Collaborative pedagogy

In “Collaboration and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’,” Kenneth A. Bruffee cites thinking out loud and collaborating as natural states of learning, because they mimic the process of earlier stages of development. Citing Michael Oakeshott, Bruffee argues that “[w]e 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 with ourselves, in imagination, the parts of all the participants in the conversation”.[9] In other words, he believes that the concepts of independent learning and thinking are more like social constructs than a natural state of being. Despite believing in Oakeshott’s theories about collaborative learning being natural, he acknowledges the difficulty of blending this with the independent and authoritative environment of the classroom, especially the college first-year composition classroom. Bruffee confronts the overarching fact that “[h]umanistic study, we have been led to believe, is a solitary life, and the vitality of the humanities lies in the talents and endeavors of each of us as individuals”.[10] On a more minute level, collaborative pedagogy becomes problematic for instructors who worry that classrooms will spiral out of control, in “…an adversarial activity pitting individual against individual”.[11] However, Bruffee thinks that if composition instructors and scholars believe in writing and learning as a process from which everyone can benefit, then it is important to forge community through collaboration, despite the individualist discourse of the university.

Wayne Campbell Peck et al. view collaborative pedagogy in a positive light, due to its success at the Community Literacy Center (CLC), which pairs inner-city high school students with student mentors from Carnegie Mellon University. They describe a curriculum encouraging students to write responses to the real world situations they face, such as writing their school administrators about detention policies.[12] Peck et al. justify the need for their program by positing that, “…beyond cultural appreciation, we believe that the next, more difficult step in community-building is to create an intercultural dialogue that allows people to confront and solve problems across racial and economic boundaries”.[13] Their program attempts to reach this goal of intercultural dialogue by promoting multiple levels of interaction and understanding. First, the mentors from Carnegie Mellon and the inner-city youth must reach mutual understanding to promote clearer communication. Next, the students and administrators need to remain open to the others’ perspectives to develop stronger community. Last, the program coordinators need to view all parties involved as equal stakeholders.[14] Overall, they argue that their program, while often fraught with conflict, helps stakeholders in different positions understand varying perspectives about issues in their local community, and that this learning process is both necessary and beneficial.

A critique of collaborative pedagogy is that it juxtaposes the individual work production valued within the university. In “The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing,” Joseph Harris echoes Bruffee’s sentiments that the community and individual work at cross-purposes within the university setting. He claims that although the term "collaborative" usually connotes a positive sense of belonging, community in reality often creates an “us versus them” mentality, and also creating a dichotomy between individual and group, or in this case, student versus university. He wonders, “If to enter the academic community a student must ‘learn to speak our language’ [in reference to David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University”], and become accustomed and reconciled to our ways of doing things with words, then how exactly is she to do this?”.[15] Issues of inclusion, exclusion, community, and individual relate to collaborative pedagogy, because first-year composition instructors struggle to promote critical thinking and collaborative learning, while also meeting the demands of college-level writing. Harris does not provide much consolation to this problem, except to say that students need to learn to navigate the complexities of individual and community identity.

John Trimbur both supports and critiques collaborative pedagogy, but his support is predicated upon adjusting the views of both conflict and resolution. His article, “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning," focuses on redefining the definition of “consensus” as it applies to collaborative pedagogy in the first-year composition classroom. He argues that,

To develop a critical version of collaborative learning, we will need to distinguish between consensus as an acculturative practice that reproduces business as usual and consensus as an oppositional one that challenges the prevailing conditions of production. The point of collaborative learning is not simply to demystify the authority of knowledge by revealing its social character but to transform the productive apparatus, to change the social character of production. In this regard, it will help to cast consensus not as a “real world” practice but as a utopian one (Trimbur, 743).[16]

After he links collaborative learning with his notion of the role of consensus, he claims that “The revised notion of consensus I am proposing here depends paradoxically on its deferral, not its realization. I am less interested in students achieving consensus…as their using consensus as a critical to open gaps in the conversation through which differences may emerge”.[17] This notion of consensus helps students build community and collaboration by grappling with issues that do not lend themselves so easily to consensus as agreement.

The works of the scholars listed above and in the references section primarily deal with the conundrum of preparing students for collaborative work environments, when most of their work occurs individually and in a classroom environment. Freedman and Adam worry that the classroom creates trained in capacities in students, preventing them from adapting to a work world where authoritative boundaries are blurred and most stakeholders are equal.[21] Blakeslee notes that even when instructors try to bring the “real world” into the classroom, businesses and students still struggle to communicate clearly.[22] Robert J. Johnson makes the theoretical claim that audience awareness is central to technical communication as a practice, but that the university purposefully separates writer from audience, which does not promote collaborative pedagogy or learning.[23] However, he further argues that for communication to succeed in any setting, audience must be “involved” rather than removed from the process of communicating.[24]