Leigh and Katie

Collaboration and community are important to the composition classroom because they change the context in which students learn, allowing them to experience how conversation works within a discourse community. As these terms have been explored across the readings for this week we begin to see their roles both in the composition classroom as well as the theories of composition that inform these classrooms. The role of collaboration and community in composition theory is two-fold. These terms draw our attention to the role of collaboration and community as contributive to both our disciplinary formation itself as well as the knowledge that is created within these formations of community. In particular, our attention is drawn to the ways in which the knowledge that emerges here is shaped by the discursive practices that at once articulate and authorize this knowledge.

Kenneth Bruffee writes, “We first experience and learn ‘the skill and partnership of conversation’ in the external arena of direct social exchange with other people. Only then do we learn to displace that ‘skill and partnership’ by playing silently ourselves, in imagination, the parts of all the participants in the conversation” (549). In other words, Bruffee suggests that conversation and thought are connected and that thought is a social artifact created through interaction not isolation. As Bruffee asserts, “To think well as individuals we must learn to think well collectively—that is, we must learn to converse well” (550). For classroom teachers, this means fostering the kind of community life that will both establish and maintain conversation that leads to the kinds of thought we value in the academy. Collaborative learning creates a community of status equals in that all our students are peers of a certain variety (all freshmen; all business majors; all graduate students, etc).

While he articulates the role of collaborative learning in classroom practice, Bruffee also makes an argument for how this more complete understanding of collaboration and community should inform our theories of composition. He opens his essay with an observation about the dual approach of collaborative learning. When looking at CCCC and MLA, he observes that collaborative learning is both “a process that constitutes fields or disciplines” as well as a “tool” that “works in the teaching of composition or literature.” In regard to the latter, he observes that many teachers are unsure of how to use collaborative learning in their classrooms. To remedy this, a holistic understanding of collaborative learning needs to become part of our theories of composition. These theories of composition need to reflect understandings of both the foundational ideas behind collaborative pedagogies as well as the history of collaborative learning. Implicit to these discussions of collaborative learning is another term -- community. Joseph Harris finds this term to be one that is at once laden with rhetorical power and lacking meaning. In this way community is both “seductive and powerful” ... or, in other words, dangerous when used too lightheartedly within our theories of composition. Here, Harris suggests that we need to move towards more meaningful definitions of community -- definitions that no longer exploit the seductiveness of this term. This seductiveness is rooted in the use of community as a term synonymous with consensus. Harris goes on to suggest that these new definitions should incorporate a “material view” of community that allows for both consensus and conflict (756).

This understanding of community that incorporates both consensus and conflict has played an increasingly important role in classroom practice. Collaborative learning allows students to consider the role of consensus and difference within our conversations and our writing. Trimbur criticizes Bruffee’s notion of normal and abnormal discourses as complements of each other. For Trimbur, how discourse operates within a discourse community is more reminiscent of Foucault. Difference and conflict represents the power relations that are a reality in any discourse community: the permissions and prohibitions, what and who is included and excluded. Trimbur urges classroom teachers to use consensus and difference that result from conversations to talk with students about marginalized voices that resist and contest various aspects of the conversation. Trimbur complicates what Bruffee offers by saying that it is not enough to foster community and tell students that “writing means learning to participate in the conversation and consensual practices of various discourse communities” (741). In reality, learning to write within a discourse community and learning to converse in a conversation requires understanding that conflict is at the heart of writing situations. And at times, conflict can block conversations altogether.

This nuanced understanding of the presence of conflict in the writing situation plays an important role as an emphasis on collaboration and community in the classroom can enable students to learn how to converse within various discourses. Bartholomae proposes that every time a student writes, he or she has to invent the university. Students, working with each other within a classroom community and the larger community of their various disciplines, learn to mimic the language(s) of the academy by seeking to establish a balance between their own voices and thoughts and the conventions and history of the discipline. He writes, “The student had to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and he has to do this as though he were easily and comfortably one with his audience, as though he were a member of the academy” (606). In fact, Bartholomae offers a possible solution for classroom teachers that address the problems of basic writers. If teachers determine the community’s conventions, then he or she could seek to demystify them in our classroom by writing them out and teaching them to our students. Thus, our students would have a clearer and better way to participate within their discourse communities when we ask them “to argue, describe, or define” (615). Harris concurs with Bartholomae and adds that having this conversation with students moves towards the understanding that “our aims and intentions in writing are thus not merely personal, idiosyncratic, but reflective of the communities to which we belong” (749).

This also applies to the understandings of classroom practice that are reflected in our theories of composition. Here, these readings provide a critical reflection on the nature of knowledge and the authority that is held by/granted to some knowledges and not to others. Approached as a social artifact, knowledge is situated by the discourses that create it. Bartholomae describes knowledge as “situated in the discourse that constitutes ‘knowledge’ in a particular discourse community, rather than as situated in mental “knowledge sites”” (613). Framing knowledges as situated in and drawing authority from a discourse community enables us to resituate collaborative learning as a means of incorporating this element of composition theory into our pedagogies. Collaborative learning enables us to acknowledge in practice the ways in which our knowledge of composition is a matter of public discourse and discussion rather than a matter of expertise and technique (Trimbur 742). It is for this reason, as Mike Rose points out, that we must continually revisit the language that not only represents our knowledge, but is critical in the creation of it. Without doing this we can easily fall in the trap of not adequately reflecting the students and our classrooms and consequently developing theories of composition that remain “social artifacts” of this discourse community and are isolated from material experiences and realities of the classroom (602).

Collaboration and community also prompts us to think about the disciplinary communities from which our theories of composition emerge. Kenneth Bruffee quotes Thomas Kuhn from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions where it is suggested that “to understand scientific thought and knowledge we must understand the nature of scientific communities” (550). “Scientific knowledge changes not as our ‘understanding of the world’ changes. It changes as scientists organize and reorganize relations among themselves.” It is just this kind of “organizing” that we see taking place across these readings; each author developing an understanding of composition that both corresponds with the discourse formation of the discipline and reflects on shared experiences in the classroom. Bartholomae suggests that students, like the scholars in these readings, do the same thing: “he has to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language while finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, on the one hand, and the requirements of convention, the history of a discipline, on the other” (606). This is a struggle that affects the entire disciplinary community, students and scholars alike.