Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
602. the good side: collaborative learning "organizes students...to engage in a process of intellectual negotiation and collective decision-making" with the goal of "reach[ing] consensus through an expanding conversation"; for bruffee "the language used to reach consensus acquires greater authority as it acquires greater social weight: the knowledge students put into words counts for more as they test it out" against one another. the critique (p.1) "the use of consensus in collaborative learning is an inherently dangerous and potentially totalitarian practice that stifles individual voice and creativity, suppresses differences, and enforces conformity;
603. (p.2) "bruffee's social constructionist pedagogy runs the risk of limiting its focus to the internal workings of discourse communities and of overlooking the wider social forces that structure the production of knowledge"--"in an unequal, exclusionary social order...embedded in hierarchical relations of power," by which means "unwittingly or not," it may "accommodate its practices to the authority of knowledge it believes it is demystifying"
instead:

"consensus in some of its pedagogical uses may indeed be an accommodation to the workings of normal discourse and function thereby as a component to promote conformity and improve the performance of the system," but "consensus need not inevitably result in accommodation"; it "can be a powerful instrument for students to generate differences, to identify the systems of authority that organize these differences, and to transform the relations of power that determine who may speak and what counts as a meaningful statement

(i.e. who can change the matrix) plus, "if the fear of conformity is a legitimate one, it is not for the reasons...bruffee's critics give[]. their effort to save the individual from the group is based on an unhelpful and unnecessary polarization of the individual and society"
604. rather "consensus represents the potentiality of social agency inherent in group life--the capacity for self-organization, cooperation, shared decision-making, and common action"; "the goal of reaching consensus gives the members of a group a stake in collective projects"; also "pragmatists see no reason to rescue the individual from 'normative communities' because in effect there is nowhere else the individual can be: consciousness is the extension of social experience inward." the thing to fear is the "teacher-centered and authoritarian...fear of 'group-think'": "it prevents a class of students from transforming themselves from an aggregate of individuals into a participatory learning community" & "locks [students] into a one-to-one relation to the teacher, the repository of effective authority in the classroom, and cuts them off from the possibilities of jointly empowering activities carried out in the society of peers" --> and "the issue" of "the left-wing critique...is not the status of the individual but the status of exchange among individuals"
605. "how we teach, bruffee suggests, is what we teach"; "the term conversation has become a social constructionist code word to talk about knowledge and teaching and learning as social--not cognitive--acts": "learning" in rorty's words "is a shift in a person's relations with others, not a shift inside the person that now suits him to enter new relationships"; his "notion of conversation describes a discourse that has no beginning or end, but no crisis or contradiction, either"
607. rorty also "acknowledges...the tendancy of discourse to normalize itself and to block the flow of conversation by posing as a 'canonical vocabulary'" but he doesn't follow this far enough; what he defines as "abnormal discourse" is "the activity par excellence not of the group but of the individual--the genius, the rebel, the fool"
608. he doesn't carry out the disruption he hints at, trading in "civility, the agreement to keep on talking" & "the 'power of strangeness' in abnormal discourse...simply reaffirms our solidarity with the conversation," which is why trimbur wants to "look[] at consensus in terms of conflict rather than agreement"--and at abnormal discourse as "the result...of the set of power relations that organizes normal discourse: the acts of permission and prohibition, of incorporation and exclusion that institute the structure and practices of discourse communities" & as "dissensus...marginalized voices, the resistance and contestation both within and outside the conversation, what roland barthes calls aratic discourse--the discourses out of power"
610. civility and consensus are worth saving, but "to do this we will need to rehabilitate the notion of consensus by redefining it in relation to a rhetoric of dissensus" such that "collaborative learning" is also "a process of identifying differences and locating those differences in relation to each other" in which "the consensus that we ask students to each...will be based not so much on collective agreements as on collective explanations of how people differ, where their differences come from, and whether they can live and work together with these differences"
611. institutionally "we must acknowledge that one of the functions of the pforessions and the modern university has been to specialize and to remove knowledge from public discourse and decision-making, to reduce it to a matter of expertise and tecnique": "the prevailing configuration of knowledge and its institutions prevents the formation of consensus by shrinking the public sphere and excluding the majority of the population from the conversation"
613. this "utopian view of consensus...would abandon this expert-novice model of teaching and learning. instead consensus would provide students with a critical measure to identify the relations of power in the formation of expert judgment"; "collaborative learning...seeks to locate authority in neither the text nor the reader but in what stanley fish calls interpretive communities" that examine difference productively & create learning by virtue of their examination.
614. the paradox: "the revised notion of consensus i am proposing here depends paradoxically on its deferral, not its realization. i am less interested in students achieving consensus (although of course this happens at times) as in their using consensus as a critical instrument to open gaps in the conversation through which differences may emerge"
615. dreamy picture painted: "consensus offers a way to orchestrate dissensus and to turn the conversation in the collaborative classroom into a heterotopia of voices--a heterogeneity without hierarchy."