Cinnabar and Alabaster

"ideology, society, university"
Sullivan, Patricia. "Revising the Myth of the Independent Scholar": 11-30.
13. "the notion of the independent scholar, which underlies graduate education...and its most important artifact, is largely a myth; indeed, it is a contradiction in terms....actual textual practices and the social contexts in which dissertations are written subvert the mythic representation of the scholar as an independent knower and author," and "we might more effectively create 'a climate conducive to creativity' in our graduate schools by acknowledging and implementing the collaborative nature of graduate students' research practices rather than suppressing evidence of their existence"
14. doctoral programs were designed on the german model to become research factories--and "the phd was conceived as a research degree, but the idea of research itself was intimately tied to method--specifically, the methods of positivist science.
15. "fields that could not demonstrate a sufficiently 'scientific' approach to the discovery and advancement of knowledge remained college subjects" (emph mine); "science was the paradigm for all fields of inquiry hoping to attain disciplinary status."
16. "by producing an original contribution to knowledge that was the product of individual labor, the graduate student, like his faculty advisor, distinguished himself from those peers whose future vocations in higher education would be confined to teaching"; transformation of work ethic as "the principles of American democracy" were "honed..into a meritocracy" wherein "an individual scholar's inventions and discoveries...formed the test and measure of the man: they attensted to his innate propensities for originality and creativity and counted, in professional forums, as the material signs of personal success."
17. yes, the "he" & "mankind" business is on purpose to make a point about history-writing.
24. in reality, "each element of" the diss--the lit review, the extensive works cited list, the names and signatures of advisors--"points to the author-researcher's inherent dependence on a cast of imagined or actual others"
25. (regarding that last) "the author of the text literally writes the text with others: Others are always present, their perceptions and judgments always at stake, always an influence"
27. re-telling the albert & mileva einstein story: "true genius lies not in the exceptional mind, but in the mind's unexceptional ability to connect with another."

Marilyn M. Cooper, Diana George, & Susan Sanders, "Collaboration for a Change: Collaborative Learning and Social Action": 31-46.
32. "collaborative learning stands, we could argue, at the center of the tension in this country between education as a controlling device and education as a liberating force"
36. "collaborative learning can be a threat to [the] structure of control in an elitist society when it presupposes an environment in which Others have a voice and in which the outcome is uncertain. when the very space of the classroom is taken over by noise and clusters of students all talking at the same time, individual voices are difficult to control, difficult to evaluate. and--even more threatening--in this situation, individuals may find their own problems reflected in the problems of all the others and may opt for group consciousness over the tyranny of a serialized existence"; besides "the myth of American individualism is the myth of the trailblazer, the pioneer....[and] lone pioneering is a ridiculous notion. the myth America clings to is that of daniel boone, davy crockett, kit carson, and all the other 'rugged individuals' of Westward Expansion; the reality is the wagon train."
37. "by arguing that collaboration is essentially a matter of imposing consensus...critics reveal their underlying assumption that any kind of education must be a controlling device, that students will automatically believe what their teachers say." but "collaborative learning does not have to be about conforming"--trimbur's "redefinition of consensus in relation to what he calls a rhetoric of dissensus" shows "collaboration as dialogue and difference" wherein differences are "identifi[ed]" and "locat[ed] in relation to each other."
38. "control in the name of individual freedom"--defending the "status quo, which 'allows' people to be individuals"; "in any social organization, the views of the dominant tend to be taken for granted as objective and neutral" (bartlett) & "calls for control of...'radical elements' that encourage diversity thus can masquerade as objective calls for freedom of expression"
40. (stevens, in answer to "west is the best" philosophies) "Americans of English descent had lived on this continent for eight generations before the revolution, and to think we didn't learn much from the land and the Indians is absurd"
41. "arguments about collaborative learning are not just arguments about what goes on in the classroom. they are arguments about how people might conduct themselves outside the classroom. if we, as scholars, constent ourselves with arguing over collaborative learning as if it were simply a classroom issue, then we miss the point. it is about how people live and function in a democratic society."
43. "just as we would replace the image of the lone frontiersman...we would replace the individual genius of franklin and jefferson with the combined efforts of people at barn raisings [and] quilting bees...in these sites we find a true vision of democracy at work, a vision that the myth of individualism tries to repress, for democracy, in the form of community action, is a radical force and poses a considerable threat to late capitalism....because they recognize the potential power of the group to challenge and change, those in control have historically attempted to keep individuals from forming groups that could threaten the status quo....given this history, it is not surprising that collaborative learning that liberates individuals by allowing them to once again form groups strikes fear into the hearts of traditional educators..."

Judith Entes, "The Right to Write a Co-Authored Manuscript": 47-60.
multiple authorship is a weird thing to try to study, b/c people list multiple names both in accordance with different & entirely unregulated methods and to imply wholly different relationships.

"the classroom: difference, conflict, contact"
Thia Wolf "Conflict as Opportunity in Collaborative Praxis": 91-110.
92. inherent tension in our classrooms "is composed of a series of social myths (such as education betters and enlightens the student, or the teacher is the only expert in the classroom) justaposed with a series of social realities (education indoctrinates students into acceptable social service, or the teacher has power in the classroom but everyone, including the students, has levels of expertise). the conversations that this tension invites offer the best possible focus for the collaborative classroom and lead directly to 'the language of possibility' that giroux...desires"

Thomas Fox, "Race and Gender in Collaborative Learning": 111-122.
112. also quoting trimbur: "[t]he conversation...is 'heteroglot,' a mosaic of vernaculars, the multi-accented idiomatic expression of race, class, and gender differences. the conversation gives voice to the conflicts inherent in an unequal social order and in the asymmetrical relations of power in everyday life"
120. because the gender/race/etc. power relations still exist, we should seriously consider "experiment[ing] with homogeneous grouping, that is, all-women groups, all African-American groups, all Chicano groups" because "homogeneous groups of marginalized students provide opportunities for the transforming of the personal into the social....perhaps, if we wish for politically oppressed students to assert their voices in academic contexts, we need to provide them contexts that are free from domination in order to develop collectively the strength of their voices"

Victor Villanueva, "On Writing Groups, Class, and Culture: Studying Oral and Literate Language Features in Writing":123-140.
study set out to see "how basic writers of color differed from traditional writers of color and from whites, relying more on oral language features in writing" <--a common charge to explain observed differences. what he found was
135. "the opposite": the traditional (of color and not) students' "sense of being essentially no different from others in the classroom's discourse community...made for a certain ease among the traditional, an ease that was evident in their abilities at exploiting the oral-like in arriving at the literate. the basic writers, on the other hand, were keenly aware of differences between themselves and the academic community....class was the overriding difference.... [and] the basic writers were at least implicitly aware of the discourse differences, denying their ways with oral discourse, attempting a somewhat foreign discourse pattern. the basic writers' problems were not rooted in an inordinate reliance on oral strategies; their problems came from their inordinate denial of the oral"
135-6. in the "traditional classroom...collaboration...tended to turn on matters of correctness, in terms of the expectations of the academic community"--new members are uniformly welcomed into conversations in the field, and "those with cultural differences quieted those differences" and "became subject to acculturative and assimilationist forces"; the basic writers, on the other hand "suggested utopian consensus in theor group interactions," which "recognizes the social and the political, yet counters individualism as an ideology" without "the individual, as a human, subjective being... be[ing] suppressed"
137. the basic writers "were not disposed to denying difference" the way the traditional writers were, although their over-attention to their percieved hierarchical differences between oral and written language tended to weaken their writing in areas bringing oral features in would have helped.
138. traditional writers were still better at talking about language, sentences, etc.; had more of an "intuited sense of the sounds of written discourse"

Sheila Kennedy, Richard Marback, and Ellen McManus, "A Melting Pot of Brains?: Metaphors for Collaboration and Diversity": 141-156.
158. metaphors for the university serving as metaphors for collaboration: student-group started with "melting pot" (of brains!) but discarded it, not liking how it utterly erased them; they ended up with "symphony: a metaphor that maintains the diversity and distinctness of the individual members emphasizing the necessity of personal contribution, while also highlighting the importance of cooperation and collaboration"; researchers writing about the students' work conceived of their own project as more of a "dialogue" wherein speakers took turns, influencing each other but maintaining separate voices. the article exemplifies how working within each metaphor creates different collaborative conditions/products, & concludes:
159. "each collaboration needs to find its own metaphors" based on the needs & practices of its participants & situation
164. "while individual, personal perspectives may be...crucial to the 'participatory ways of knowing' necessary to collaborative learning, the kinds of nonacademic writing that might serve as antidotes to the impersonality of academic writing--'autobiographical stories, moments, sketches'--are very difficult to use in collaborative writing....thus we can hear the voice of personal authority...falter as [students] try to adapt it to group writing."
165. "we should recognize...that there are legitimate possibilities for collaborative writing that fall short of...[the] utopian ideal of forging new genres to accomodate diversity in collaboration. there are different kinds of collaboration that suit different perposes, and we should judge [each] according to [each]. if the purpose...of the colaboration is...to acknowledge and celebrate diversity, then perhaps we should not also expect the synthesizing thought that we look for in academic inquiry and argument. if, on the other hand, the purpose of the collaboration requires consensus, we should not expect diversity of perspective, individuality of style, or even, perhaps, complexity of ideas."

David Bleich, "Extended Collaboration": 179-198.
195. his use of extended collaboration in his classrooms--groups that stay together all semester--suggests that it "can change the traditional social relations of the classroom"; "only a long relationship among students and the extended collaboration that follows from it can actually disclose salient underlying differences of culture and gender" that students, stuck in groups, then have to work through and come to see "as an issue of language use and writing."

Sally Barr Reagan, "Collaborative Learning in the Graduate Classroom": 197-212.
207. evokes rosenblatt's transactional reading theory & nancy shanklin who "defines transaction as 'a mutual dependency network'" wherein "a change in one element can affect changes in others" to show that "during collaborative learning, these transactions are magnified and multiplied. they take place not only between reader and text and between reading and writing, but also between reader and writer" in both text and conversation.

Melanie Sperling, "Speaking of Writing: When Teaching and Student Collaborate": 227-46.
234. her example of the dominating teacher as still a collaborative force (working w/6th graders): "Mr. Peterson's active and, indeed, dominating reading and interpretation of Barb's text in a one-on-one conversation encourages Barb to think over and modify her ideas, to shape them for further writing as she addresses and then helps to create the extended text that he assumes with his questions. [he] does much of the leg work--he is always in the lead, not only asking questions but pulling together generalities from Barb's text and from the information that she contributes during their conversation. yet...this work on [his] part is adaptable to his working with this reticent student and...gradually, Barb joins him in building on that information"

Mary Ann Latimer and Pamela Spoto, "Collaboration and World View" 265-82.
281. hidden, weird gender-issues these 2 collaborators don't elaborate on at all but just plug into their essay's conclusion: "we like spending time together--intellectual and personal. our academic and personal lives aren fuller and richer because of our collaboration--although Latimer's husband and Spoto's boyfriend might not agree."

Miller, Susan. "New Discourse City: An Alternative Model for Collaboration": 283-300.
283-4. "current standard" collaboration texts: bruffee's & trimbur's articles, ede & lunsford, gere, karen spear's sharing writing, & david bleich's subjective criticism and the double perspective.
289. reality check: "basic assumptions about the relative importance (to use ede/lunsford's term, 'hierarchy') of voices in the ongoing conversation ('dialogue'?) that professionals will actively overhear have not changed in the discipline that promotes collaborations, not when an actual economy of published writing was at stake"
294. idealistic notions of "community" that "existed in ancient and pre-modern versions of discourse education for elites, among privileged male upper-class students and citizens" aren't appropriate to today's realities in classrooms or disciplines: "new discourse city" is her proposition for a replacement metaphor
295-6. "English" is the only place in education where we both try to indoctrinate the youth & try to teach them to rebel against indoctrination, while asking them to take on our world views that we call social action but that doesn't "result in new political support for or opposition to roe v. wade. nor does it feed a hungry child."
297. the meat of the metaphor (using bender's terms): "in communities, 'people "remain essentially united in spite of all separating factors," [but] urban society is characterized by impersonal "secondary" relationships that are analytically distinct from the "primary" or face-to-face relationships of the small village, or the family'"
298. ideals of community "collapse[] differences that...are not 'conflict' but lack of understanding between people. because you do not see the world from my perspective, i am always an 'object' to you, even in 'public' spaces where we write collaboratively. no amount of mutuality, sympathy, or collaborative, 'dialogic' and dialectic interaction reduces this difference. but its limit does not make us each other's 'other.' we are not idolated and doomed...because we are not one"; miller's "freshman coauthors, despite our joint publication, did not identify with [her or her colleagues'] ideals; [her] graduate students did not identify with each other. instead, both insisted on the same urban experience of being included in the same space without being at all in the same 'space'."
299. "new discourse city" as a model "would celebrate four qualities of urban societies: it would allow for differentiation without exclusion; appreciate variety; encourage erotic attraction to novel, strange, and surprising encounters; and...value publicity in 'public spaces...where people stand and sit together, interact and mingle, or simply witness one another, without becoming unified in a community of "shared final ends"' (young, 240)"; recognizes that our participatory writing happens within "a 'society' that can never be [our] 'community'"