What is the role of collaboration/community in composition theory and in the classroom?
Bruffee: As is evident by this week’s readings, these scholars envision different approaches for effective collaboration in the classroom and acceptable ideas of community. According to Bruffee, collaborative learning should be a key component in a composition classroom and that more teachers should incorporate this pedagogical tool into their classrooms. He defines collaborative learning “as a way of engaging students more deeply with the text” and describes it as a “pedagogical tool that ‘works’ in teaching composition” (545). Although he “offers no recipes,” Bruffee mentions peer tutoring (peer criticism/peer evaluation and classroom group work) as options for teachers who are hesitant to experiment with this approach in the classroom (547). Collaboration changes the social context in which the students learn (548) which in turn stimulates conversation which then produces “a community of knowledgeable peers” (553). Bruffee contends, “Mastery of a knowledge community’s normal discourse is the basic qualification for acceptance into that community” (552). Collaborative learning allegedly democratizes education (546) and provides an “alternative to traditional classroom teaching” (547) that students can participate in.
Trimbur: For Trimbur, Bruffee’s definition of collaborative learning is somewhat idealistic. Trimbur responds to Bruffee’s notion of collaborative learning by attempting to redefine one of his key terms: consensus. Trimbur recounts, “The aim of collaborative learning […] is to reach consensus through an expanding conversation” (733). Here he addresses two criticisms: critics voice their fear of conformity, saying that accepting consensus in this way “stifles individual voice and creativity, suppresses difference, and enforces conformity.” The second criticism challenges Bruffee’s notion because of how it overlooks “the wider social forces that structure the production of knowledge” (734). Trimbur refutes the first criticism calling it “baseless.” He says, “Consensus does not necessarily violate the individual but instead can enable individuals to empower each other through social activity” (735). Therefore, he aims to redefine consensus as “a process of identifying differences and locating differences in relation to each other” (741).
Harris: Both Bruffee and Trimbur offer approaches of how collaboration might function as pedagogical tool in the composition classroom. In terms of community, there is an underlying assumption that collaboration creates a kind of community. Harris claims that “the idea of community” is “somewhat central to our work” (748), and as a result, should be analyzed critically in terms of its usage, application, and adoption by teachers. According to Harris, “We write not as isolated individuals but as members of communities whose beliefs, concerns, and practices both instigate and constrain, at least in part, the sorts of things we can say. Our aims and intentions in writing are thus not merely personal, idiosyncratic, but reflective of the communities to which we belong” (749). This statement supports his belief that suggests that students should not attempt to master a particular discourse, but, instead, they should become confident in their roles as users of many discourses (754). For Harris, “One is always simultaneously a part of several discourses, several communities, is always already committed to a number of conflicting beliefs and practices” (755). Here, Harris reinforces the idea that we should resist the vague and sentimental notion of community and treat the implications of being a participant in a community more seriously.
Bartholome: The idea of community as something to belong to or to penetrate through learning seems to present communities as stable and “existing” in their own right. Bartholome insists that this is not the case at all and that community is an imagined space that gets (re)created through its rituals: specifically, that the University as a discourse gets invented every time a student writes for the University. He writes that “Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion – invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English. The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community” (605). When a student writes, he “dramatizes his experience in a ‘setting’” so that he can place himself into the imagined space (607); the space in which he has the authority and ability to write for the discourse. Familiarity with (some) of the discourse is important, however, since “it is difficult to imagine… how writers can have a purpose [in writing] before they are located in a discourse, since it is the discourse with its projects and agendas that determines what writers can and will do” (609). The discourse community, then, needs to be invented in order to give purpose to the writing and when students write for the academy this is what they are doing: simultaneously inventing the text and the purpose for the text through writing. (What is so interesting, as Bartholome points out, is how the errors students make reveal this (re)creation and invention of the community).
Rose: An important idea to draw from Rose’s contribution to our readings is the idea that the writing community extends beyond the visible boundaries of the classroom, the peer group, and the teacher. Composition is shaped and understood in much wider and perhaps more determining frames: academic, social and political. While it is all well and good to understand how students write for the classroom and their peer group and invent the University, it is equally important for the composition teacher to know that composition is taking place in the context of what academics, parents, and politicians think composition is. Political and institutional considerations shape what we think writing is, what we think writing is for, and what we think “good” writing looks like, while age-old assumptions about writing (from this larger community) keep teachers reading and evaluating in the same modes even while they talk about struggling against them (590). What counts even as “literacy” is based on the constantly evolving views of these wider group. To really understand what composition is, where it has been and where it is going, then, we have to understand that writing develops not just in the writer or his context or his academic discourse, but also in the body of academic and political policy that defines what writing is.
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