Bruffee: "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind'"

I usually make some notes prior to teaching, so I'll just use this blog as a way to make these notes accessible to you.

1. Page 636: Why collaborate?

Bruffee sets up a problem. Basically, he feels like collaborative learning (group work in class, peer tutors, peer evaluations) works in these revolutionary ways, but he's had mixed success with the practice. Collaborative learning, thus, is like a set of tactics. He wants a theory by which he can figure out when and how to implement this or that tactic.

2. Page 639-41: Talk, Inner Speech, and Writing

These pages basically summarize and respond to Vygotskty's influential work Mind and Society. Think of this way: You ever talk to yourself? Sure you do and you've been doing it since you were a child and no one but your parents understood you. This "inner speech" is our brain's way of problem solving. But where did inner speech come from? It seems logical to speculate that it comes from other people. We hear others and take in their language. Then later, we use that language for our purposes. "Thought," says Bruffee, "and conversation tend to work largely in the same way."

You might see in this passage echoes of North. He too emphasizes the role of talk in the writing center. You talk so as to create an effective conversation with the writer. This writer then internalizes this talk and uses it as inner speech. This inner speech is then "made public and social again" (641) in the form of writing (or more conversation).

642-47: Normal Discourse

How do you know your talk makes sense (or will make sense) to others? Mostly, you rely on the fact that your talk adheres to a whole range of accepted conventions. "Normal discourse is what William Perry describes as discourse in the established contexts of knowledge in a field, a discourse that makes effective reference to facts as defined within those contexts."

So here we get deeply social definition of "facts," right? (B. calls knowledge a "social artifact" [646].) You have a field (biology, anthropology, etc.) and you have people talking, writing, and using inner speech to figure out problems. But what counts as a problem? What counts as a good answer? What counts as accepted, as controversial, as old hat?

The answer (on about p. 644) comes in the form of knowledge (aka interpretive) communities. Groups of experts talk about problem X and solution Y all the time. They agree and disagree. They locate stable knowledge and they identify dubious claims. The stable knowledge becomes "normal discourse."

644: So what does this have to do with peer tutoring and writing consultancy?

Bruffee claims that all you are members (experts) in your own local knowledge communities, and the rules for making knowledge are not all that different. In addition, you have a good sense of the conventions (expectations) of academic knowledge communities, even if you are not an established member of this or that community.

647: Abnormal discourse

Hey, wait a minute, you say. Suppose that no one agrees with the stuff I'm saying but suppose also that I'm right? Would it then be the case that "knowledge" is actually false knowledge and that my words get ignored by the idiot masses in their "knowledge communities."

Yes. That happens a lot, unfortunately, which is why we must be ever on the lookout for "abnormal discourse," which is a phrase Bruffee borrows from the philosopher Richard Rorty:

"If, as Rorty suggests, knowledge is a social artifact, if knowledge is belief justified through normal discoruse, then the generation of knowledge, what we call creativity, must also be a social process [...]. But the discourse involved...cannot be normal discourse, since normal discourse maintains knowledge. It is inadequate for generating new knowledge" (647).

648: The Role of Abnormal Discourse in Peer Tutoring

Collaborative learning and the concepts of "normal/abnormal" discourse change the way one things about knowledge, teaching, and learning.

If knowledge is just "there," then your job is to learn it and quit being ignorant. Your job is not, necessarily, to question knowledge, to communicate it, and certainly not to create it.

But knowledge, in this argument, is social. It does not come from a higher power nor does it come from proximity to a "great mind" (see p. 649). Collaborative learning--as a social act--challenges the authority foundation on which most knowledge rests (teachers, schools, government, and other relevant institutions and their representatives).

According to Bruffee, teachers and peer tutors, in their best manifestations, operate as "conservators and agents of change."

Teaching--or peer tutoring--writing, therefore, means engaging writers in a conversation about what is true, meaningful, and important, especially when that writing seems "abnormal," for it is in abnormal discourse that new knowledge is made.