Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’”

Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’”
Too much talk for too little info.
“collaborative learning is discussed sometimes as a process that constitutes fields or disciplines of study and sometimes as a pedagogical tool that “works” in teaching composition and literature” (416).
Collaborate learning began to interest American college folk in the 1980’s, but term coined in the 50’s and 60’s (416).
“The help colleges offered, in the main, were tutoring and counseling programs staffed by graduate students and other professionals. These programs failed because undergraduates refused to use them” (417).
“one type of collaborative learning, peer criticism (also called peer evaluation), students learn to describe the organizational structure of a peer’s paper, paraphrase it, and comment both on what seems well done and what the author might do to improve the work” (418).
“human conversation takes place within us as well as among us” (419).
“any effort to understand how we think requires us to understand the nature of conversation, and any effort to understand conversation requires us to understand the nature of community life that generates and maintains conversations” (421). Huh? I don’t think I agree.
“Richard Rorty argues . . .that to understand any kind of knowledge we must understand what he calls the social justification of belief. That is, we must understand how knowledge is established and maintained in the ‘normal discourse’ of communities of knowledgeable peers” (421).
“our task must involve engaging students in conversation among themselves at as many points in both the writing and the reading process as possible, and that we should contrive to ensure that students conversation about what they read and write is similar in as many ways as possible to the way we would like them eventually to read and write” (422).
“A community of knowledgeable peers is a group of people who accept, and whose work is guided by, the same paradigms and the same code of values and assumptions” (423).
“What students do when working collaboratively on their writing is not write or edit or, least of all, read proof. What they do is converse. They talk about the subject and about the assignment” (425).
“To learn is to work collaboratively to establish and maintain knowledge among a community of knowledgeable peers through the process that Richard Rorty calls ‘socially justifying belief’”(427).
I LOVE ABNORMAL DISCOURSE!!!!!!!!!
“Abnormal discourse, Rorty says, ‘is what happens when someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of the conventions governing that discourse ‘ or who sets them aside’” (429).
“’the product of abnormal discourse can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution’”(429).
“Thus collaborative learning can help students joint the established knowledge communities of academic studies, business, and the professions. But it should also help students learn something else. They should learn, Trimbur says, ‘something about how this social transition takes place, how it involves crises of identity and authority, how students can begin to generate a transitional language to bridge the gap between communities’ (private correspondence)” (430).
[Teachers are] “Responsible to both sets of values, therefore, we must perform as conservators and agents of change, as custodians of prevailing community values and as agents of social transition and reacculturation” (432).