Creating Student Experts for Collaborative Learning

As always, the readings were provocative and forced me to revisit my instruction, though this week I found myself mostly nodding in agreement. I was grateful to see Hartwell because I've long despised the notion of teaching grammar, and though I knew there was a theoretical foundation for my opposition, Hartwell spelled it out nicely. (In the interests of full disclosure, though, I should admit that I generally mark up at least one page of each student's assignment in the much-denigrated formalist approach, so while I hate teaching grammar, I also hate grammar errors.) What struck me most, though, was Bruffee's discussion of collaborative learning. I've long liked the idea of collaborative learning, and often try to add more of it to the class, but Bruffee's discussion of the socially-constructed nature of knowledge made me vow to be much more diligent. In particular I was struck by his idea that "reflective thought is public or social conversation internalized" (549). The old chestnut of instruction is that we are trying to teach critical thinking, but so often we (or at least I) imagine that such thinking can exist without the conversation--that students can think critically without having ever conversed critically. That said, I think one key component of such conversations is the notion that knowledge is not created by just any social interaction, but by communities of knowledgeable peers (per Kuhn). As such collaborative learning in the classroom needs not only to foster collaboration, but also to foster the students' sense that they are knowledgeable and worthy of critical participation in the conversation. I think this second point is why a lot of peer reviewing of student writing degenerates into either empty praise or minute discussions of misplaced commas. My most recent attempt at a solution is to work to change the concept of peer review utilizing a rhetorical approach. Instead of asking the students to act as writing experts, I would like them to act simply as an audience, and every rhetorical audience is automatically expert because moving the audience is the point of the rhetoric. Coupled with this might be a move to have the peer-review process take place over multiple drafts, with the first "drafts" being entirely oral. Students would simply make their case to their review group, and the group would respond, all in conversation. The major flaw in this approach is simply that students aren't idiots, and if I'm grading the paper then all the talk about their peer group being the audience is simply hot air, and they will know it. And that's a problem that still stumps me.

A Quick(?) Review

In light of the statement that we aren’t thinking deeply enough or sufficiently considering the readings, I thought I’d try to do a quick review of what we’ve covered and see if I can’t synthesize the major points. I’ll try to add a second post this week on the new readings.

1. FYC is largely accidental and as a consequence is poorly defined, both in methods and in goals.

• Parker calls it, and English departments in general, the accidental and undefined child of speech and linguistics. Horner discusses the religious and political forces driving this accidental birth, and raises the point that the discipline, such as it is, was designed for the upper class. Schank makes a similar point, suggesting universities are really in the business of training professors, and ultimately arguing that this focus on being “academic” is an impediment to the more fundamental goal of being well-educated.


• Brereton and Kitzhaber look more specifically at what departments are doing. Brereton examines three major departments and finds a largely ineffective (according to the depts’ own reports) mixture of literature, linguistics, rhetoric, and speech that varies substantially by school. Interestingly, most folks from these departments (100 years ago!) complained about the quality of student writing and lack of time for grading. Kitzhaber, in one of my favorite critiques, suggests that the three key problems with the discipline are (1) it lacks clear aims and so there is no sense of progression (this prefigures Hairston’s suggestions to some extent), (2) there is little confidence in the expertise of the instructors, and (3) the texts are less rigorous. In all key problems include the “cult of literature” largely driven by class elitism, the focus on teaching math/science in the post-Sputnik time (though I would point out that math teaching has been, if anything, even less effective than FYC), and confusion about whether FYC is the first step in a lit major or a service course.

2. One key instructional mistake is focusing on style (and an unreal style at that) and structure over content. Plus some hints of solutions.

• Macrorie, though included in the second week of readings, begins to point the way forward with his discussion of “Engfish”—the pretentious style into which students are forced. Real writing, he suggests, is about telling truths and writing freely. Essentially he seems to be adopting the romantic/expressive position, in large part as a rejection of the older formalist approach. Crowly makes a similar point, suggesting that the push toward prescriptive instruction has minimized or eliminated invention and artificially elevated style and arrangement. D’Angelo obliquely references a similar trend toward prescription with his (welcome) attack on teaching the “modes.”


• Finally, Shaughnessy takes on the most fundamentally prescriptive methods, teaching grammar, by pointing out that this approach actively undermines writing instruction by enhancing the obstacles that prevent students both from writing and from having anything to write about. However, she does not suggest simply ignoring errors, stating that they “are unintentional and unprofitable intrusions upon the consciousness of the reader,” adding that “errors carry messages which writers can’t afford to send” (395). Instead, she argues that errors are more symptomatic than problematic, arising from the underlying logic of the writer and thus offering the opportunity for instruction. As such, she seems to reject both the formalist and the expressive approaches, leaning toward a rhetorical (and perhaps cognitive) approach instead.

So, to sum up, despite addressing a fundamentally different group of students than a century ago, FYC is clinging to methods that are not only ineffective, but destructive. In particular, the readings suggest the current traditional/formalist approach is the wrong way to teach, and instead we should move toward the cognitive and rhetorical models. They also suggest we need to settle, once and for all (or at least for a while) what FYC is actually trying to achieve.