Social writing for a social world

Rebecca Moore Howard offers Kenneth A. Bruffee’s three principles as the basis of collaborative pedagogy, but they stand here without qualification. If I were to disagree with his very first premise (“thought is internalized conversation”), which I am inclined to do in the absence of supporting evidence or argument, how can I approach this pedagogy?

To me, the value in collaborative pedagogy lies not in the fact that it is a more natural means of communication but that it can help students learn to communicate in a means that is advantageous in our social world, especially in the workplace. Howard invokes Lunsford’s recognition that employees are increasingly asked to perform collaborative tasks that involve groups working together at all levels to discover and resolve problems, and to report on findings. This type of collaboration can involve the first three categories that Howard presents in this article, learning, contribution to solo-authored texts, and writing, though I argue that writing in fact contains both of the others.

Because of the social stigma related to collaboration, it is easy to see why Howard chose to present these as separate categories. As she points out, “the very notion of collaboration contradicts a long cultural tradition that privileges the individual agent and especially the solitary author” (55). This value penetrates all levels of writing, down to the ideas that comprise it, thus it is difficult to get people to accept the idea of collaborative invention even while some of our most prized authors made active use of it.

While some of my most rewarding classroom experiences as a student have involved collaborative learning and contribution, I have never participated in collaborative writing and have a hard time imagining doing so. I see its possibility in my future professional career, and so would love the opportunity to try it in a classroom setting.

The last category seems to stand apart from the others. While Howard presents writer/text collaboration as something novel, it seems to me what every writer does. Our knowledge is comprised of the information that we take in, and so all that we have read becomes a stimulus for creation. While this type of collaboration in its strictest form may disregard idea ownership as we currently understand it, as a whole it differs very little from the student who writes an essay response to a piece of literature. I would be interested to hear about this area from my fellow students – how do you understand writer/text collaboration?