"Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind" by Kenneth Bruffee

"Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind" by Kenneth Bruffee

Reading this article again, I am amazed at how much of his ideas I have absorbed into the fiber of my own belief about language, knowledge, and teaching. Part of my interest in reflection comes from his notions of reflective thought as internalized conversation. His ideas, I see, have been my entrance into postmodern views toward language—that thought and conversation are causally related, that to converse better is to learn to think better: "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" (400). Let me chart this process out:

Thought = social talk made internal

Writing = internal thought/social talk made external

Bakhtin and Foucault are the one who most closely say the same thing as Bruffee here, but they would include more than "talk" and include all language (spoken or written or seen). I love this quote in particular: "The way they talk with each other determines the way they will think and the way they will write" (400). Language shapes thought. How we frame reality by the language we use gives reality meaning. I think in terms of teaching that the two most important touch-points for our guidance as teachers of how our students talk to each other and us is in peer response and in writing reviews. I think it is important that we model and request that students talk about writing in certain ways using certain language.

Notion #2 that I am reminded about in this article is the idea of "normal discourse," that the foundation of being considered knowledgeable and worth listening to is that the writer has adopted certain codes, conventions, and baseline knowledge or literacies that are "normal" for that group. It is equivalent to a terministic screen (Burke), a way of looking and seeing the world that is linguistically, gesturally, and ethically subscribed. Of course, this community has different levels, and the sort of "community of knowledgeable peers" we seek to develop in our classes is many steps below the kind of entrance into normal discourse I am seeking to do in this doctorate. Yet, in act and effect (perhaps not in degree) they are the same and develop a kind of practical wisdom of communication that may carry over into other experiences with other normal discourses.

Notion #3: I have been deeply influenced by Bruffee's notion that "knowledge is a social artifact" (404). I think I have mouthed the words for years without really understanding them, but I am getting some glimpses what they truly mean since I have been in this program. These are the two key quotes for me:

"Knowledge is maintained and established by communities of knowledgeable peers. It is what we together agree it is, for the time being."

and

"We socially justify belief when we explain to others why one way of understanding how the world hands together seems to us preferable to other ways of understanding." (405)

I think about my main goal for this summer—try to understand how knowledge is made in composition, try to see how knowledge about reflection has been made via research, and inquire about how I might go about creating knowledge with my dissertation.

I think what Bruffee is saying, in other words, is that knowledge is rhetorically created! This perspective is the one that I wrote about early in the summer when Harris talked about how Britton was so successful with his theories about writing growth. North said essentially the same thing. What I am coming to see is that some of my premises of what I should be doing with this dissertation research are flawed. I have this idealized version of revealing observation, confirming objective truths about the world, that I can then SHOW everyone and presto—they will believe me. My essential model is a scientific one—find proof in nature for my theory and test it and show the results that confirm the theory. Maybe. Maybe that would work. BUT what am I really after? What can I actually do in my research? I'm after creating "socially justified belief" in whatever manner I can. It seems in this rhetorical endeavor that I need to present some grounds for my proposition/claim/theory. But what sorts of support will lead to this belief and must it be scientific proof? What are the strengths and limits of empirical evidence in the formation of knowledge as a social artifact? It seems clear that whatever I do I must engage in a level of social exchange to create this social artifact called negotiated meaning.

One last connection with Bruffee. I was just this morning summarizing a small study that Linda Flower did on reflection (recounted in chapter 9 of her book The Construction of Negotiated Meaning), and she hints that reflection is a pedagogical tool that can help students acquire better facility with what she calls "literate practice." What she means by "literate practice" is the complex literacy of academia—a particular "normal discourse." Bruffee has a strikingly similar claim to make about collaborative learning. He says, "[collaborative learning] 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" (410). I hear them saying essentially the same thing—that each one is a pedagogical tool, a classroom practice to use that will help students achieve this "knowledge," this capacity for action based upon knowledge. Ahhh! What happens when a class uses both of these teaching practices! Here, in theoretical terms, is expressed my goals in using peer response and writing reviews so much in my classroom.