Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
426. a funny thing about/revealed by comp's taxonomies: "the composition theorists and teachers most often identified with collaborative learning and peer response techniques--james moffett, donald murray, peter elbow, ken macrorie--are also usually identified with bizzell's 'inner-directed' group, berlin's 'expressionist' group, or lefevre's platonic group, which posits the uniqueness of individual imagination and sees writing as a means of expressing an autonomous inner self. ironically, then, the very scholars most often associated with collaborative learning hold implicitly to traditional concepts of autonomous individualism, authorship, and authority for texts."
427-8. elbow's "magic"; bruffee's collaborative learning as a way toward or step in a process of individual learning--students write alone & then revise alone after social-group response.
429. collaborative learning is not the same as collaborative writing: "collaborative learing theory has from its inception failed to challenge traditional concepts of radical individualism and ownership of ideas and has operated primarily in a traditional and largely hierarchical way. students in collaborative learning situations may work together on revising or on problem solving, but when they write, they typically continue to write alone, in settings structured and governed by a teacher/authority in whom final authority is vested. studies of collaborative writing,on the other hand, make such silent accomodations less easy to maintain and as a result offer the potential to challenge and hence resituate collaborative learning theories"
434. "in practice...collaborative writing often gives the authority and intellectual ownership to 'the boss' or the leader, without question, particularly in a rigidly hierarchical mode" although of course there are many cases, "particularly in those involving dialogic modes of collaboration, [wherein] the writers involved were aware of at least a working sense of shared authorship, shared authority, and shared intellectual property"
435. golden with potential: "we could argue [that] collaborative writing holds out the promise for a plurality of power and authority among teacher and students, what ohmann calls an 'opening up' of the classroom"; in reality the rigid semester/course system "represents students as isolated units, all of whom learn in similar ways and at similar speeds. the time necessary for group cohesion to occur, for the examination of group dynamics involving consensus and dissensus to take place, much less for consideration of the issue at stake in seemingly simple questions such as 'who is the author of this essay?' or 'who is responsible for these words?' is not easily found in such a system." classroom design, grading practices, & our emphasis on testing/measurement all also work against the reinvisioning a collaborative approach to writing instruction/writing would entail.
437. on plagiarism: it's "rhetorically situated" & what we teach them needs to acknowledge "that all writing is in an important sense collaborative and that 'common knowledge' varies from community to community and is collaboratively shared. from this perspective, attribution of sources becomes not a means of avoiding the heinous sin of plagiarism, but of building credibility or writerly ethos, of indicating to readers that the writer is a full collaborative participant in the scholarly conversation surrounding whatever topic is at hand"
438. big picture: a "pedagogy of collaboration...would advance efforts on a number of fronts to reconceive intellectual property and selfhood and to value these reconceived notions in a way that is commensurate with the idea of a postmodern democracy" (whatever that has to do with it)