Some Difficulties with Collaborative Learning.

Abstract

Theories of and writing are finally gaining recognition. Sessions at the Conference on College Composition and Communication convention devoted to the research and practice of collabo rative methods jumped from six in 1987 to eleven in 1988 to twenty-two in 1989. Articles on the subject are appearing in all the major journals with an interest in composition, including College English, the Journal of Advanced Composition,Research in the Teaching of English, m&Rhetoric Review. The field even recognizes a list of semicanonical texts: Edwin Mason's Collabo rative Learning, M.L.J. Abercrombie's The Anatomy of Judgment, John Dewey's Experience and Education, and Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Also, proponents of often cite Kenneth Bruffee's groundbreaking articles, * 'Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind' and Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge: A Bibliographical Essay. Perhaps, then, we should stop and critically survey this phenomenon, if for no other reason than that the term collaborative learning applies to such a wide range of pedagogical theories and methods. The support for such theories and methods depends on a truly eclectic body of theory, presupposition, and evidence, much of it not directly related to composition at all. In this essay, I will examine some of the major theories that support in composition, especially the assumptions, evidence, and relationships between theory and practice. I am less interested in the theories themselves, which have received comment elsewhere, than I am in the pedagogical application of the theories.1 The problem begins with what we mean by collaborative learning. The term applies to any pedagogical theory or method that advocates or involves using groups, everything from free group discussions to teach close observation to adults to highly structured systems for organizing lower elementary classrooms into teams of students who have their progress regularly charted in order to earn rewards for their achievements. In composition, the most common forms of are peer response groups and peer tutoring, although various kinds of group projects using teams of researchers, drafters, and editors are also used. I often find it difficult to sort out the claims of theorists so as to discover just

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.