Truimbur, John. “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning”

Truimbur, John. “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning” (461).
“The aim of collaborative learning its advocates hold, is to reach consensus through an expanding conversations” (461).
“These critics of collaborative learning want to rescue the sovereignty and autonomy of the individual from what Johnson calls collaborative learning’s “peer indoctrination classes.’” (462).
“Consensus, I will argue, can be a powerful instrument for students to generate differences, to identify the systems of authority that organize these differences, and to transform the relations of power that determine who may speak and what counts as a meaningful statement” (462).
[about Bruffee] “Their effort to save the individual from the group is based on an unhelpful and unnecessary polarization of the individual and society” (463).
“What Bruffee takes from Dewey is a strong appreciation of the generativity of group life and its promise for classroom teaching” (463).
“If anything, it is through the social interaction of shared activity that individuals realize their own power to take control of their situation by collaborating with others” (463).
“Dewey’s educational pragmatism recasts the fear that consensus will ineveitably lead to conformity as a fear of group life itself” (463).
“Consensus does not necessarily violate the individual but instead can enable individuals to empower each other through social activity” (464).
“Knowledge, in this account, is not the result of the confrontation of the individual mind with reality but of the conversation that organizes the available means we have at any given time to talk about reality” (465).
“Rorty acknowledges, for example, the tendency of discourse to normalize itself and to block the flow of conversation by posing a “canonical vocabulary” (467).
This makes a lot of sense to me, those participating in the conversation can be deterred by that same “canonical vocabulary” by means of not having access to that vocabulary. We limit participation in our conversations when we “over jargon” them with terms that are not readily available to all.
“The ‘power of strangeness’ in abnormal discourse ‘to take us out of our old selves’ and ‘to make us into new beings’ . . .simply reaffirms our solidarity with the conversation” (468).
“Instead, abnormal discourse represents the result at any given time of the set of power relations that organizes normal discourse: the acts of permission and prohibition, of incorporation and exclusion that institute the structure and practices of discourse communities” (469).
“In the account I’m suggesting, it also refers to the relations of power that determine what falls within the current consensus and what is assigned the status of dissent. Abnormal discourse, from this perspective is neither as romantic or as pragmatic as Rorty makes it out to be. Rather it offers a way to analyze the strategic moves by which discourse communities legitimize their own conversation by marginalizing others. It becomes a critical term to describe the conflict among discourses and collective wills in the heterogeneous conversation in contemporary public life” (469).
“Bruffee uses the term vernacular to call attention to the plurality of voices that constitute our verbal thought. The intersecting vernaculars that we experience contending for our attention and social allegiance, however, are not just plural. They are also organized in hierarchical relations of power” (469).
“Myers argues, correctly I think, that Bruffee’s use of consensus risks accepting the current production and distribution of knowledge and discourse as unproblematical and given” (470).
[Wells says] “They can learn, that is, not how consensus is achieved through collaborative negotiation but rather how differences in interest produce conflicts that may in fact block communication and prohibit the development of consensus” (471).
“If one of the goals of collaborative learning is to replace the traditional hierarchical relations of teaching and learning with the practices of participatory democracy, we must acknowledge that one of the functions of the professions and the modern university has been to specialize and to remove knowledge from public discourse and decision-making, to reduce it to a matter of expertise and technique” (472).
Rather than opening communications with the outside world, we are closing off by continuing to narrowly define ourselves so that one must have an especial knowledge of the field in order to discuss it!
“Collaborative learning, that is, seeks to locate authority in neither the text nor the reader but in what Stanley fish calls interpretive communities” (474).
“In contrast, I think we need to begin collaborative classes by asking why interpretation has become the unquestioned goal of literary studies and what other kinds of readings thereby have been excluded and devalued” (474).
“One of the benefits of emphasizing the dissensus that surrounds the act of reading is that it poses consensus not as the goal of the conversation but rather as a critical measure to help students identify the structures of power that inhibit communication among readers (and between teachers and students) by authorizing certain styles of reading while excluding others” (475).
“We need to see consensus, I think, not as an agreement that reconciles differences through an ideal conversation but rather as the desire of humans to live and work together with differences” (476).
This was good, thought provoking.