Benjamin Keating, doctoral candidate (University of Michigan’s Joint PhD Program in English and Education), works on the following within the field of rhetoric and composition: language diversity and translingualism, critical race/whiteness theory, disability studies, and qualitative methods in writing research.
[this is still a bit rough]
First I want to say thank you to Matthew and to the other panelists for the opportunity to discuss these urgent topics. Matthew posed the following question: “How can we use the tools of our trade—close reading, the poem, the novel, the essay—to teach citizenship in a digital age?”
In my time, I want to talk about one tool that we often use: collaborative learning, specifically peer review/response.
We know and hope that collaborative learning activities in the English classroom can empower students by decentering instructor authority, by helping students claim authority over the texts they produce, and by creating a peer-to-peer community that can support students as they learn to practice and critique academic genres.
Based on a semester-long ethnographic study of two first year writing classes (not my own), I will argue that collaborative learning can hurt as much as help students.
In my research I argue that a combination of ideologies around whiteness, standard language, race, gender, culture, and disability shaped peer review, mostly in ways that reproduced domination, discrimination, and fragmentation. (one example, if time?) Diss title: Ideologies of Language, Authority, and Disability in College Writing Peer Review
But if we want our students to learn to connect across difference or at least be able to recognize a democratic notion of citizenship, it seems that we need to do this hard group work.
But how? How can collaborative learning help redress the deepening chasms, ideological and cultural, that shape the discursive spaces of our classrooms as well as our national politics?
For the sake of this conversation, I want to make two concrete suggestions:
The first is teachers should not do collaborative learning or PR in their classrooms if they’re unwilling to spend the time to address questions of power and difference as well as questions about the connections between standard academic English and whiteness. Leaving these questions unaddressed will encourage students to re-create hierarchy based on social prestige or institutional norms while focusing on grammar, probably no matter what the teacher’s guidelines say. Students will dismiss each other’s feedback based on ideological differences or based on a deficit view of writing and literacy.
Second, students, like all of us, need a metalanguage, first to articulate their own social positionality. I use “discourse community” – students map their discourse communities, comparing with peers. From here, students are more willing to listen to each other in collaborative learning contexts. (indeed, learning to listen, like learning to read, is a skill that remains largely invisible, despite the work of Krista Ratcliffe on rhetorical listening).
They also need a metalanguage for negotiating in their groups to maintain their own authority and preserve space for their voices. Let me say a few more words about making space for student voices: in my study, I found that for many students, especially multilingual students and students who identified as disabled (these students are not the same), time was an issue in group work. It was an issue in terms of chronological time (how much time was allotted by the instructor), but it was also an issue in terms of kairotic time (the opportune time to say something so as to persuasive). This becomes a question of altering the flow of discussion to make space for students to speak at kairotic moments. Metalanguage about time itself is one way to address this.
In conclusion, if we don’t make space for voices that are marked in the English classroom as “non-standard,” “abnormal,” or otherwise “other,” I think collaborative learning can become yet another “filter bubble” or “you-loop,” confirming existing prejudices and insulating students from self-reflexivity. On the other hand, I think that when students learn to value their peers as collaborators, there is reason for cautious hope.
Text