Collaborative Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind" by Kenneth A. Bruffee (1984)
Author: Kenneth A. Bruffee
Collaborative Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind" Author(s): Kenneth A. Bruffee Source: College English, Vol. 46, No. 7 (Nov., 1984), pp. 635-652 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/376924
There are some signs these days that collaborative learning is of increasing interest to English teachers. (1) Composition teachers seem to be exploring the concept actively. Two years ago the term appeared for the first time in the list of topics suggested by the Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication for discussion at the CCCC annual convention. It was eighth or ninth on a list of ten items. Last year it appeared again, first on the list
- I am indebted for conversation regarding substantive issues raised in this essay to Fellows of the Brooklyn College Institute for Training Peer Tutors and of the Asnuntuck Community College Institute in Collaborative Learning and Peer-Tutor Training, and to Peter Elbow. Both Institutes were supported by grants from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. I am particularly grateful to Peter Hawkes, Harvey Kail, Ronald Maxwell, and John Trimbur for reading the essay in early drafts and for offering suggestions for improvement. The essay is in many ways and at many levels a product of collaborative learning.
Teachers of literature have also begun to talk about collaborative learning, although not always by that name. It is viewed as a way of engaging students more deeply with the text and also as an aspect of professors’ engagement with the professional community. At its 1978 convention the Modern Language Association scheduled a multi-session forum entitled “Presence, Knowledge, and Authority in the Teaching of Literature.” One of the associated sessions, called “Negotiations of Literary Knowledge,” included a discussion of the authority and structure (including the collaborative classroom structure)of “interpretive communities.” At the 1983 MLA convention collaborative practices in re-establishing authority and value in literary studies were examined under such rubrics as “Talking to the Academic Community:Conferences as Institutions” and “How Books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost Got to be Valuable” (changes in interpretive attitudes in the community of Miltonists).
In both these contexts 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. The former discussion, often highly theoretical, usually manages to keep at bay the more troublesome and problematic aspects of collaborative learning. The discussion of classroom practice is less fortunate. What emerges there is that many teachers are unsure about how to use collaborative learning and about when and where, appropriately,it should be used. Many are concerned also that when they try to use collaborative learning in what seem to be effective and appropriate ways, it sometimes quite simply fails.
I sympathize with these experiences. Much the same thing has happened to me. Sometimes collaborative learning works beyond my highest expectations. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Recently, though, I think I have been more successful. The reason for that increased success seems to be that I know a little more now than I did in the past about the complex ideas that lie behind collaborative learning. This essay is frankly an attempt to encourage other teachers to try collaborative learning and to help them use collaborative learning appropriately and effectively. But it offers no recipes. It is written instead on the assumption that understanding both the history and the complex ideas that underlie collaborative learning can improve its practice and demonstrate its educational value.
The history of collaborative learning as I know it can be briefly sketched. Collaborative learning began to interest American college teachers widely only in the 1980s, but the term was coined and the basic idea first developed in the 1950s and 1960s by a group of British secondary school teachers and by a biologist studying British post-graduate education-specifically, medical education. I myself first encountered the term and some of the ideas implicit in it in Edwin Ma-son’s still interesting but now somewhat dated polemic entitled Collaborative Learning (London: Ward Lock Educational Co., 1970), and in Charity James’ Young Lives at Stake: A Reappraisal of Secondary Schools (London: Collins, 1968).Mason, James, and Leslie Smith, colleagues at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, were committed during the Vietnam era to democratizing education and to eliminating from education what were perceived then as socially destructive authoritarian social forms. Collaborative learning as they thought of it emerged from this largely political, topical effort.
The collaborative forms that Mason and his colleagues proposed to establish in education had already been explored and their educational value affirmed, however, by the earlier findings of M. L. J. Abercrombie. Abercrombie’s Anatomy of Judgment (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964) culminated ten years of research on the selection and training of medical students at University College, University of London. The result of her research was to suggest that diagnosis, the art of medical judgment and the key element in successful medical practice, is better learned in small groups of students arriving at diagnoses collaboratively than it is learned by students working individually. Abercrombie began her study by observing the scene that lay people think is most typical of medical education: the group of medical students with a teaching physician gatheredarounda ward bed to diagnose a patient. She then made a seemingly slight but in out-come enormously important change in the way that scene is usually played out. Instead of asking each individual member of the group of students to diagnose the patient on his or her own, Abercrombie asked the whole group to examine the patient together, discuss the case as a group, and arrive at a consensus, a single diagnosis that they could all agree to. What she found was that students learning diagnosis this way acquired good medical judgment faster than individuals working alone (p. 19).
For American college teachers the roots of collaborative learning lie neither in radical politics nor in research. They lie in the nearly desperate response of harried colleges during the early 1970s to a pressing educational need. A decade ago, faculty and administrators in institutions throughout the country became aware that, increasingly, students entering college had difficulty doing as well in academic studies as their native ability suggested they should be able to do. Of course, some of these students were poorly prepared academically. Many more of them, however, had on paper excellent secondary preparation.The common denominator among both the poorly prepared and the seemingly well-prepared was that, for cultural reasons we may not yet fully understand,all these students seemed to have difficulty adapting to the traditional or “normal” conventions of the college classroom.
One symptom of the difficulty these students had adapting to college life and work was that many refused help when it was offered. 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. Many solutions to this problem were suggested and tried, from mandated programs that forced students to accept help they evidently did not want, to sink-or-swim programs that assumed that students who needed help but didn’t seek it out didn’t belong in college anyway. One idea that seemed at the time among the most exotic and unlikely (that is, in the jargon of the 60s, among the most “radical”) turned out in the event to work rather well. Taking hints about the social organization of learning given by John Bremer, Michael von Moschzisker, and others writing at that time about changes in primary and secondary education, some college faculty members guessed that students were refusing help because the kind of help provided seemed merely an extension of the work, the expectations, and above all the social structure of traditional classroom learning (The School Without Walls [New York: Holt, 1971], p. 7). It was traditional classroom learning that seemed to have left these students unprepared in the first place. What they needed, it seemed, was help that was not an extension of but an alternative to traditional classroom teaching.
To provide that alternative some colleges turned to peer tutoring. Through peer tutoring teachers could reach students by organizing them to teach each other. And peer tutoring, it turned out, was just one way of doing that, although perhaps the most readily institutionalized way. Collectively, peer tutoring and similar modes such as peer criticism and classroom group work could be sensibly classified under the convenient term provided by our colleagues in Britain: collaborative learning. What the term meant in practice was a form of indirect teaching in which the teacher sets the problem and organizes students to work it out collaboratively.For example, in 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. The teacher then evaluates both the essay and the critical response. In another type of collaborative learning,classroom group work, students in small groups work toward a consensus in response to a task set by the teacher, for example, a question about a play, a poem, or another student’s paper. What distinguished collaborative learning in each of its several types from traditional classroom practice was that it did not seem to change what people learned (a supposition that now seems questionable)so much as it changed the social context in which they learned it. Students’ work tended to improve when they got help from peers; peers offering help, furthermore,learnedfrom the students they helped and from the activity of helping itself. Collaborative learning, it seemed, harnessed the powerful educative force of peer influence that had been-and largely still is-ignored and hence wasted by traditional forms of education.( 2)
- The educative value of peer group influence is discussed in Theodore M. Newcomb and Everett K. Wilson, eds., College Peer Groups (Chicago: Aldine, 1966).
More recently, those of us actively interested in collaborative learning have begun to think further about this practical experience. Recent developments in philosophy seem to suggest a conceptual rationale for collaborative learning that yields some unexpected insights into pedagogical practice. A new conception of the nature of knowledge provides directionthat we lacked earlieras we muddled through,trying to solve practical problems in practical ways. The better we understand this conceptional rationale, it seems, the more effective our practice of collaborative learning becomes.
In the hope that this experience will prove true for others, the following three sections outline the rationale of collaborative learning as I currently understand it and the relation of that rationale to classroom practice. The final section outlines some as yet not fully worked out implications both of collaborative learning as a practice and of some aspects of its conceptual rationale. Practice and rationale together, I will argue there, have the potential to challenge fairly deeply the theory and practice of traditional classroom teaching.
Conversation and the Nature of Thought and Knowledge
In an important essay on the place of literature in education published some twenty years ago, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” Michael Oakeshott argues that what distinguishes human beings from other animals is our ability to participate in unending conversation. “As civilized human beings,” Oakeshott writes, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. . . . Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance. (Rationalism in Politics [New York: Basic Books, 1962], p. 199)
Oakeshott argues that the human conversation takes place within us as well as among us, and that conversation as it takes place within us is what we call reflective thought. In making this argument he assumes that conversation and reflective thought are related in two ways: causally and functionally. That is, Oakeshott assumes what the work of Lev Vygotsky and others has shown, that reflective thought is public or social conversation internalized (see, for example, Vygotsky, Mind and Society [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978]).We first experience and learn “the skill and partnership of conversation” in the external arena of direct social exchange with other people. Only then do we learn to displace that “skill and partnership”by playing silently ourselves, in imagination, the parts of all the participants in the conversation. As Clifford Geertz has put it, thinking as an overt, public act, involving the purposeful manipulation of objective materials, is probably fundamental to human beings; and thinking as a covert, private act, and without recourse to such materials[is] a derived, though not unuseful, capability…. Human thought is consumately social: social in its origins, social in its functions, social in its form, social in its applications. (3)
- The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1971), pp. 76-77, 360. In addition to “The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind,” also relevant in the same volume are “The Impact of the Concept of Man” and “Ideology as a Cultural System,” parts four and five.
Since what we experience as reflective thought is related causally to social conversation(we learn one from the other), the two are also related functionally. That is, because thought is internalized conversation, thought and conversation tend to work largely in the same way. Of course, in thought some of the limitations of conversation are absent. Logistics, for example, are no problem at all. I don’t have to take the A train or Eastern Airlines flight #221 to get together with myself for a chat. And in thought there are no differences among the participants in preparation,interest, native ability, or spoken vernacular.Each one is just as clever as I can be, or just as dull. On the other hand, in thought some of the less fortunate limitations of conversation may persist. Limitations that may be imposed, for example, by ethnocentrism, inexperience, personal anxiety, economic interests, and paradigmatic inflexibility can constrain my thinking just as they can constrain conversation. If my talk is narrow, superficial, biased, and con-fined to cliches, my thinking is likely to be so too.
Still, it remains the case that according to this concept of mental activity many of the social forms and conventions of conversation, most of the grammatical, syntactical and rhetorical structures of conversation, and the range, flexibility, impetus, and goals of conversation are the sources of the forms and conventions, structures, impetus, range and flexibility, and the issues of reflective thought.
The relationship I have been drawing here between conversation and thought illuminates the source of the quality, depth, terms, character, and issues of thought. The assumptions underlying my argument differ considerably, however, from the assumptions we ordinarily make about the nature of thought. We ordinarily assume that thought is some sort of given, an “essential attribute” of the human mind. The view that conversation and thought are causally related assumes not that thought is an essential attribute of the human mind but that it is instead an artifact created by social interaction. We can think because we can talk, and we think in ways we have learned to talk. As Stanley Fish has put it, the thoughts we “can think and the mental operations [we] can perform have their source in some or other interpretive community.” (4) The range, complexity, and subtlety of our thought, its power, the practical and conceptual uses we can put it to, and the very issues we can address result in large measure directly from the degree to which we have been initiated into what Oakeshott calls the potential “skill and partnership” of human conversation in its public and social form.
- Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 14. Fish develops his argument fully in part 2, pp. 303-371. On the distinction between “interiority” or “inwardness” and “internalization,” see Stephen Toulmin, “The Inwardness of Mental Life,” Critical Inquiry, 6 (1979), 1-16.
To the extent that thought is internalized conversation, then, 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 conversation. Furthermore, any effort to understand and cultivate in ourselves the kind of thought we value most requires us to understand and cultivate the kinds of community life that establish and maintain conversation that is the origin of that kind of thought. To think well as individuals we must learn to think well collectively–that is, we must learn to converse well. The first steps to learning to think better, therefore, are learning to converse better and learning to establish and maintain the sorts of social context, the sorts of community life, that foster the sorts of conversation members of the community value.
This principle has broad applicability and has implications far beyond those that may be immediately apparent. For example, Thomas Kuhn has argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (2nd ed.: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) that to understand scientific thought and knowledge we must understand the nature of scientific communities. Scientific knowledge changes not as our “understanding of the world” changes. It changes as scientists organize and reorganize relations among themselves (pp. 209-10). Carrying Kuhn’s view and terminology further, Richard Rorty argues in Philosophy and the Mirrorof Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) 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. (5) Stanley Fish completes the argument by saying that these “interpretive communities” are the source of our thought and of the “meanings”we produce through the use and manipulation of symbolic structures,chiefly language. Fish suggests further, reflecting Erving Goffman’s conclusion to The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life ([New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959], pp. 252-53), that interpretative communities may also be in large measure the source of what we regard as our very selves (Fish, p. 14). Our feelings and intuitions are as much the product of social relations as our knowledge.
- I have explored some of the larger educational implications of Rorty’s argument in “Liberal Education and the Social Justification of Belief,” Liberal Education, 68 (1982), 95-114.
Educational Implications: Conversation, Collaborative Learning and “Normal Discourse”
The line of argument I have been pursuing has important implications for educators, and especially for those of us who teach English–both literature and composition. If thought is internalized public and social talk, then writing of all kinds is internalized social talk made public and social again. If thought is internalized conversation, then writing is internalized conversation re-externalized. (6)
- I make a case for this position in “Writing and Reading as Collaborative or Social Acts,” in Janice N. Hays, et al, eds., The Writer’s Mind: Writing as a Mode of Thinking (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1983), pp. 159-169. In the current critical climate the distinction between conversation and speech as sources of writing and thought is important to maintain. Deconstructionist critics such as Paul de Man argue (e.g., in his Blindness and Insight [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983]), following Derrida, that writing is not displaced speech but a primary act. This argument defines “writing” in a much broader sense than we are used to, to mean something like “making public” in any manner, including speech. Hence deconstructionist “writ-ing” can be construed as a somewhat static conception of what I am here calling “conversation”: a social act. So long as the conversational, hence social, nature of “writing” in the deconstructionist sense remains unrecognized, the aversion of deconstructionist criticism to the primacy of speech as embodying the phenomenological “metaphysics of presence” remains circular. The deconstructionist argument holds that privileging speech “centers” language in persons. But “persons” are fictions. The alternative proposal by deconstruction, however, that writing is “free play,” invites centering once again, since the figure of play personifies language. The deconstructionist critique has thus yet to acknowledge sufficiently that language, and its products such as thought and the self, are social artifacts constituted by “interpretive communities.”
Like thought, writing is related to conversation in both time and function. Writing is a technologically displaced form of conversation. When we write, having already internalized the “skill and partnership”of conversation, we displace it once more onto the written page. But because thought is already one step away from conversation, the position of writing relative to conversation is more complex than the position of thought relative to conversation. Writing is at once two steps away from conversation and a return to conversation. We converse; we internalize conversation as thought; and then by writing, we re-immerse conversation in its external, social medium.
My ability to write this essay, for example, depends on my ability to talk through with myself the issues I address here. And my ability to talk through an issue with myself derives largely from my ability to converse directly with other people in an immediate social situation. The point is not that the particular thing I write every time must necessarily be something I have talked over with other people first, although I may well often do just that. What I have to say can, of course, originate in thought, and it often does. But my thought itself is conversation as I have learned to internalize it. The point, therefore, is that writing always has its roots deep in the acquired ability to carry on the social symbolic exchange we call conversation.
The inference writing teachers should make from this line of reasoning is that 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. The way they talk with each other determines the way they will think and the way they will write.
To organize students for these purposes is, in as general a way as I can put it, to organize collaborative learning. Collaborative learning provides a social context in which students can experience and practice the kinds of conversation valued by college teachers. The kind of conversation peer tutors engage in with their tutees, for example, can be emotionally involved, intellectually and substantively focused, and personally disinterested. There could be no better source than this of the sort of displaced conversation-writing-valued by college teachers. Similarly, collaborative classroom group work guided by a carefully designed task makes students aware that writing is a social artifact, like the thought that produces it. Writing may seem to be displaced in time and space from the rest of a writer’s community of readers and other writers, but in every instance writing is an act, however much displaced, of conversational exchange.
Besides providing a particular kind of conversation, collaborative learning also provides a particular kind of social context for conversation, a particular kind of community–a community of status equals: peers. Students learn the “skill and partnership” of re-externalized conversation, writing, not only in a community that fosters the kind of conversation college teachers value most, but also in a community that approximates the one most students must eventually write for in everyday life, in business, government,and the professions.
It is worthwhile to digress a moment here to establish this last point. In most cases people write in business, government, and the professions mainly to inform and convince other people within the writer’s own community, people whose status and assumptions approximate the writer’s own. (7) That is, the sort of writing most people do most in their everyday working lives is what Richard Rorty calls “normal discourse.” Normal discourse (a term of Rorty’s coinage based on Thomas Kuhn’s term “normal science”) applies to conversation within a community of knowledgeable peers. 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. In normal discourse, as Rorty puts it, everyone agrees on the “set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution,what counts as a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it.” The product of normal discourse is “the sort of statement that can be agreed to be true by all participants whom the other participants count as ‘rational'” (p. 320).
- Some writing in business, government,and the professions may of course be like the writing students do in school for teachers, that is, for the sake of practice and evaluation. Certainly some writing in everyday working life is done purely as performance to please superiors in the corporate or department hierarchy,tell them what they already know, and demonstrate to them the writer’s proficiency as a writer. It may be true, therefore,that learning to write to a person who is not a member of one’s own status and knowledge community, that is, to a teacher, has some practical everyday value. But the value of writing of this type is hardly proportionate to the amount of time students normally spend on it.
The essay I am writing here is an example of normal discourse in this sense. I am writing to members of my own community of knowledgeable peers. My readers and I (I presume) are guided in our work by the same set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution,what counts as a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it. I judge my essay finished when I think it conforms to that set of conventions and values. It is within that set of conventions and values that my readers will evaluate the essay, both in terms of its quality and in terms of whether or not it makes sense. Normal discourse is pointed; it is explanatory and argumentative. Its purpose is to justify belief to the satisfaction of other people within the author’s community of knowledgeable peers. Much of what we teach today–or should be teaching–in composition courses is the normal discourse of most academic, professional, and business communities. The rhetoric taught in our composition textbooks comprises–or should comprise–the conventions of normal discourse of those communities. (8)
- A textbook that acknowledges the normal discourse of academic disciplines and offers ways of learning it in a context of collaborative learning is Elaine Maimon, et al., Writing in the Arts and Sciences (Boston: Little Brown, 1981).
Teaching normal discourse in its written form is central to a college curriculum, therefore, because the one thing college teachers in most fields commonly want students to acquire, and what teachers in most fields consistently reward students for, is the ability to carry on in speech and writing the normal discourse of the field in question. Normal discourse is what William Perry describes as discourse in the established contexts of knowledge in a field, discourse that makes effective reference to facts as defined within those contexts. In a student who can integrate fact and context together in this way, Perry says, “we recognize a colleague.” (9)This is so because to be conversant with the normal discourse in a field of study or endeavor is exactly what we mean by being knowledgeable-that is, knowledge-able-in that field. Not to have mastered the normal dis-course of a discipline, no matter how many “facts” or data one may know, is not to be knowledgeable in that discipline. Mastery of a knowledge community’s normal discourse is the basic qualification for acceptance into that community.
- “Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts,” in Examining in Harvard College: A Collection of Essays by Members of the Harvard Faculty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963). Quoted from Kenneth A. Bruffee, A Short Course in Writing (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 221.
The kind of writing students find most useful to learn in college, therefore, is not only the kind of writing most appropriate to work in fields of business, government, and the professions. It is also the writing most appropriate to gaining competence in most academic fields that students study in college. What these two kinds of writing have in common is that they are both written within and addressed to a community of status equals: peers. They are both normal discourse.
This point having, I hope, been established, the nature of the particular kind of community that collaborative learning forms becomes clearer. Collaborative learning provides the kind of social context, the kind of community, in which normal discourse occurs: a community of knowledgeable peers. This is one of its main goals: to provide a context in which students can practice and master the normal discourse exercised in established knowledge communities in the academic world and in business, government, and the professions.
But to say this only raises a host of questions. One question is, how can student peers, who are not members of the knowledge communities they hope to enter, who lack the knowledge that constitutes those communities, help other students enter them? The first, more concrete answer to this question is that no student is wholly ignorant and inexperienced. Every student is already a member of several knowledge communities, from canoeing to computers, baseball to ballet. Membership in any one of these communities may not be a resource that will by itself help much directly in learning to organize an essay or explicate a poem. But pooling the resources that a group of peers brings with them to the task may make accessible the normal discourse of the new community they together hope to enter. Students are especially likely to be able to master that discourse collaboratively if their conversation is structured indirectly by the task or problem that a member of that new community(the teacher) has judiciously designed. (10) To the conversation between peer tutors and their tutees in writing, for example, the tutee brings knowledge of the subject to be written about and knowledge of the assignment. The tutor brings sensitivity to the needs and feelings of peers and knowledge of the conventions of discourse and of standard written English. And the conversation is structured in part by the demands of the teacher’s assignment and in part by the formal conventions of the communities the teacher represents, the conventions of academic discourse and standard English.
- For examples and an explanation of this technique, see my A Short Course in Writing, cited above, and “CLTV: Collaborative Learning Television,” Educational Communication and Technology Journal, 30 (1982), 26-40. Also see Clark Bouton and Russell Y. Garth, eds., Learning in Groups (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1983).
Such conversation among students can break down, of course, if any one of these elements is not present. It can proceed again if the person responsible for providing the missing element, usually but not always the teacher, is flexible enough to adjust his or her contribution accordingly. If, for example, tutees do not bring to the conversation knowledge of the subject and the assignment, then the teacher helps peer tutors see that their most important contribution may be to help tutees begin at the very beginning:how to go about making sufficient acquaintance with the subject matter and how to set out to clarify the assignment. If tutors lack sensitivity to language and to the feelings and needs of their peers, tutees must contribute by making those feelings and needs more clearly evident. If the task or assignment that the teacher has given is unclear or too difficult or too simple minded to engage students effectively, then the teacher has to revise it. Throughout this process the teacher has to try to help students negotiate the rocks and shoals of social relations that may interfere with their getting on with their work together.
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. They talk through the writer’s understanding of the subject. They converse about their own relationship and, in general, about relationships in an academic or intellectual context between students and teachers. Most of all they converse about and as a part of writing. Similarly, what students do when working collaboratively in small groups in order to read a text with understanding–a poem, a story, or another student’s paper–is also to converse. They converse in order to reach consensus in answer to questions the teacher has raised about the text. They converse about and as a part of understanding. In short, they learn, by practicing it in this orderly way, the normal discourse of the academic community.
Collaborative Learning and the Authority of Knowledge
The place of conversation in learning, especially in the humanities,is the largest context in which we must see collaborative learning. To say that conversation has a place in learning should not of course seem peculiar to those of us who count ourselves humanists, a category that includes all of us who teach literature and most of us who teach writing. Furthermore,most of us believe that “class discussion” is one of the most effective ways of teaching. The truth, however, is that despite this belief the person who does most of the discussing in most of our discussion classes is the teacher.
This tends to happen because behind our enthusiasm for discussion lies a fundamental distrust of it. The graduate training most of us have enjoyed–or endured–has taught us, in fact, that collaboration and community activity is inappropriate and foreign to work in humanistic disciplines such as English. Humanistic study, we have been led to believe, is a solitary life, and the vitality of the humanities lies in the talents and endeavors of each of us as individuals. What we call discussion is more often than not an adversarial activity pitting individual against individual in an effort to assert what one literary critic has called “will to power over the text,” if not over each other. If we look at what we do instead of what we say, we discover that we think of knowledge as something we acquire and wield as individuals relative to each other, not something we generate and maintain in company with and in dependency upon each other. (11)
- I discuss the individualistic bias of our current interpretation of the humanistic tradition in “The Structure of Knowledge and the Future of Liberal Education,” Liberal Education, 67 (1981), 181-185.
Only recently have humanists of note, such as Stanley Fish in literary criticism and Richard Rorty in philosophy, begun to take effective steps toward exploring the force and implications of knowledge communities in the humanistic disciplines, and toward redefining the nature of our knowledge as a social artifact. Much of this recent work follows a trail blazed two decades ago by Thomas Kuhn. The historical irony of this course of events lies in the fact that
Kuhn developed his notion about the nature of scientific knowledge after first examining the way knowledge is generated, established, and maintained in the humanities and social sciences. For us as humanists to discover in Kuhn and his followers the conceptual rationale of collaborative learning is to see our own chickens come home to roost.
Kuhn’s position that even in the “hard” sciences knowledge is a social artifact emerged from his attempt to understand the implications of the increasing indeterminacy of knowledge of all kinds in the twentieth century. (12) To say that knowledge is indeterminate is to say that there is no fixed and certain point of reference, no Arnoldian “touchstone” against which we can measure truth. If there is no such absolute referent, then knowledge must be a thing people make and remake. Knowledge must be a social artifact. But to call knowledge a social artifact, Kuhn argues, is not to say that knowledge is merely relative, that knowledge is what any one of us says it is. Knowledge is maintained and established by communities of knowledgeable peers. It is what together we agree it is, for the time being. Rorty, following Kuhn, argues that communities of knowledgeable peers make knowledge by a process of socially justifying belief. Collaborative learning models this process.
- I trace briefly the history of the growing indeterminacy of knowledge and its relevance to the humanities in “The Structure of Knowledge,” cited above.
This then is a second and more general answer to the question raised in the preceding section. How can student peers, who are not themselves members of the knowledge communities they hope to enter, help other students to enter those communities? Isn’t collaborative learning the blind leading the blind?
It is of course exactly the blind leading the blind if we insist on the Cartesian model of knowledge: that to know is to “see,” and that knowledge is information impressed upon the individual mind by some outside source. But if we accept the premise that knowledge is an artifact created by a community of knowledgeable peers constituted by the language of that community, and that learning is a social and not an individual process, then to learn is not to assimilate information and improve our mental eyesight. 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.” We socially justify belief when we explain to others why one way of understanding how the world hangs together seems to us preferable to other ways of understanding it. We establish knowledge or justify belief collaboratively by challenging each other’s biases and presuppositions; by negotiating collectively toward new paradigms of perception, thought, feeling, and expression; and by joining larger,more experienced communities of knowledgeable peers through assenting to those communities’ interests, values, language, and paradigms of perception and thought.
If we accept this concept of knowledge and learning even partially and tentatively, it is possible to see collaborative learning as a model of the way that even the most sophisticated scientific knowledge is established and maintained. Knowledge is the product of human beings in a state of continual negotiation or conversation. Education is not a process of assimilating “the truth” but, as Rorty has put it, a process of learning to “take a hand in what is going on” by joining “the conversation of mankind.” Collaborative learning is an arena in which students can negotiate their way into that conversation.
Collaborative Learning and New Knowledge
Seen this way, collaborative learning seems unexceptionable. It is not hard to see it as comfortable, not very surprising,not even very new. In discovering and applying collaborative learning we seem to be, if not exactly reinventing the wheel, certainly rediscovering some of the more obvious implications of that familiar and useful device. Collaborative learning, it seems, is no new thing under the sun. However much we may explore its conceptual ramifications,we must acknowledge the fact that people have always learned from their peers and doggedly persist in doing so whether we professional teachers and educators take a hand in it or not. In Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel Eugene Gant records how in grammar school he learned to write (in this case, form the words on a page) from his “comrade,” learning from a peer what “all instruction failed” to teach him. In business and industry, furthermore,and in professions such as medicine, law, engineering,and architecture–where to work is to learn or fail–collaboration is the norm. All that is new in collaborative learning, it seems, is the systematic application of collaborative principles to that last bastion of hierarchy and individualism,t he American college classroom.
This comfortable view, while appropriate, may yet be deceptive. If we follow just a bit further the implications of the rationale for collaborative learning that I have been outlining here, we catch a glimpse of a somewhat startling educational scene. Take, for example, the principle that entering an existing knowledge community involves a process of negotiation. Followed to its logical conclusion this principle implies that education is not a rite of passage in which students passively become initiated into an institution that is monolithic and unchanging. It implies that the means by which students learn to negotiate this entry, collaborative learning, is not merely a better pedagogy, a better way of initiating new members into existing knowledge communities. And it implies that collaborative learning as a classroom practice models more than how knowledge is established and maintained. The argument pursued here implies, in short, that in the long run collaborative learning models how knowledge is generated, how it changes and grows.
This way of thinking about collaborative learning is somewhat speculative, but it is nevertheless of considerable interest and importance to teachers of English. If, as Rorty suggests, knowledge is a social artifact, if knowledge is belief justified through normal discourse, then the generation of knowledge, what we call “creativity,” must also be a social process. It too must involve discourse. But the discourse involved in generating knowledge cannot be normal discourse, since normal discourse maintains knowledge. It is inadequate for generating new knowledge. Knowledge–generating discourse is discourse of quite another kind. It is, to use Rorty’s phrase, abnormal discourse.
In contrast to normal discourse, abnormal discourse occurs between coherent communities or within communities when consensus no longer exists with regard to rules, assumptions, goals, values, or mores. 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.” Whereas normal discourse produces “the sort of statement which can be agreed to be true by all participants whom the other participants count as ‘rational,'” “the product of abnormal discourse can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution.” Unlike the participants in normal discourse who sound “rational” to the others in the community, a person speaking abnormal discourse sounds “either ‘kooky’ (if he loses his point) or ‘revolutionary'(if he gains it)” (pp. 320, 339).
The importance of abnormal discourse to the discussion of collaborative learning is that abnormal discourse serves the function of helping us–immersed as we inevitably are in the everyday normal discourse of our disciplines and professions–to see the provincial nature of normal discourse and of the communities defined by normal discourse. Abnormal discourse sniffs out stale, unproductive knowledge and challenges its authority, that is, the authority of the community which that knowledge constitutes. Its purpose, Rorty says, is to undermine “our reliance upon the knowledge we have gained” through normal discourse. We must occasionally undermine this reliance because normal discourse tends to “block the flow of conversation by presenting [itself] as offering the canonical vocabulary for discussion of a given topic” (pp. 386-387).
Abnormal discourse is therefore necessary to learning. But, ironically, abnormal discourse cannot be directly taught. “There is no discipline that describes” abnormal discourse, Rorty tells us, “any more than there is a discipline devoted to the study of the unpredictable or of ‘creativity'” (p. 320). What we can teach are the tools of normal discourse, that is, both practical rhetoric and rhetorically based modes of literary criticism such as the taxonomy of figures, new-critical analysis, and deconstructive criticism. (13) To leave openings for change, however, we must not teach these tools as universals. We must teach practical rhetoric and critical analysis in such a way that, when necessary, students can turn to abnormal discourse in order to undermine their own and other people’s reliance on the canonical conventions and vocabulary of normal discourse. We must teach the use of these tools in such a way that students can set them aside, if only momentarily,for the purpose of generating new knowledge, for the purpose, that is, of reconstituting knowledge communities in more satisfactory ways.
- Christopher Norris defines deconstruction somewhat simplistically but usefully for most purposes as “rhetorical questioning” (Deconstruction: Theory and Practice [London: Methuen, 1982], p. 21).
It is just here that, as I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, we begin to move beyond our earlier suppositions about what people learn through collaborative learning. Defining knowledge as a social artifact established and maintained through normal discourse challenges the authority of knowledge as we traditionally understand it. But by changing what we usually call the process of learning-the work, the expectations, and the social structure of the traditional classroom-collaborative learning also changes what we usually call the substance of learning.It challenges the authority of knowledge by revealing, as John Trimbur has observed, that authority itself is a social artifact. This revelation and the new awareness that results from it makes authority comprehensible both to us as teachers and to our students. It involves a process of re-acculturation. Thus collaborative learning can help students join 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).
Challenging the traditional authority of knowledge in this way, collaborative learning naturally challenges the traditional basis of the authority of those who teach. Our authority as teachers always derives directly or indirectly from the prevailing conception of the authority of knowledge. In the pre-Cartesian world people tended to believe that the authority of knowledge lodged in one place, the mind of God. In that world teachers derived their authority from their godliness, their nearness to the mind of God. In Cartesian,Mirror-of-Nature epistemology, the authority of knowledge has had three alternative lodgings, each a secular version of the mind of God. We could believe if we chose that the authority of knowledge lodged in some touchstone of value and truth above and beyond ourselves, such as mathematics, creative genius, or the universals of sound reasoning. We could believe that the authority of knowledge lodged in the mind of a person of genius: a Wordsworth,an Einstein, or a Freud. Or we could believe that the authority of knowledge lodged in the nature of the object objectively known:the universe, the human mind, the text of a poem.
Our authority as teachers, accordingly, has had its source in our nearness to one of these secular versions of the mind of God. In the first case we derive our authority from our identification with the “touchstone” of value and truth. Thus, for some of us, mathematicians and poets have, generally speaking, greater authority than, say, sociologists or literary critics. According to the second alternative we derive our authority from intimacy with the greatest minds. Many of us feel that those who have had the good fortune to study with Freud, Faraday, or Faulkner, for example, have greater authority than those who studied with their disciples; or, those who have studied the manuscripts of Joyce’s fiction have greater authority than those who merely studied the edited texts. According to the third alternative, we derive our authority as teachers from being in direct touch with the objective world. Most of us feel that those whose knowledge is confirmed by hands-on laboratory experimentation have greater authority than those whose knowledge is based on a synthesis of secondary sources.
Because the concept that knowledge is socially justified belief denies that the authority of knowledge lodges in any of these places, our authority as teachers according to that concept has quite another source as well. Insofar as collaborative learning inducts students into established knowledge communities and teaches them the normal discourse of those communities,we derive our authority as teachers from being certified representatives of the communities of knowledgeable peers that students aspire to join, and that we, as members of our chosen disciplines and also members of the community of the liberally educated public at large, invite and encourage them to join. Teachers are defined in this instance as those members of a knowledge community who accept the responsibility for inducting new members into the community. Without successful teachers the community will die when its current members die, and knowledge as assented to by that community will cease to exist.
Insofar as collaborative learning helps students understand how knowledge is generated through abnormal discourse, however, our authority as teachers derives from another source. It derives from the values of a larger–indeed, the largest possible–community of knowledgeable peers, the community that en-compasses all others. The interests of this largest community contradict one of the central interests of local communities such as professional disciplines and fields of study: to maintain established knowledge. The interest of the larger community is to resist this conservative tendency. Its interest is to bridge gaps among knowledge communities and to open them to change.
The continued vitality of the knowledge communities we value-in particular the community of liberally educated people and its sub-communities, the scholarly and professional disciplines–depends on both these needs being met: to maintain established knowledge and to challenge and change it. As representatives and delegates of a local, disciplinary community, and of the larger community as well, teachers are responsible for the continued vitality of both of the knowledge communities we value. 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 re-acculturation.
Because by giving students access to the “conversation of mankind,” to return to Oakeshott’s phrase, collaborative learning can serve both of these seemingly conflicting educational aims at once, it has an especially important role to play in studying and teaching English. It is one way of introducing students to the process by which communities of knowledgeable peers create referential connections between symbolic structures and “reality,” that is, by which they establish knowledge and by doing so maintain community growth and coherence. To study adequately any text–student theme or play by Shakespeare–is to study an entire social symbolic process, not just part of it. To study and teach English is to study and teach the social origin, nature, reference, and function of symbolic structures.
The view that knowledge is a social artifact, furthermore, requires a re-examination of our premises as students of English and as teachers. To date, very little work of this sort has been done. One can only guess what might come of a concerted effort on the part of the profession as a whole. The effort might ultimately involve “demystifying” much that we now do as humanists and teachers of the humanities. If we bring to mind, for example, a sampling of important areas of current theoretical thought in and allied to literary criticism, we are likely to find mostly bipolar forms: text and reader, text and writer, symbol and referent, signifier and signified. On the one hand, a critique along the lines I have been following here might involve examining how these theories would differ if they included the third term missing from most of them. How would a psychoanalytically oriented study of metaphor differ, for example, if it acknowledged that psychotherapy is fundamentally a kind of social relationship based on the mutual creation or recreation of symbolic structures by therapist and patient? How would semiotics differ if it acknowledged that all “codes” are symbolic structures constituting language communities and that to understand these codes requires us to examine and understand the complex social symbolic relations among the people who make up language communities? How would practical rhetoric look if we assumed that writer and reader were not adversaries but partners in a common, community-based enterprise? How would it look if we no longer assumed that people write to persuade or to distinguish themselves and their points of view and to enhance their own individuality by gaining the acquiescence of other individuals? How would it look if we assumed instead that people write for the very opposite reason: that people write in order to be accepted, to join, to be regarded as another member of the culture or community that constitutes the writer’s audience?
Once we had reexamined in this way how English is studied professionally, we could on the other hand also undertake to reexamine how English is taught as well. If we did that, we might find ourselves taking issue with Stanley Fish’s conclusion that to define knowledge as a social artifact generated by interpretive communities has no effect whatsoever on the way we read and teach literature and composition. My argument in this essay suggests, on the contrary, that some changes in our pedagogical attitudes and classroom practices are almost inevitable. These changes would result from integrating our understanding of social symbolic relationships into our teaching–not just into what we teach but also into how we teach it. For example, so long as we think of knowledge as a reflection and synthesis of information about the objective world, then to teach King Lear seems to involve providing a “correct” text and rehearsing students in “correct” interpretations of it. “Correct” here means the text and the interpretations that, as Fish puts it, seem “obvious and inescapable” within the knowledge community, within the “institutional or conventional structure,” of which we happen to be members(p. 370).
But if we think of knowledge as socially justified belief, then to teach King Lear seems to involve creating contexts where students undergo a sort of cultural change. This change would be one in which they loosen ties to the knowledge communities they currently belong to and join another. These two communities would be seen as having quite different sets of values, mores, and goals, and above all quite different languages. To speak in one community of a person asking another to “pray you undo this button” (V, iii) might be merely to tell a mercantile tale, or a prurientone, while in another community such a request could be both a gesture of profound human dignity and a metaphor of the dissolution of a world.
Similarly,so long as we think of learning as reflecting and synthesizing information about the objective world, to teach expository writing is to provide examples, analysis, and exercises in the traditional modes of practical rhetoric–description, narration, comparison-contrast–or examples, analysis, and exercises in the “basic skills” of writing, and to rehearse students in their proper use. But if we think of learning as a social process, the process of socially justifying belief, then to teach expository writing seems to involve something else entirely. It involves demonstrating to students that they know something only when they can explain it in writing to the satisfaction of the community of their knowledgeable peers. To teach this way, in turn, seems to require us to engage students in collaborative work that does not just reinforce the values and skills they begin with, but that promotes a sort of re-acculturation. (14)
- I suggest some possible curricular implications of the concept of knowledge as socially justified belief in “Liberal Education and the Social Justification of Belief,” cited above. See also Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge(New York: Basic Books, 1983),pp. 14-15, 161; Richard M. Rorty, “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching,” Synergos: Selected Papers from the Synergos Seminars, George Mason University, 2 (Fall 1982), 1-15;and my “Learning to Live in a World out of Joint: Thomas Kuhn’s Message to Humanists Revisited,” Liberal Education,70 (1984),77-81.
The argument I have been making here implies, in short, that students and teachers of literature and writing must begin to develop awareness and skill that may seem foreign and irrelevant to our profession at the present time. Organizing collaborative learning effectively requires doing more than throwing students together with their peers with little or no guidance or preparation. To do that is merely to perpetuate, perhaps even aggravate, the many possible negative efforts of peer group influence: conformity, anti-intellectualism,intimidation, and leveling-down of quality. To avoid these pitfalls and to marshal the powerful educational resource of peer group influence requires us to create and maintain a demanding academic environment that makes collaboration–social engagement in intellectual pursuits–a genuine part of students’ educational development. And that in turn requires quite new and perhaps more thorough analyses of the elements of our field than we have yet attempted.
Kenneth A. Bruffee is a professor of English at Brooklyn College and a member of the editorial board of Liberal Education. His first essay on collaborative learning appeared in College English in 1972; he has most recently published Elegaic Romance: Cultural Change and Loss of the Hero in Modern Fiction (Cornell University Press, 1983).
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I love the way it goes from thought to internalized conversation to community!
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