Posted by Glenn Jackson at Wednesday, November 2, 2011 7:05:57 PM EDT
Regarding Ede, Lisa and Andrea A. Lunsford. “Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship.” PMLA 116.2 (Mar 2001) 354-369.
and
Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind.’” College English 46.7 (Nov 1984) 635-52.
Ede and Lunsford cite Barthes' "The Death of the Author" as a pivotal moment in writing history. I certainly think that we have experienced the rebirth of the author, after Barthes, after postmodernism, and as one of the culminating features of the personal narrative essays, calls to action, and speech format. In visual essays, it’s more difficult to say that the author is alive. Not that one cannot write a personal visual essay, but it generally increases the distance between author/speech and author/text. Ede and Lunsford quote Joseph Harris regarding the professional life for which professors prepare students, noting their roles as “subaltern dissident and intellectual entrepreneur” (356). These joint positions both as subjugated beings and as upwardly mobile academics constitute an ambivalence in writing, and that tension strung out between the two roles keeps writing assignments challenging.
This piece asserts that the institution takes the ideologies of the individual author and the audience for granted, and I would like to know how it does that. It has not been my experience, except where a general lack of time and interest prevents a body of readers, including instructors, from dedicating the necessary time to each student.
We have to socialize the author as producing, according to Ede and Lunsford. I keep hearing people say that people are standing at a crossroads, one where we need to at least re-engineer, and maybe figure out creatively, who we are and what we do. It is the repetition of this assertion that makes it matter, because standing alone it reads as a platitude or a pep talk. What is different today, I wonder, that gives this mantra currency. Why are we at a crossroads, and why do we need to be more creative than pragmatic? Regarding the position of our economy and our national politics, I would like to think that we could be creative and earn a chance to get out of our mess—but is “creative engineering” not at all to blame for the creation of our predicament? As Berlin pointed out in the beginning of the semester, we have based our university system after the German model. The resulting hyper-specification, along with growing college attendance, interferes with the direct interaction of disciplines. Public media has gained a more general appeal, lost some of its flair for propaganda, yet seems less likely than ever to make a difference in public opinion or national action.
According to Bruffee, we assume that thought is somehow a given, but instead language is created by social interaction (639). To write by oneself requires talking to oneself, he says, and talking to oneself requires discussion with others. Bruffee mentions that tutors can be personally disinterested. How can they remain organized, engaged, and collaborative while maintaining not just objectivity but also personal disinterest? If the tutors are to bring culture and sensitivity about culture to their work, how can personal disinterest be a virtue?
In this essay, the idea of “normal discourse” sounds rich and loaded—research in the years since its publication in 1984 have made composition teachers resistant to the form of straight or normal discourse. Our discussion in class over the features of academic writing speaks to this point: academic writing can be normalized, but it is hardly normal. From a social viewpoint, it might not be discourse, either.
Bruffee’s criteria for his own writing address those characteristics, and I want to reproduce them in list form here. These are the standards he says he readers will use as well. He says, “I judge my essay finished when I think it conforms to that set of conventions and values” (643):
What counts as a relevant contribution;
What counts as a question;
What counts as having 1) a good argument for that answer or
2) a good criticism of it.
Bruffee makes some rough (though maybe well-founded) accusations about teachers who lead discussions so actively that the discussions turn quickly back into lectures. I don’t think that the reason I talk too much when teaching is that I’m mistrust collaborative learning (645). My training, all after the year 2000, did not teach a distrust of “collaboration and community activity” (645). I feel I ending up leading the discussion by the nose, rather than leading it gently as a moderator, and when it happens, I worry that I am using that worst of teacher tricks: asking a question so that students can fill the other half of my sentences, rather than their own ideas. I intervene because I’m interested in collaborative learning—and when it doesn’t seem to be working, I try to revise my questions, my answers, and recast others answers. When it doesn’t work, I use all of those revisions to change the format. If the result is just me talking, those intentions are moot.
and
Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind.’” College English 46.7 (Nov 1984) 635-52.
Ede and Lunsford cite Barthes' "The Death of the Author" as a pivotal moment in writing history. I certainly think that we have experienced the rebirth of the author, after Barthes, after postmodernism, and as one of the culminating features of the personal narrative essays, calls to action, and speech format. In visual essays, it’s more difficult to say that the author is alive. Not that one cannot write a personal visual essay, but it generally increases the distance between author/speech and author/text. Ede and Lunsford quote Joseph Harris regarding the professional life for which professors prepare students, noting their roles as “subaltern dissident and intellectual entrepreneur” (356). These joint positions both as subjugated beings and as upwardly mobile academics constitute an ambivalence in writing, and that tension strung out between the two roles keeps writing assignments challenging.
This piece asserts that the institution takes the ideologies of the individual author and the audience for granted, and I would like to know how it does that. It has not been my experience, except where a general lack of time and interest prevents a body of readers, including instructors, from dedicating the necessary time to each student.
We have to socialize the author as producing, according to Ede and Lunsford. I keep hearing people say that people are standing at a crossroads, one where we need to at least re-engineer, and maybe figure out creatively, who we are and what we do. It is the repetition of this assertion that makes it matter, because standing alone it reads as a platitude or a pep talk. What is different today, I wonder, that gives this mantra currency. Why are we at a crossroads, and why do we need to be more creative than pragmatic? Regarding the position of our economy and our national politics, I would like to think that we could be creative and earn a chance to get out of our mess—but is “creative engineering” not at all to blame for the creation of our predicament? As Berlin pointed out in the beginning of the semester, we have based our university system after the German model. The resulting hyper-specification, along with growing college attendance, interferes with the direct interaction of disciplines. Public media has gained a more general appeal, lost some of its flair for propaganda, yet seems less likely than ever to make a difference in public opinion or national action.
According to Bruffee, we assume that thought is somehow a given, but instead language is created by social interaction (639). To write by oneself requires talking to oneself, he says, and talking to oneself requires discussion with others. Bruffee mentions that tutors can be personally disinterested. How can they remain organized, engaged, and collaborative while maintaining not just objectivity but also personal disinterest? If the tutors are to bring culture and sensitivity about culture to their work, how can personal disinterest be a virtue?
In this essay, the idea of “normal discourse” sounds rich and loaded—research in the years since its publication in 1984 have made composition teachers resistant to the form of straight or normal discourse. Our discussion in class over the features of academic writing speaks to this point: academic writing can be normalized, but it is hardly normal. From a social viewpoint, it might not be discourse, either.
Bruffee’s criteria for his own writing address those characteristics, and I want to reproduce them in list form here. These are the standards he says he readers will use as well. He says, “I judge my essay finished when I think it conforms to that set of conventions and values” (643):
What counts as a relevant contribution;
What counts as a question;
What counts as having 1) a good argument for that answer or
2) a good criticism of it.
Bruffee makes some rough (though maybe well-founded) accusations about teachers who lead discussions so actively that the discussions turn quickly back into lectures. I don’t think that the reason I talk too much when teaching is that I’m mistrust collaborative learning (645). My training, all after the year 2000, did not teach a distrust of “collaboration and community activity” (645). I feel I ending up leading the discussion by the nose, rather than leading it gently as a moderator, and when it happens, I worry that I am using that worst of teacher tricks: asking a question so that students can fill the other half of my sentences, rather than their own ideas. I intervene because I’m interested in collaborative learning—and when it doesn’t seem to be working, I try to revise my questions, my answers, and recast others answers. When it doesn’t work, I use all of those revisions to change the format. If the result is just me talking, those intentions are moot.
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