Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
xii. "our students have expectations for their roles and for ours, just as we have expectations of them. insofar as everybody understands these expectations, it's a safe circle. to the extent that students' lives don't match those of one another or those of the teacher, or the myth of the student or the classroom activity, the classroom can't be safe. too many experiences and opinions and values get shut down or closed out. we lose these students, even if we're unaware of it. only when we acknowledge difference and use it can the classroom become what it needs to be, a place of trust where we can together cross from the safe circles of unquestioned assumptions into the wilderness of new ideas and divergent experience and opinion." (she's got great stories to tell here, truly she does, but i have a really hard time even in the face of them allowing "acknowledgment" to suffice as a recipe for trust. i'm not sure i'd believe anything as a recipe for trust, really. acknowledgment is necessary, certainly; we can get closer to trust with candor than without it, but "closer" might never be more than a matter of millimeters.)
2. attitude: students "don't relish [group work] particularly, because they don't believe that it matters particularly."
5. "the primary reason that group work so often fails when it's attempted is that the practice of using groups conflicts with theories about knowledge and achievement that teachers, students, and institutions hold on to, most often unconsciously. how can a student be simultaneously collaborative and competative with others? how can a teacher be at once the authority and the novice? how can achievement be evaluated in a context in which individual achievement counts for little?"
8. from noddings: "kids learn in communion. they listen to people who matter to them and to whom they matter. the patterns of ignorance we deplore today are signs that kids and adults are not talking to each other about everyday life and the cultural forms we once shared." --> "group work promotes precisely this kind of communion and caring when it's initiated and sustained in an organic, integral part of classroom learning...[it] makes students into active, engaged learners" who "begin their own process of conscientitizao" (friere's term = "critical consciousness")
23. putting noddings' ideas about care to work is crucial--if we can get students to care about each other and each others' work, they "would be unlikely to remember themselves as 'the only one who worked' in a group"
24-5. lunsford's claims that hepsie believes in:
1. "collaboration aids in problem finding as well as problem solving...
2. collaboration aids in learning abstractions...
3. collaboration aids in transfer and assimilation; it fosters interdisciplinary thinking
4. collaboration leads not only to sharper, more critical thinking, but deeper understanding of others...
5. collaboration leads to higher achievement in general
6. collaboration fosters excellence"
32. "i've often told students that one reason i like them to write for one another and to show one another their work is that they'll write and turn in things to me that they'd never give to someone they cared about, like their fellow students" (cute, but realistic? at large schools they start & mostly end, even with my insistence on name-games & quizzes, as strangers. why should/would they care what these strangers think? my opinion is at least connected to their grades; when they walk out the door i'm the only one who hangs over them like a spectre; the rest all disappear.)
43. typical gender-spreads: "single-sex male groups often have difficulty interacting....they complete assignments quickly, often superficially, and then lapse into silence or occasional commentary. in contrast, women who work together often seem to thrive in single-sex groups....they get enthusiastic, they solve problems together....when males and females are mixed, males are often the dominant voices, or the females in the group encourage them to be drawn into the conversation, sometimes to the detriment of other females....[in the example on the preceding pages] you can see the female striving to include the male in the task and the male allowing himself to be included" ("why are you being so nice to me?" "...because you're letting me.")
65. "underlying all these [demonstrated] problems with groups is a mistrust, sometimes a fear, of what might take place in a group where Authority, as it's defined in the teacher's role, is absent."
69. "one of the most important strengths of small-group work...lies in its ability to make a chorus heard in a classroom....however, the chorus is precisely the problem. teachers and students fear what will happen when the many rather than the one have a say, when there is no single voice to dominate or direct, when there are many directions and many paths and therefore potentially many outcomes to any activity. the fear is simply the fear of chaos."
72. reality is: "biases and prejudices about class background, ethnic characteristics, sex and gender roles, and race relations inevitably and unconsciously frame the conversation in the small group. and this means that women and minorities might not have any better chance at involvement and power than they have had traditionally in the world outside the classroom." but because groups are also places there "knowledge is made, not merely acquired," group work "values and nurtures something more than the 'normal discourse' of the academic environment, and so has the hope of valuing the contributions of those who have not had access to this discourse or who have resisted it."
79. just putting them together doesn't (no matter how much we might wish it would) "mean that understanding will occur, that transformation will occur, primarily the transformation of the more powerful group member"
83. the condensed version of the tips list: "1. the virtues of groups--compromise, turn taking, and connection--all practices associated with feminism and with feminine attributes--can work against the group as well as for it....in the name of compromise [the women in one group] remained silent; in the name of cohesiveness and connection, they followed the rules laid out by one [male] member....2. principles of equality must be established overtly in the group by its members and in classrooms by the teaching" (which might include repeated & significant intervening)....3. neither gender is aware to what extent their reactions and habits are govered by role-playing and falling into cultural expectations for their gender. they are often resistant to being made conscious of these factors outside themselves, preferring to label reactions according only to individual personality"
84. "learning to write and speak in a community is more than learning to participate in the conversation and practices the community has ratified....students who work together in groups work toward connecting themselves to one another through language and asserting their own language within the group and in the larger context of the class and the community of learners. but they can't perform this work if teachers fear the conflict that dissensus presents--the speech of dialect, the odd form, the stream-of-consciousness comment."
87. cautious teachers (typically) use group work "if there's time in an overcrowded class period, if there's dead space where students seem starved for talk with one another, or if the class is responsible enough to handle 'the freedom'....[it's] a reward for students who have already proved they are socialized into the normal discourse of the classroom well enough not to go too far outside its bounds once they talk together."
130. hepsie's maxims:
1. "make group work organic
2. teach people how to work in a group
3. make membership in a group permanent
4. make the group's work real"
137. alongside the more traditional roles of "president" & "recorder" she adds "the reflector" to all groups, defined as "commentators and responders to whatever the group engages in on any one day--the reflector's assigned task is to look back at the work and consider what's been accomplished and where the group needs to go."