According to Bruffee, collaborative learning is “a way of engaging students more deeply with the text” (p. 545). This deep engagement occurs through a process of socialization between students that often leads to a consensus. This view of learning is very Dewian as it repositions the authority of the teacher; no longer is the teacher the God of the classroom. Instead the teacher is one who creates a situation for dialogue, while students work with peers to have a conversation in the discourse of the classroom or community where they respond to the situation created by the teacher. Students learn through the experience of conversation instead of merely listening and imitating.
In the composition classroom collaborative learning typically takes place through peer review of each other’s works. As Bruffee points out, the ultimate goal of peer review is not to proofread or find errors; instead it is about how to strengthen a conversation with a wider community through discussion about what worked well and what possibilities for change exist within a written work. However, this is not the only possibility for collaboration within the composition classroom. Collaboration is not only about review. It is also about creation. In collaborative writing, peers can work together to create a product, just as we are doing here. When this happens the identity of the individual merges to create the voice of a group. More so, Brufee’s social constructionist bent highly suggests that the students’ language used “to reach consensus acquires greater authority [and] great social weight” (Trimbur 733). Thus, students are transformed as knowledge agents, truth seekers, and socialists.
Trimbur further notes that there is a strong criticism or opposition to a collaborative teaching practice that “stifles individual voice and creativity, suppresses differences, and enforces conformity” (733). For this reason teachers must be careful to create situations that encourage learning and exploration of ideas instead of situations that promote exclusion and marginalization. Bruffee states that peer groups are automatically “a community of status equals,” which seems to be a serious glossing-over of the range and variation of students’ backgrounds, experiences, levels of preparation and ability, and even interest in the course or topic at hand (551). In any group of individuals, even in the business and professional contexts, there exists some amount of difference among the members. It is not uncommon to see failed attempts of collaborative learning where students operate on a “majority rules” system in order to get an assignment done as quickly as possible. When this occurs, the voice of the outsider is not heard and students fail to learn about and from conflicting view points. This creates a very narrow conversation instead of a layered and multi-dimensional conversation. From Trimbur’s point of view, knowledge, power, and status all come in conflict when we try collaborative writing or discourse. We seem, according to him, to move away from consensus into discensus, which is healthy for it allows the students to measure rather than make the students “identify the structures of power that inhibit communication among readers” (745). So, in a “utopian desire” for power, status, and knowledge all to receive an equal playing field, consensus is in collaborative work “a means for transforming it” (743).
For Harris, his first step for his readers is to understand Bartholomae and Bizzell’s belief to demystify intention: that no writer really works within a vacuum, but must discourse with a larger community to have a purpose or intention for communicating (749). This to us strikes in opposition to Trimbur’s and Bruffee’s perceptions of the community of writers within a collaborative learning environment. Juxtaposed further is the notion in Harris’ opening where he sides with both Bartholomae and Bizzell that we “write [...] but as members of communities [diverse] whose beliefs, concerns, and practices both instigate and constrain” (749) and are reflections of the communities we write in (749). Harris sets up his argument like the others, by presenting the opposing field’s armament: “discursive utopias,” and “normal discourse.” (749). Aside from intention, which stands as a necessary evil for students to produce within a community, Harris believes that Williams’s definition of community sufficiently starts the dialogue going in a direction to support his assertion: a set of relationships already established or “an alternative set of relationships” (749). But Harris warns us against the catch-all mentality to use this term for much more than it is. However, for Bartholomae, the university community is at once dynamic and competing as one unit or it is a mixture of many different disciplines each with its own technical terms and language of discourse that somehow fights with the larger unit, the university (750). Unfortunately, for Harris, Bartholomae looks too generally at the idea of community only as a “stabilizing term” (750) that generalizes like other theorists seem to do about the nature of collaborative discourse. Instead of Bartholomae’s conception of moving among separate, but hazily demarcated, discourse communities, Harris suggests framing writing instruction in terms of “adding to or complicating [students’] use of language” (754).
It’s interesting to note that all of these articles were written in the 1980s, after the publication of the reports on the National Study of Writing, a study of high school writing instruction begun in 1979 (see Applebee, A.N., Lehr, F., & Auten, A. (1981). Learning to Write in the Secondary School: How and Where. The English Journal, 70 (5), 78-82). The report includes suggestions for improvement in writing instruction, including having students write "to fulfill natural communicative functions" (82). The interest on collaborative learning in composition seems linked to the 1970s literacy crisis and the resulting focus on the teaching of reading and writing. Bruffee notes that teachers are “unsure about how to use collaborative learning” (546), echoing the uncertainty about classrooms implementation of collaborative and cross-curricular writing expressed by most teachers responding to the NSW national survey. It is clear that collaborative learning is not going anywhere, as it has been with us for over two decades. It will be interesting to see the new directions that it takes with the collaborative tools of Web 2.0 becoming more and more common in classrooms, especially in the K12 strata. If past is prologue, perhaps we will see even more integration of collaborative learning, this time in an online environment, in first-year-composition courses.
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