Cinnabar and Alabaster

111. from spellmeyer: "the central mission of education should be reflexive: to help students 'in their particular struggles to decide who they have been and what they will become" (281); "collaborative inquiry affords one of the few opportunities for students in the academy to engage in an intellectual experience at what spellmeyer calls 'the deep level of life-world politics' (278). (note "collaborative inquiry" as opposed to "collaborative learning" or "collaborative writing")

"the paradox of collaboration is that through the process of interacting with others, individuals (re)discover their selves. as one of our students put it, 'collaboration involves the loss of individualism, but it results in the gain of the individual'"; "collaboration allows for a 'fusion of horizons' that results in an enlargement of one's perspective, what we call a more 'complicated understanding.' if collaboration is to provide a way for students to negotiate multiple (and often contradictory) positions, it must involve two recursive moves: a dialectical encounter with an 'other' (a person or idea) and a reflexive engagement with the self"; "while we are sensitive to the criticism that collaboration can result in 'groupthink' and can prevent people from discovering and using their individual strengths, we have more often seen collaborative inquiry serve as a catalyst for individual transformation"

112. "collaborative inquiry simply exposes and highlights the creative and ongoing dialectical tension that is always present between individuals and their worlds"; "philosopher iris young argues that the ideal of community…'presumes subjects who are present to themselves and presumes subjects can understand one another as they understand themselves' (2)"; "'practically speaking, such mutual understanding can be approximated only within a homogeneous group that defines itself by its common attributes' (13)"; as such "dialogic collaboration tended to favor those groups who were already united by virtue of shared beliefs or sociocultural backgrounds"
113. kenway & modra "observe that authentic dialogue is much harder to foster because it relies on assumptions of similarity and equality between participants that may or may not actually exist" and caution that "we can no longer act as if the conditions for community (reasonableness, trust, and shared understanding) are 'always present or always capable of achievement.' instead, they suggest that 'perhaps we sould do better to see dialogue as the goal of pedagogy, not the condition for it' (163)"—authors "go further" to "suggest that 'reflexive' dialogue—dialogue that may lead to the construction and examination of one's own position—should be the aim of a pedagogy intent on enlarging, complicating, or challenging students' experiences and belief systems." "dialogue" for them occurs "with each other, with 'experts'…and with themselves in their journals"; "instead of writing a single paper together, students produced three separate essays on their common topic and coauthored a forward which examined and attempted to account for the differences and similarities in their perspectives"
114. "when a person populates the ideas of others with his or her own 'life-world' experiences, bakhtin tells us that the 'externally authoritative' word becomes 'internally persuasive' and that individual becomes the 'author' of his or her own perspective"
115. "because the group has succeeded in locating a common ground, their differences will not appear as overwhelming later. if groups do not or cannot initially establish some basis for solidarity, through shared purpose or experience, collaboration becomes much harder; differences may become disruptive and can curtail rather than invite reflexive dialogue"; "collaborative inquiry suggests one way to mend…'the gap that divides the public from the private in our culture and our consciousness'…because it involves both a public encounter with an 'other' and a reflexive encounter with the 'self'"
116. benefits: "interviews promote the possibility of a true dialectic because people talk back and ask questions in ways that books can never do" & "in most cases, the journal serves as a resource for each student to negotiate the group's collective voyage. if their subject becomes too murky or if the intensity of the collaborative process threatens to consume them individually, they use their journals to renegotiate their equilibrium"
117. ici: "for groups that are relatively homogeneous, either in terms of members' ethnic and/or socioeconomic backgrounds or because of similar views on their chosen topic, consulting outside sources is essential for providing the critical distance needed to complicate their understanding of the issues they are investigating. when groups are composed of more diverse individuals, outside sources can often help the group see how their separate positions may also be connected within a larger theoretical framework. thus, in the same way that dialogue within the group leads to individual, reflexive encounters with the self, dialogue with people and ideas outside of the group can lead to group reflexivity"
118. "this project succeeds in pushing these students [in the more homogeneous group] further into 'the messy middle' of the learning process….[and leads] to both resistance and transformation as individuals and as a group"
119. the more heterogeneous group's "collaboration is more disruptive, less dialogic, but no less transformative"; "people only learn 'from those least like themselves' when they have the desire, the ability, and the opportunity to engage in dialogue and become self-reflexive. and even then, the kind of dialogic collaboration the first group experiences is not always possible"; "the memos the second group writes to each other will assist their efforts to communicate by creating a liminal space for them to voice what they are not able to say and to listen to what they cannot hear during their group meetings"
122-3. "from the start…the student's [sic] different and unequal knowledge positions affect the dynamics of the dialogue. in many ways, avery already owns the position the women are seeking to understand….his role in the group becomes one of shepherding the others, sometimes quite emphatically, toward a specific (politically correct) understanding of racism. he becomes a self-appointed devil's advocate within the group. however, this kind of strong, vigilant stance does not invite the kind of shared, open, exploratory inquiry that occurred" in the other group; "avery's knowledge and conviction arise out of an experiential authority these women simply do not have"; "'how many times do i have to tell you?'" he demands, frustrated; "and yet that's the point. avery can't tell them….words don't have a meaning until they are embodied in the life-text of a person"
124. for this group, "listening is not the unproblematic activity that the first group allowed us to assume and that this group may mistakenly believe"
125. the role of emotion: "avery responds to their appeals for civility by writing, 'it is a bourgeois, elitist, intellectualist attitude to think that discussion has to always be quiet, scholarly and rational'"; "in his memo, avery reminds the group that their topic is an 'extremely sensitive, controversial, incendiary issue' and it is only 'antural' that they will get 'angry or impassioned about certain points'"; "'when people get angry, they tend to be honest about their true feelings'"; "avery doesn't realize that many (white, middle class) women have been socialized to feel that anger is not natural or honest, that it is a personal indictment of them, and therefore, it is always to be avoided or prevented"
128. "the promise of collaboration, the creation of individuals with intellectuality and morally complex visions, leads yet to another paradox: the sometimes uncomfortable burden of enlightenment. through collaborative inquiry, previously invisible and unexamined beliefs and practices are exposed and held up for inspection"; "avery represents that part of us that is at once impassioned, articulate, politically aware and well-intentioned while at the same time, protective, unyielding and unsuspectingly dogmatic. like avery, we have earned our insights through hard experience, and it is easy for us to feel impatient with those who are not willing to convert. but we must remember that conversion is not the mission of a liberal education; understanding and self-transformation are"; "as spellmeyer notes, 'the gospel carried to the wilderness is neither welcome or useful there'"; "if we are to engage in authentic dialogue with our students and with each other, it must be a relexive dialogue, one that leads all of us to a more complicated understanding and to a way of knowing 'deeper than reason.'"