension within co-operative educational circles between those who would emphasize practical, specific training and those who would stress broader – sometimes called philosophical – education. That tension will never disappear and in balance it often leads to healthy debates... An encouraging [development] is the gradual development of Co-operative Studies as a field of enquiry. It is one of the most promising developments for the stimulation of reflection – if it has the opportunity to grow as it could. It will help to create the new knowledge – and the new ways of thinking about old issues – upon which more meaningful reflection can be based. It could provide the space – intellectual and programmatic – that co-operators have long said they wanted in the academy, still, despite the pressures, one of the few possible locations for sustained, reflective discussion.​

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Education as Creating Knowledge​

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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, co-operative education enjoyed the benefits of a rich and expanding, fresh and controversial, base of knowledge. Much of it was experiential, derived from what co-operators were learning in their local societies. It was concerned with such basic questions as the following. How to take stock in the local stores? What amount of stock was reasonable? How to set budgets? How to distribute work? How to decide what a board should do? What a manager and staff should do? Should the co-op extend credit to members? As the wholesale emerged – and with it its banking, insurance, farming and worker co-partnership enterprises -- the questions became more complex: how to structure second and third tier organisations? how to accommodate the demands of workers? how to adapt democratic forms to steadily more complex institutions? how to develop appropriate relationships with movement in other countries? how to transcend different understandings from different cultural backgrounds and types of co-operative enterprise? They were challenging questions that drew the best co-operative minds of the times and a variety of different answers...​

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Education as Facilitating Learning​

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Beneath the co-operative approach, particularly in the golden age of co-operative education, there was a boundless faith in the capacity of the human mind and spirit: the optimism of Robert Owen about human nature and sometimes even a little bit more. The challenge was not so much what should be taught but how to facilitate the natural human capacity to learn. And learning took many forms, embracing the arts and sciences as well as bookkeeping. It usually involved learning in groups, in sharing ideas, in appreciating differences, in fostering openness. For the true co-operative visionary, it was the encouragement of associative intelligence.​

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In short, it was, at its ideal, co-operative learning, engaging both the young and old. It was a conviction that human beings continuously learn, a belief long held in the movement before the 1990s created the buzzwords of life-long learning. These convictions can be seen fairly readily in the curriculum, the teaching methods, the resource materials even the architecture of buildings preferred by co-operative educators. It is perhaps the subtlest of emphases within the co-operative educational tradition. It tended to lose out because of the greater attractions of other kinds of education. It may be the hardest to recapture; it may the one most essential to the revitalization of an honourable tradition. It may be the best contribution the co-operative movement can make to an informed, resourceful and empowered citizenry, the essential requirement for a genuinely democratic society. ​

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- (Ian MacPherson, ibid.)​

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