Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
23. "collective assignments" are those that "demand that students function together as a unit in the creation of a single product and in the group experience, an experience that includes both individual effort and collective nurturance for that effort"; both collaboration & competition are involved in our school ideals & so in the assignments we give.
24. Bruffee idealizes collaborative learning as if it could occlude competition, but it can't <--authors have chosen this dichotomy as the focus of their look at the ethical complexity inherent in collab. writ.; in science (Popper, Pareek), "friendly-hostile cooperation" and "free criticism" are norms of collaborative engagement--it's a different pic. from Bruffee's.
25. "collaboration requires certain political and moral virtues that are defined by the community. collaborators must be willing to challenge one another, to debate, to conform to the standards of their disciplines, and to demand conformity from others"; "clearly, the goal of providing a competitive evaluation may conflict with the goal of providing a supportive group experience": the group (1) "must produce the best possible product" but/and (2) "may be implicitly or explicitly expected to nurture all the members of the group and to produce...the best possible learning experience"
26. conflict arises when members choose not to participate, etc.; assessment raises addn'l "ethical dilemmas"--when they report on & help evaluate each others' contributions, roles get ambiguous: "is the student a collaborator, leader and participant; or a co-teacher; or an informer? at its worst, collaboration can become precisely what it was in world war ii: working for the enemy"
27. questions about collaboration: "who wields the power, to what end the collective works, and how people are respected or abused in pursuit of that end"
28. bottom line: "classroom orientation to a collective activity needs to introduce the ethical--and the political--dimensions of the task"
31. the struggle must be shared: "student collaborators must learn to express their concerns in public, even when it is difficult"
32. "classroom collaboration is complex, perhaps more complex than collaboration in industry....[&] despite the many benefits that collective assignments may offer, we must be aware that our methods exist in a political and ethical environment that cannot be avoided"