This study is an intervention study conducted on students in the middle years of a Swedish suburban school. The aim of the study is to examine students’ cooperative skills in ball games in the subject of physical education. The study’s questions focus on what emerges in activity and in conversation when students receive cooperative tasks that they must complete together in ball games, and how these conversations and activities change during the learning process. The study also focuses on the patterns that occur in the game room when students must help each other cooperate, and on the consequences of these patterns for the learning of cooperation in ball games.
The intervention consisted of three game laboratories, created as special tasks by means of cooperation, which were orchestrated. The study is based on and can be understood through John Dewey's pragmatic epistemology. It has a constructionist basis which means that learning and development is seen as an active process where individuals creat meaning in cooperation with others. Furthermore, the theoretical framework implies that students and the environment are seen as constantly interacting, creating each other in a mutual transactional process. A practical epistemology analysis (PEA) was used for the analysis of `talk and action´ in order to explore students' constructions and reconstructions of meaning making and learning about cooperation in ballgames. The empirical material consists of 24 games played and 24 rounds of talks. The first game laboratory focuses on what students are doing and talking about when they are asked to achieve the first pass. The second game laboratory focuses on what they do and talk about in order to succeed together in getting across the field’s halfway line before they get to shoot at goal. The third game laboratory focuses on what students should do to achieve the final pass before shooting at goal.
The analysis of the game laboratories shows that it is not enough to pass or to create space as, own rooms in order to achieve cooperation in ballgames. The students’ actions and agreements during talks must also harmonise with the purpose of the task in order to allow learning to cooperate in ballgames to occur. The patterns that emerged in the game room were convergence and divergence; students created their own rooms as well as isolated rooms. Furthermore, densified game room was observed to hinder cooperation, and thinned room to favour cooperation.