The icosahedron in the room: Revisiting pedagogical dilemmas of individual learning in collaborative activities

Four adult study participants successfully built together a body-scale polyhedron with minimal instructions. Preliminary observation of their rapid construction process would suggest that they were generally "on the same page" and, therefore, perhaps all entertained the same geometrical ideas. However, deeper analysis of their multimodal behaviours and utterances, both during the activity and in post-intervention stimulated-recall individual interviews, suggests acute divergence in perceptual Gestalts, even when two or more participants referred in speech and gesture ostensibly to the precise same material element, voicing operational consensus. As such, our findings query cognitive-anthropological theory of organised social activity, e.g., Goodwin's Co-Operative Action, by producing empirical evidence of productive joint action on indexically referenced co-attended features of the environment yet in the absence of conceptual cohesion.