Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
277. it is important to remember that "terms like conversation, collaboration, and community are hardly value-free"--"community," for instance, is never presented with an opposite that's also-positive, & it's easy to get sucked in to believing it's an uncomplicated good, but "despite teachers' intentions, collaborative learning practices can enable teachers merely to embody their authority 'in the more effective guise of classroom consensus,' which, according to myers, can have 'a power over individual students that a teacher cannot have' (159)."
278. "collaborative learning theories implicitly if reluctantly contribute to an autonomous model of literacy, one that assumes that the classroom can function as a neutral site of learning, a magic epistemological circle of chalk dust separating students and teachers from the world at large"; thus "it is not enough...that collaborative learning developed in response to the cultural, political, and ideological needs of real students and teachers in real colleges and universities. theorists who have thus far emphasized epistemological issues must now explore culture, politics, and ideology in equally critical ways," & their suggestion for a key way = "the concept of resistance," which "enters into our dicussion of collaborative learning in two ways: as a mode of opposition to ideology and as a mode of learning."
279. in althusser's "bleak" conception, "the dominant state ideology uses schools (ideological state apparatuses) not only to reproduce social conditions but also to construct students as subjects of ideology" whose "resistance is futile" because "resistance itself is complicit in producing inequality" & in which system "collaborative learning...is inevitably a poor trick played on students by well-meaning teachers"; resistance theory (aronowitz and giroux) holds that "since literacy is in culture--and thus not homogeneous but multiple, heterogeneous, and contested--the reproduction of ideology through schooling cannot be...seamless" and the "opposition" that is always part of students' responses to schooling is "part of the sociology of learning" and "provides the opportunity for students to act as agents--to rewrite the ideologically, culturally, and politically embedded narratives of their lives."
284. the challenge, then, is for collaborative learning theorists to refuse to "oversimply their experiences" & instead pay attention to "the significance of resistance," which "is not simply oppositional. resistance opens up possibilities for learning for teachers and theorists, as well as students. resistance threatens education itself because it crosses the borders between the classroom and the world, but the threat is also the promise. what happens in a writing classroom can make differences that matter in students' lives....the mutual interrogation of ideas does not inevitably lead to critical dominance and repression. instead, resistance can catalyze a fruitful complication and a more rewarding, enabling understanding."