When your collaborating with a professor about a paper idea and your in the process of exchanging ideas, is it easy to determine where the idea is coming from? When I need help with a paper, I like to go somewhere to get my brain juices flowing, an atmosphere that stimulates conversation and dialogue. This atmosphere consists of either two or more individuals and in the process, I find myself thinking, "that's an excellent idea to work with and it would definitely make a great thesis, was it mine, whose was it?" During this exchange, it is almost impossible to determine who comes up with with what, since it is the product of collborative dialogue or thinking.
When it comes to collaborative pedagogy, I can see why the issue of plagiarism continues to be a drawback. Though the notion of author-centered writing is traditional and lacking, as Howard explains in her article, the need for self-accreditation is an tenet in writing valued by both teachers and students. As a writer, I would want to be given credit for my ideas and as a reader, I would appreciate and respect originality. For me, originality is not an outdated requirement in composition pedagogy but is a necessary tenet in the field.
According to Howard and Andrea Lunsford, traditional composition pedagogy is no longer applicable in the classroom. Because of a significant paradigm shift in western education and history, there has been a so called shift from an author-centered/objective mentality to a reader-centered/subjective one. The shift occurs in an epistemological sense too: we have moved from viewing reality and knowledge as something inherently created in nature and innately accessible by man, to the notion that knowledge is a product of particular social conditions, making it difficult, and even impossible to assess or obtain. In a way, the collaborative approach to writing is paradoxically an objective approach to understanding a subjective system. Anne Rugger Gere articulates, 'Knowledge conceived as socially constructed or generated validates the "learning" part of collaborative learning because it assumes that interactions of collaborations can lead to new knowledge or learning."
I have to admit this article is one of the few articles I've come across in our book that gives one concrete examples of the applications of its pedagogy. Howard outlines the benefits of small-group pedagogy, diminishing the role of an educator and enabling students to teach each other; however, in my experience, lectures focused exclusively on the small-group pedagogy approach can easily lose structure, particularly around college freshmen and high school seniors. Though they may begin discussing the given topic, the group tends to lose focus if opinions are merely floating across the room and there is no real debate, or if some of the students have not completed their assignments and take advantage of the freedom to discuss subtly related subjects to kill time.
What I found greatly beneficial to collaborative writing is the recommendation that peer responses be read out loud instead of silently. If they are read silently, students or writers perform as critics and automatically begin to edit the paper. If it is read out loud, students can take the role of a reader or audience and respond with forethought. Thus, writers can use these responses as constructive criticism and develop their work with an audience's point of view in mind. There is also a disadvantage to peer response work at the classroom level. If students are only given feedback from other students, they are limiting the exposure of their work to a particular audience. Most of the time, students have to be prepared to write material that will be reviewed by their superiors and not by their peers. The ultimate judgement is going to come from one's superiors or from a specific academic group.
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