"Collaborative Pedagogies" Response

I believe in collaborative learning through group discussion and argument. I think that discussion is a great way to construct knowledge. In fact, we have been working with a “Book Club” teaching strategy in one of my education classes. The book clubs are small groups of students (4 – 6) that have chosen the same book (from a list of books) to read. While reading, the students keep journals (very free in form and length) in response to the reading and meet regularly to discuss the reading. These discussions have proven extremely well in their ability to involve many viewpoints and help the students make feats of association they may not have otherwise made without the input of other student readers.

I am also in agreement with the teacher as facilitator of knowledge rather than dictator, as again this has proven quite beneficial to student learning.

Where I feel Howard’s pedagogical ideas fall short are when they are applied to writing. For the “peer review” groups, in my own experience, I have never found them beneficial to me. Besides the obvious egocentric difficulty of having one’s work criticized by another, there is a greater issue at stake. With peer response, even though it brings “writers and readers closer together,” is that it brings writers and the wrong readers closer together. The peers in a class, most of the time, are not the targeted audience of the writer’s paper; therefore, they cannot offer truly fruitful feedback. Their feedback is that of the peer reader audience, not the targeted audience. The writer’s text may be completely inaccessible to the peer reader but completely right for the intended audience. The peer would likely respond negatively to the writer’s work and thus cause negative changes to be made.

For collaborative writing: Although Howard insists that diverse and minority input should and will be encouraged in collaborative writing, I fear that a real danger of social monolithing exists. When groups work together or discuss things with one another, they often come to a consensus—not on purpose, but nevertheless they do. Western culture resists dissent and heterogeneity within social groupings. And this is not necessarily a good thing—especially when the students consent to something that is wrong.

Howard says that the groups need to be readied to deflate the ego of other students and to be deflated. What if only one student in the group must suffer the deflating blow of having what she has written deleted from the final paper? This paper, as Howard argues, should come at the end of a course. This means that this student will not have the opportunity to redeem her ego. I think that such a shot to one’s ego could cause irreversible damage to one’s writing confidence.

One final note: writer/text collaboration just sounds like the old Greek mimetic pedagogies to me. Haven’t those been established as outdated?