The Role of Collaboration/Community

Our group's collaborative process consisted of an email conversation, a combination of contributions, and a wordle wrap-up. Here are the results of our conversation:

Elizabeth: From Bruffee comes the understanding that collaborative learning is going to happen no matter what--it's legitimate and key to the way (he understands) knowledge to be made. So, it makes sense for composition theorists to carefully examine social aspects of writing, and it makes sense for composition instructors to be aware of the theory, so they can avoid the potential pitfalls of uninspired collaborative learning in the classroom. I think the ideas of community and collaboration from this week's readings connect to the last two collections of "Difference" reading--Harris, especially, in his meditations on the word "community" reinforces the notion of grounding educational experience within a local context. One more thing--these readings helped me see the importance of fostering awareness of collaborative practices. Honestly, in the past I've had my students do a lot of collaborative work because being social seems to equal fun for them. Now, I have to think more carefully about how the collaboration is scaffolded, especially considering the power structure within the classroom community in which the collaboration is to take place.

Stephen: Elizabeth took the words right out of my mouth (or off of my keyboard, I guess): the notion of community and collaboration in the composition classroom provides a direct link from our pedagogy and our curriculum to the social nature of composition. What our students are trying to do, at least according to Bartholomae, is situate themselves and their writing with in a community (discourse, academic, disciplinary, etc.) that, in the case of the entering Pitt freshmen, they know nothing about except that it is big and scary and that it probably requires the same kinds of "writing" that their high school teachers asked them to do. Never mind the intimidation factor that has to play into what these students actually wrote; the point is that they know they have to adapt without knowing what it is they are adapting to (i.e., none of the essays B. presented used what could be invariably called a "home language." Which tells us that even the most basic writers are aware of the social nature of writing. And so difference (or dissensus) is the elephant already sniffing at the number two pencils or blue books or whatever they use to write their entrance essays, i.e. it's something that students are capable of dealing with. Which I think is interesting.

Stacy: Great thoughts, both of you. Although collaboration and community clearly have some overlaps in the reading, I do think we want to be careful about conflating them completely. This could just be because I've spent considerable time with discourse community readings for my thesis, whereas the collaboration pieces are new to me. So, for me, the idea of community contributes, as Stephen said, to our understanding of composition as socially situated. I think it adds to that understanding in useful ways, as it allows us to consider how composition is not only situated in and influenced by the culture at large, but also more locally, by the particular demands of a given environment (say, a specific discipline within the academy - echoes of Bazerman here). Bartholomae introduces this idea, which is complicated by Harris. I think Harris makes a particularly good point that community can be a dangerous term because it is a positive with no negative. His suggestions for concretizing the term to allow for both positive and negative aspects is, I think, important to our consideration of community. Trimbur and Harris both discuss the idea of consensus. I felt Trimbur's piece was a bit overly utopian (heterotopian), but I did think his idea of consensus as something that could be used as tool in collaboration rather than a necessary end goal had traction. I remain unsure of how I could institute such an idea in my pedagogy when I necessarily still hold a position of authority in my classroom. Bruffee and Rose both offered insightful considerations of the way that we talk about teaching writing and the way that we actually go about doing it. Rose points out that highly politicized conversations about what writing is and what use it is in the academy have trapped us into a certain way of thinking about and teaching composition. I'm distressed that these conversations still seem so current more than twenty years after the publication of this piece. I don't have much to say about the Bruffee that you two didn't already cover, so I'll leave that, I think.