Cinnabar and Alabaster

175. "collaboration among the students alone in necessary, but not enough to change the classroom from what it is now. the most intractable feature of the classroom structure is the unchanging authority of the teacher who assigns grades"--so doing away with grading (at least in so far as can be done with particular activities) enables genuine teacher-student collaboration that can't happen in any other ways. "cooperation is itself an ambiguous idea. many parents use the word to mean 'follow my instructions.' a child who does not follow instructions is 'not cooperating'."
180. workshops fostering sharing & creativity among faculty create a sense of membership & belonging between faculty members that can then be shared/recreated with students--"when the leadership begins to function collaboratively, it is no longer difficult to promote collaborative work in classrooms, nor for teachers and students to collaborate with one another. also important here is the purely local character of these changes. this community, working within its own constraints, found some ground for creating a collective identity"
182. "heath's studies propose...each use of language is anchored in a generic social act, and it is not a paradox to use a new form of social initiative to change, enhance, or understand an existing social situation. by understanding language in this thoroughly social sense, it no longer makes sense to approach it as if it were an abstract and infinitely variable code; it is considered instead as a feature of identifiable human interests....[and] it is not an academic matter to study language, but an ethical, social, and political project which requres active collaboration among individuals, communities, and classes"
183. writing, like talk in literacy classrooms, usually goes from teacher to student and from student to teacher; in jr. high students pass notes around that "are forms of writing, and they represent student interests...which have a legitimate place in the literacy classroom. they are spontaneous writing efforts and their value ought not be underestimated. why shouldn't writing efforts in university classrooms be directed toward other individuals in that class? why shouldn't texts be exchanged fluently, not just for 'peer evaluation' but for interest and reflection on what they say."
185. in a classroom where teachers and students all provide feedback on one anothers' work, "an important compensation for students' lack of experience...is their tendency to 'close ranks' and collaborate in the search for what the teacher is not aware of"
186. in the exchanges in this ideal class, "teachers and students are mutually implicated in one another's uses of langauge; the students' relationships with one another are more important than individual students' relationships with the teacher; collaborative group efforts among students and including the teacher are essential; individual histories of language-use strategies may be compiled to reveal present language-use strategies; literary experience and response statements are necessary to understand the stereoscopic experience and action of language;" and "all forms of language use in the classroom, including the oral and the informal, should be understood as potential contributions to the general project of simultaneously studying and cultivating literacy"
253. in bleich's dream world, "teachers and students should be considered members of the same class....instead of considering the classroom and the academy as two classes...all members of a classroom [are] members of a single class or genre, 'classroom members.' this conception of the classroom admits into it the reciprocity of pedagogical function--a reversible 'syntax' of mutual teaching....the reversals of subject and predicate refer to new social relations which can enable a new access to authority for all classroom members" (of course in real rooms this doesn't happen)
281. part of why we're not very good at teaching w/groups is that we don't know much about how groups function; all of our energy has been spent on studying individuals. we believe groups need leaders, but we don't know much about how the leadership in groups morphs with tasks & situational demands. groups of three are less "easy" than pairs but have an "essential political feature...--the presence of a majority and a minority." disputes between only two members "would have no social source for possible resolution, and it would be too easy for individual positions to become fixed in a stalemate"; a group of three "is a structure which, because of its own political character, makes it possible to introduce political considerations of a larger order. issues of genre, race, and class, for example, might not be confined to the subject matter of students' study of language, but might also find expression in the deliberations of the group itself"; it also "has a meaningful history in each person's childhood development" as "the basic idea of the group of three as two two-versus-one configurations develops: the child's relation to two parents"; "potentially, there are actually four modes of membership--two in which one is in the majority, one in which one is a minority, one in which there is consensus among all members"
283. "finally, the group of three is the smallest unit in which peer-group psychology can come into play. for many young people, the peer group is affirmative, a set of others who can be trusted more easily than parents, teachers, and other authority figures....a small group functions in part as a 'safe haven,' a place where one's doubts about authority can find a sympathetic response to begin with; perhaps an even more permanent set of views can be cultivated and nurtured with less compliance to the teacher than if one had these views by oneself. belonging to a group thus helps to validate differences between students and teachers and creates more authority for each class member to find common ground with teachers"
318. "in spite of his obviously generous intentions, the conversations bruffee has in mind seem to be between members of a privileged community--the teachers--and members of underprivileged communities--students. the social task of teachers is to 'convince' students to be less loyal to their own already established set of communities and, presumably, increase their loyalty to the teachers' communities"; "the basic idea of conversation seems to have been overridden by the presupposition that it is better to be in the teachers' community than in whatever community the students are already in....which leads to the second problem: the implied conception of what a community is impoverished" (i can't read that sentence. i keep trying. somebody here is impoverished.) & "finally, i'm not sure it does anyone any good to assume that students ought to be members of our community. even those who actually wish to become teachers will work in communities far different from ours and will have different purposes and be confronted by different problems"
321. tom fox's observation that ethnographers' intent being to "inscribe culture, not change it" is intrinsically erroneous: "consider the thought that one can write about something without actually changing it....both the researcher's joining of the new community and the writing about it, is already a change in that community relative to both the researcher's community and the one being studied."
322. "almost all...students assume traditional individualist values, namely, that they are in the literacy classroom to improve their individual skill, and that the unquestioned path to that end is to secure, in a one-to-one relationship with the teacher, either authorized approval or official instruction in a problem-solving way, to achieve the real ultimate end--a high grade."