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March 12, 2005
felt-top calvinball: house rules
for my project in 611 on collaborative writing, one of the things i'm reading is kenneth bruffee's 1984 "collaborative learning and the 'conversation of mankind,'" which i'll be summarizing elsewhere in a bit, but i'm not done with yet; i'm still extracting gems, & here's the current if-too-dark sparkle:
bruffee doesn't surprise me--i've had way too much education training not to have heard it a hundred times already--when he says "most of us [teaching in the humanities] believe that 'class discussion' is one of the most effective ways of teaching. the truth, however, is that despite this belief the person who does most of the discussing in most of our discussion classes is the teacher." what's so pivotal & immediately relevant to me about this, though, is the reasoning he gives & the things i hear it speaking to (all of these lines are in immediate succession, by the way):
on what's still too true about how we (& i'm shifting the "we" here to mean "grad students," because that's what he's talking about, even though he's looking at graduate education as a now-finished contributor to a current situation, and i'm still in a place to see it as an ongoing influence on both our now-and-future teaching and our now-and-future contributions to the field that we, ourselves, will be perpetuating) position ourselves and our work, no matter how much we might wish to believe otherwise (& work our assess off to make otherwise, or at the very least work in ways we honestly believe ought to make otherwise):
behind our enthusiasm for discussion lies a fundamental distrust of it. the graduate training most of us have enjoyed—or endured—has taught us...that collaboration and community activity is inappropriate and foreign to work in humanistic disciplines such as english. humanistic study, we have been led to believe, is a solitary life, and the vitality of the humanities lies in the talents and endeavors of each of us as individuals.
on how this positioning plays out too often in our face-to-face attempts to come together to talk about what we're reading & learning:
what we call discussion is more often than not an adversarial activity pitting individual against individual in an effort to assert what one literary critic has called "will to power over the text," if not over each other.
on networking & wovenness--in simplest form, what plays out on the pool-felt as a cooperation vs. competition-based approach to playing (with) the game:
if we look at what we do instead of what we say, we discover that we think of knowledge as something we acquire and wield as individuals relative to each other, not something we generate and maintain in company with and in dependency upon each other.
when j and i play pool, we start the game like everybody else does--taking turns, designating colors, following an agreed-on set of rules about what happens when somebody scratches--but it doesn't end that way. when somebody "wins" (assuming we've gotten that far without starting to replace off-shots with do-overs and the like already) either by virtue of a brilliant move (usually not me) or by default (much more often me) when someone else's brilliant move goes astray, we pick new rules & play on for as long as there are balls left on the table.
our surface-level justification for this is simple: we've payed to play with the toys; we may as well play with them for as long as the money down covers the activity. (and economics is definitely the easiest way to explain this to other people.) the underlying truth seems to take many more words, and be much more confusing to explain, although to my way of thinking it's simpler still: we play to play.
neither one of us has a thing to gain by winning; "winning" at pool, as far as i can tell, just means quitting while there's still something left to play with, some other physics-stunt to try, some playful backwards shot to laugh at trying to bend over the table for. competing--creating "winner" and "loser" categories--doesn't make either of us better at the physics, more likely to control the ball next time around, or better-pleased by the activity as a whole, whereas cooperating at the task--whether the task (and maybe here's where i'm such an oddball--for a lot of people i suppose winning is the task) is clearing the table, improving our hand-eye coordination, or amusing one another--makes all of these things far more likely to happen.
we play to play. we play to learn--but not to learn how to "win"--we play to learn how to play, to learn how to learn more from playing. and the best, most productive, most learning-centered conversations about rhetoric & composition that i'm involved in--the ones that happen almost exclusively after hours, over the back of the break-room couch, or across the table in chuck's, or trooping through the snow on my walks to school with ty, or in cordell's living room, or on IM at 1 in the morning--the ones that made me want to be in grad school in the first place, the ones that (sometimes are all that) make me want to stay--play just like those pool games.
Posted by ttobryan at March 12, 2005 12:22 PM
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Posted by: tyra at March 14, 2005 11:07 AM