"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife"

First, let me say that I appreciate your good with with the responses to Hemingway's story. Brendan brings up a good point on his blog. To paraphrase: Interesting story, but what does it have to do with collaborative learning?

Building off the work of Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Bruffee argues that "knowledge is established and maintained in the "normal discourse" of communities of knowledgeable peers" (640). Fish, he notes, goes so far as to claim that "'interpretive communities' are the source of our thought."

These points lead me to several questions:

Are we, in this class, a functioning interpretive community? With regard to Hemingway's story, what does "normal" discourse look like? Finally, if new knowledge is created by way of "abnormal discourse"(see pp. 647-8), what would that look like?