Collaboration and play in the writing classroom.

Abstract

This essay presents theory and field investigation that supports the argument for more collaborative learning in writing instruction. The authors claim that although collaborative learning occurs frequently in the university system, chances for students, teachers, and writing tutors to engage in meaningful collaborative activities in classrooms are much rarer and need to be implemented more often. The authors offer a literature review and on-site case studies that situate in-class writing tutoring as an option for teachers interested in exploring in-class collaboration resources and activities.

Introduction

Collaborative learning is an important aspect of education that has warranted research and study in multiple fields. In composition studies, for example, practitioners over the past two decades have scrutinized the educational value of collaborative learning (Bruffee; Lunsford; Trimbur; Gere), and the connection between writing centers and the university at large (Barnett and Blumner; Bruffee; Pemberton and Kinkead; Spigelman and Grobman, Eodice). More broadly, in Interdisciplinary Courses and Team Teaching, James Davis reports on several case studies he conducted across the country on interdisciplinary team-teaching programs. While Davis relays many interesting findings involving collaboration, he also notes that, with all the meeting and planning participants were involved in, the mission of imparting the importance of collaborative learning was not getting across to students. When evaluation questionnaires were given to students, collaborative categories were given the lowest scores. In other words, students did not perceive much collaboration going on. Although teachers were collaborating extensively outside the classroom, students were not seeing it (Davis 124-30). A growing movement in composition and rhetoric, and writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC), however, illustrates ways students, teachers, and tutors can collaborate on a day-to-day basis in the classroom in full view of one another (Spigelman and Grobman; Lawfer; Gere; Corbett; Decker; Soliday; Nicolas; Spigelman; Grobman; Grobman and Spigelman). Based on these findings and our own research and practice at the University of Washington (UW), we assert that if students, teachers, and tutors interact frequently in the classroom they can share valuable information such as deploying various rhetorical strategies; balancing directive and non-directive teaching methods; modeling--and questioning--the idea of appropriate academic discourse; and fostering an experimental, playful teaching/learning attitude in writing. [1]

Literature Review

Work in the field of composition and rhetoric points to several theoretical rationales for collaborative learning. Kenneth Bruffee argues that students gain better access to other communities, acculturate better, and learn more from others than from texts (7-9). Bruffee goes even further to conclude that the goal of teachers should be "to initiate students into the skill and partnership of knowledgeable discourses" through conversation and collaborative learning toward consensus (257). [2] John Trimbur, a former student of Bruffee, complicates Bruffee's notion of consensus, however, claiming: "I am less interested in students achieving consensus (although of course this happens at times) as in their using consensus asa critical instrument to open gaps in the conversation through which differences may emerge" (614). Trimbur believes that in_ class conversations that play on difference, conflict, and contention will enable students to voice stronger claims and rationales, or enable them to build a more playful sense of argument for writing. [3]

The sort of attitude we often see students take toward writing seems unnecessarily akin to what Janet Emig calls "Beethovian" (qtd. in Harris 61), where the writer agonizes and suffers while composing (or inventing). Pragmatist John Dewey offers one possible answer that might help writers deal with this issue more creatively. Dewey saw in the actions of children lessons applicable to adults. He claimed that as children move along in school, their natural inclination toward collaboration and play is quickly replaced with a competitive attitude and subsequent action (The School and Society). But he also contends that these are learned, reciprocal habits of mind. Not only do adults have a lot to teach children but vise versa:</p> <pre> With respect to the development of powers devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems we may say the child should be growing in manhood. With respect to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness. (Democracy and Education 50) </pre> <p>Dewey goes further to link the act of play to the way habits should be formed concerning work. He advises that work remain "permeated with the play attitude, thus functioning as art" (Democracy and Education 206). Vygotsky also recognized this play/learning connection in children. Play/learning is crucial to his zone of proximal development theory. When a younger child plays the games of an older child, the younger child must move beyond her average age and daily behavior while learning to play with the older child (Vygotsky 102). Anne Ruggles Gere links Vygotsky's zone of proximal development theory to the history and implications of writing groups outside and inside the classroom. Gere claims that close in-class collaborations between students and teachers and students and each other allow each to explore how the authority of the individual can coexist with the authority of consensus (6). Students become empowered as their communication apprehensions are loosened, while "they discover new capacities in themselves as they collaborate" (64). Students learn together the meta-language that brings them closer to understanding how academic communication is dialogically constructed (84-94).

The intersections of writing center theory and practice and WAC offer inter-animating avenues for playful experimentation with in-class collaborations. Andrea Lunsford argues against the idea of the autonomous "garret" author, who sits alone composing from inner genius alone. Instead, she posits the idea of a "Burkean parlor" style writing center where an unending conversation invites writers into dynamic, ongoing discussion at any time (see Burke, Philosophy 110-11). But she also warns that "the idea of a center informed by a theory of knowledge as socially constructed, of power and control as constantly negotiated and shared, and of collaboration as its first principle presents quite a challenge" (Lunsford 41). Research and practice on in-class writing tutoring deals with just such theoretical and practical challenges.

The collection On Location offers a current source of information on the concept of in-class writing tutoring. In their concluding essay, Grobman and Spigelman suggest that tutors in the classroom provide more than just novel intervention. Rather, they claim, in-class tutoring "can be a significant practice for teaching students, tutors, teachers, and coordinators about the social construction of knowledge and the collaborative realities of writing" (227). The contributors to this usable collection illustrate how teachers, students, and tutors' attitudes, desires, theories and methodologies can be complicated and enriched by close day-to-day classroom interactions. Contributors discuss the ups and downs of in-class tutoring, which sometimes involves serious subject matter, but which also encourages the inter-illuminating effects of spontaneity and play. Teagan Decker (UW) explains how visiting tutors act as emissaries of writing center communication, dialogic communication that values the nuances involved in the collaborative negotiation and appropriation of ideas. Mary Soliday (CUNY) describes the usefulness of in-class tutors for learning rhetorical disciplinary conventions of content and form. Laurie Grobman (Penn State) explains the pivotal role of the peer-response group leader in helping basic writers gain access to academic conventions. And Steven J. Corbett (UW), Melissa Nicolas (Ohio State), and Candace Spigelman (Penn State) illustrate how consensus and difference are explicitly activated and vividly enacted during in-class collaborations between students, teachers and tutors. Corbett claims that the "collaborative games tutors learn to play can be shared with others who are interested in learning more about issues of communicative interdependence and the writing process as collaborative rather than individual" (110).

But as the contributors also show, collaboration can sometimes mean conflict. Spigelman, drawing on Nancy Grimm, makes a forceful appeal for teachers to understand the ways students themselves are co-opted by all the "empowering" moves we try to make with collaborative learning. She suggests that students are regulated into roles that we scrupulously initiate them into--including imposing hierarchical order and control. As teachers we inevitably wield some hegemonic force, "[t]herefore if we want our students to experience nonhierarchical forms of learning, we will need to make explicit what is at stake in this effort. When we bring peer group activities to student writers, we must encourage them to reflect on their roles as well: to examine the bases of the choices they believe they are making and to consider the threatening potential of student collaboration" (Spigelman 204).

Models of In-class Collaboration at the UW

Our interest in in-class tutoring at the UW stems in large part from concerted efforts between our English Department Writing Center (EWC) and first-year composition (FYC) courses. Teagan Decker, then EWC Administrative Director, began to send tutors into classrooms as emissaries around 2000. Tutors began to see just how much was at stake with student learning and communication skills as they began to interact with teachers and fellow students on a regular basis. Today, in-class collaborations between the EWC and FYC courses at the UW take primarily two forms: peer-response facilitation, and in-class tutors attached to a classroom with a writing instructor.

Recently, Steven Corbett and a peer tutor, Dorian Taylor, visited the class of our colleague Michelle LaFrance, in her FYC class, to help facilitate peer-response. In their roles as facilitators, Steven and Dorian were what Decker calls "meta-tutors, encouraging students to tutor each other" (27). Decker explains that in "this capacity, tutors ate not doing what they would be doing in a one-to-one conference in the writing cente--they are showing students how to do it" (27). This explicitly links the role of the in-class emissary to Gere's concept of meta-language. In-class tutors model and explain for students how to critique and praise, and in turn, how to take criticism and praise and how to apply it. At the same time, Dorian and Steven modeled both directive and nondirective teaching methods that could be used in future peer-response activities with groups of three-four students. They suggested that students begin by asking each other openended questions like: What is your claim? What are you trying to do in your introduction right now? But they also offered direct suggestions when appropriate. At one point, Steven noticed many students focusing on grammar and spelling concerns. He quickly gathered the entire class's attention and urged them not to focus on grammar and spelling at this phase of the writing process, to focus on the higher-order concerns like claim, evidence, and analysis first. He explained that if we focus in on the sentence-level mechanics now, we would be less likely to revise higher-order concerns later.

These types of in-class collaborative visits have, in-turn, given rise to more long-term in-class writing tutoring choreographies. For the past two years Corbett has regularly had an in-class tutor attached to his first and second-year composition classes on a day-to-day basis, based on the models of Writing Fellows Programs like the ones at Penn State, Brown, CUNY, and California State, Chico, among others (see On Location; Lawfer). In FYC classes ranging from mainstream students, to underrepresented students, to a second-year composition class with students from various disciplines, Corbett's findings suggest the high degree of consensus and difference negotiation, asserted by Trimbur and Spigelman, that plays out more vividly in the writing classroom with an in-class tutor. For example Sean, a tutor in Corbett's FYC class with underrepresented students, explicitly voiced his dissenting teaching philosophy in his end of the quarter reflection paper. Sean astutely observed and detailed how he and Corbett practiced two different teaching philosophies: Corbett always starting discussions from where the student was coming from then moving toward the text, Sean, on the other hand, starting with the text then moving toward student connections. Ultimately, Sean expressed his overall satisfaction with the learning experience, including being able to interact so closely with a collaborative teaching style, in a collaborative teaching setting. Based on the work of On Location, Corbett is currently working with colleagues on an action plan for coordinating a wider in-class tutoring program for marginalized and underrepresented student writers in FYC at the UW--collaborations we believe will bring valuable assistance in writing instruction to the students and teachers who can benefit from it the most.

Implications and Conclusion

As teachers, we spend countless hours collaboratively talking to colleagues in meetings, conferences, and committees. But if students are not experiencing the ups and downs of close collaboration in the writing classroom in full view of one another, and us, than we are not doing all we can for each others' educations. The implications of our findings extend beyond the composition classroom, however, suggesting that collaborative learning is an attitude and method usable in many fields. In-class collaborations allow students, teachers, and writing tutors to metacognitively explore the dialectical process where all three participate, negotiate, argue, critique and praise together. Michelle Eodice believes that, for all academics, "collaboration is like the 'air we breathe'" (114). And Deborah Tannen, hopeful that dialogic collaboration offers solutions to our culture of polarized argumentative thinking, asserts, "cooperation, after all, is not the absence of conflict but a means of managing conflict" (26). While this essay has illustrated the complicated nature of in-class collaborations, even the potentially threatening, conflict-laden nature of collaboration suggested by Trimbur, Spigelman, and Lunsford, we still believe, as Eodice concludes, that: "We can and should demand collaboration and continue to work toward boundarylessness, even with the knowledge that these actions will never be fully accomplished, completed" (129). In the spirit of Burke's unending conversation, we also believe that working toward the blurring of authority, the complication of knowledge production, and the playful opening of classrooms up for conversation partners to voice their agreements and disagreements--no matter how challenging these orchestrations might prove--is something well worth striving for, well worth collaborating toward.

Works Cited

Barnett, Robert W., and Jacob S. Blumner, eds. Writing Centers and Writing Across the Curriculum Programs: Building Interdisciplinary Partnerships. Westport, CT/London: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Bruffee, Kenneth A. Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge. 2nd ed. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1999 [1993].

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. New York: Prentice Hall, 1945.

--. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973 [1941].

--. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969 [1950]. Corbett, Steven J. "Bringing the Noise: Peer Power and Authority, On Location."

Spigelman and Grobman 101-111, 240-1.

Davis, James R. Interdisciplinary Courses and Team Teaching: New Arrangements for Learning. Phoenix, AZ: American Council on Education and Oryx Press, 1995.

Decker, Teagan. "Diplomatic Relations: Peer Tutors in the Writing Classroom." Spigelman and Grobman 17-30.

Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. New York: The Free Press, 1997 [1916].

--. Human Nature and Conduct. New York: The Modern Library, 1930.

--. The School and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1900.

Eodice, Michelle. "Breathing Lessons, or Collaboration Is." Pemberton and Kinkead 114-129; 192-95.

Grobman, Laude. "Building Bridges to Academic Discourse: The Peer Group Leader in Basic Writing Peer Response Groups." Spigelman and Grobman 44-59; 238.

Gere, Anne Ruggles. Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

Grobman, Laude, and Candace Spigelman. "Conclusion: Hybrid Matters: The Promise of Tutoring On Location." Spigelman and Grobman 219-32; 244.

Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.

Hmelo, Cindy E. and Dorothy H. Evensen, eds. Problem Based Learning, A Research Perspective on Learning Interactions. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc., 2000.

Lawfer, Laura. "Writing Fellows: An Innovative Approach to Tutoring." Writing Lab Newsletter 29.9 (May 2005): 10-13.

Lunsford, Andrea. "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center." The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. Eds. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995 [1991]. 36-42.

Nicolas, Melissa. "A Cautionary Tale about 'Tutoring' Peer Response Groups." Spigelman and Grobman 112-125; 241.

Pemberton, Michael A., and Joyce Kinkead, eds. The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003.

Slavin, Robert E. Cooperative Learning: Theory, Research, and Practice. 2nd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995.

Soliday, Mary. "General Readers and Classroom Tutors across the Curriculum." Spigelman and Grobman 31-43.

Spigelman, Candace. "Reconstructing Authority: Negotiating Power in Democratic Learning Sites." Spigelman and Grobman 185-204; 242-44.

Spigelman, Candace and Laurie Grobman, eds. On Location: Theory and Practice in Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2005.

Tannen, Deborah. The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue. New York: Random House, 1998.

Trimbur, John. "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning." College English 51 (October 1989): 602-16.

Vygotsky, L.S. Mind and Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Ed. Michael Cole. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Notes

(1.) The concept of attitude is foundational in the works of Kenneth Burke. Drawing on George Herbert Mead's idea of attitude as "incipient action," Burke posits attitude as the substance, or mental precondition, from which action originates (see Philosophy 1, 10-11, 168-9, 379-82; Grammar 236-47, 294; Rhetoric 50, 90-5).

(2.) Collaborative learning finds extensive use in other fields, including medicine and education. Hmelo and Evensen's recent collection illustrates how medical schools across the US, Canada and Europe rely on collaborative (group) learning--informed by Bruffeean collaborative theory--to help diagnose problems better. In education, Slavin argues its potential as the "main organizing scheme for classroom instruction" (ix).

(3.) Trimbur's 1989 critique was aimed at Bruffee's work in the 80s. By the first edition of Collaborative learning in 1993, and especially the second edition in 1999, Bruffee had considered and addressed these concerns (10-12, 42-3, 212). (For more on the role of conflict in education see Tannen 116, 256-76; Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct 284-5, 300.)

Steven J. Corbett, University of Washington, Seattle

Juan C. Guerra, University of Washington, Seattle

Corbett is a PhD candidate in English Language and Rhetoric, and an Assistant Director of the Expository Writing Program. Guerra is Associate Professor of English Language and Rhetoric.