Bruffee

Our process of brainstorming, preparing, writing, and evaluating the mid-terms was very collaborative--as are all our class activities this semester. In what ways does this collaboration facilitate learning?

◦ In other words, by what mechanisms does collaboration lead to learning?  

Collaboration leads to learning through participation conversation.  Bruffee refers to “normal discourse” as a conversation “within a community of knowledgeable peers.”  In our class, collaboration facilitates learning, as we work and share ideas within a community of people “who accept, and whose work is guided by, the same paradigms and the same code of values and assumptions” (p. 423). At the same time, we all bring different backgrounds to the conversation, and pool our resources, to “make accessible the normal discourse of the new community [we] hope to enter.”  

◦ How would you explain the collabortive learning process from a cognitive and/or social perspective?

From a social perspective, collaborative learning initiates the learner into the discourse community s/he wishes to enter.  Cognitively, this process relates to how we re-externalize internalized knowledge, or conversation.  

◦ How would you explain the collaborative learning terms of the debate about personal growth as writers (e.g. Elbow) vs. and/or academic discourse (e.g. Bartholomae)?  

This is a less teacher-centered approach to a Bartholomaen belief in academic discourse apprenticeship.  The more student-centered Elbowian ideas fit into this as well, due to the fact that students in an expressivist inspired course will likely work in peer editing groups, and collaborate by using their own writing as texts for a course.  If personal growth is the emphasis, perhaps students take a different, more lenient route toward joining a specific conversation, or maybe they are not required to join it at all.  

◦ In what ways are we "inventing grad school" (in the Bartholomae sense of "Inventing the University")?

By collaborating, we are negotiating our way into new knowledge communities.  This is an active endeavor.  We stretch ourselves to use language which will be accepted by our knowlegable peers, and eventually by the “leaders” of the communities we wish to become part of.  

◦ And how is collaborative learning different from a Janet Emig "Writing as thinking" approach?  In other words,  would learning have been different if we just did lots of individual writing? How?

We are still participating in a conversation when we write individually, but maybe the cognitive and social processes are different than they would be in collaborative learning contexts.  I wonder if this has to do with the differences between generating written vs. spoken language, and how we write for ourselves as our own audience vs. how we write knowing that our peers are going to read our words...