Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
278. concentrated "pajama-party meetings" allowed belenky and her collaborators "to sit down together and work around the clock for three or four days at a time. i can't tell you how important it is to have this kind of time for working, sleeping on your thoughts, and returning to the conversation"
279. MB "a word that seems better than collaboration is dialogue because it suggests that our so-called research subjects were real participants in the project. in a very real sense they were also, much of the time when we were writing, the audience"; "because [author rubin] had this pact to give them the work before publishing it, that she wrote to them in a way"; "as our book was written, we very much had in mind that it would be read by the people we had interviewed"
279-80. MB on method"we all got computerized early on, but we made a decision to send hard copy—and i think that's very important. i wouldn't want to send around disks and have people start changing the text. so we sent around drafts and we wrote all over them"
EAJ & DKT "so you deliberately set a limit on the collaboration, allowing for a writer's autonomy with hard copy representing personal ownership?"
MB "if you send your disk around and people start changing it, your words and theirs get merged too fast; you need some sort of a balance. writing collaboratively gets very confusing because, when you're really working together, when the dialogue really starts, ideas grown and change and no one has real ownership. yet you have to keep, or you ought to keep your own voice….because of the way my colleagues each wrote in the margin, i always knew their handwriting and so as i worked on redrafting i had their different voices to work with"
EAJ & DKT "when your voices ultimately merged, how much of a sense of individuality did you feel?"
MB "it wasn't always clear….[i liked] the closeness of having her words and my words all mingling right in there….i try to get students to cite a text and put that scholar's words and name next to their own words and name, and i try to help them understand that this is a way of making it clear that the two of them are talking together now"; "i don't think a single person can get the kind of clarity that comes through working together to pull away the chaff and let the bold ideas come forth"
281. MB "in the academy, collaborative work is demoted, but it should count double in faculty evaluations….the writers goad each other into endless revisions. for example, in our study there's hadly a page that wasn't rewritten fifteen or twenty times. no one working alone can do that kind of intensive revision….collaboration may only produce two-hundred or three-hundred pages of text, but perhaps they're more enduring….of course, most work that's published under a single author is collaborative as well. piaget's [work] was based on his wife's…dissertation"
282. MB "we pit students one against another; we teach competition; we create it; we take in students selected as gifted and we grade them on a normal curve. we assume, we predetermine, that some of them are going to flunk. why do we do that? we wouldn't have to spend any more energy teaching collaborative processes and creating forums to support them than we do creating and teaching competitive processes…. when we do make the educational environment more collaborative, i think we'll all be happier in schools—men as well as women."
283. MB "i think teachers should put the issue [of men's & women's different interactional styles—women's "interactional problems"] on the classroom agenda: comment on the power of interaction patterns, assign a student in each group to watch gender dynamics…and really talk about how disasterous it is to live in a culture that teaches men to speak and women to listen. both qualities should be joined in each person."
286. MB "received knowers often describe this kind of response…'oh, that's neat. what an interesting idea. you've helped me understand that'…as a turning point out of received knowledge for them; they discover that they, too, can be an authority who has ideas worthy of teaching to others"