Cinnabar and Alabaster

January 24, 2006

reality-check economics (collaborative writing 48.2/50)

Hurlbert, C. Mark. "The rhetoric of possessive individualism." 1988. ERIC Document Reproduction Service, ED 296 341

1 sentence summary: both the "process" and "product" approaches to teaching composition rely on constructions of students as individuals who will be rewarded individually for individually-created works in ways that promote an economy of reward and privilege that unrealistically represents the realities of our society's late capitalism.

passages
3. "according to c.b. macpherson, 'possessive individualism' is the seventeenth-centruy view that the right to possession is the keystone to human freedom. the individual is a free agent in the economic and political market place, able to enter into relations where he or she wills, capable of making his or her own decisions, sole authority for the exchange of goods that he or she produces. in this scheme, the individual possesses natural rights to liberty, privacy, self-development and self-reliance, as well as social and self-responsibility, because he or she possesses property and goods. to put this another way, just as possession is the soruce of privilege, privilege is the result of possession. failure to own is a mark of disgrace, of a lack of initiative, a reason for being powerless and subjugated." of course, the 17th-cent. is over: "in late-capitalist market places, individuals are not self-determined; they are controlled by capital relations to which most never gain access"; nonetheless "the theory of possessive individualism and the liberal democratic ideals it sanctions do not seem to be in danger of being reputed"
4. the terms of the product/process debate "have hindered useful, even necessary, discussion because, as any comprehensive survey of composition texts and theories will demosntrate, one person's product' approach to writing instruction is another person's 'process' approach";
5. even more important than their definitions & their differences are their similarities, esp. "their mutual reliance on the theory [of] possessive individualism": in the product approach, "students are conceived of as individual interpreters and creators of discourse" & "the relative success or failure of their writing is their affair. after all, they are the ones who must decide [to] apply themselves and 'fix' their errors for they are always obliged to 'own' the grades that they…'get.'" & "grades are more than mere statements of student performance, they are also harbingers of future economic success….and because ownership is linked to honor or disgrace in the ideology of possessive individualism, grades imply the extent to which students are deserving of the rights shared by all market-participating individuals. the fact is that grades are currently, however much educators profess otherwise, statements about the worth of individual students"
6. particularly in product classrooms, "grades…are based not on what students have written, but on a subjective assessment of how they have written it. this form of assessment…affronts a student's dignity as a maker of meaning because their relationship to the meaning that they make is undermined, resulting in alienation and statements like 'i can't write'"; process theories, alternately, "because they seek to authorize students to be writers…do much to restore the dignity of students by automatically inviting them to join as equal members, or at least pretending to do so, of the discourse community of the composition classroom"—yet still "with its entailed neo-kantian, romantic views of the individuality of writers, its conception of the solitary nature of the composing pfocess, and with its valorization of privacy and self-expression, the 'process' approach conceives, like the 'product' approach, though for different reasons, of students as individual creators of discourse" who "are responsible for the texts they make"
7-8. & the grades still arrive & mark students' worth. he doesn't advocate anarchy as a solution, "but we may still productively ask ourselves what sort of social order it is that we are seeking to advance," as currently "our curricula support the promise of upward mobility for possessive individualists at a time when economic realities suggest that upward mobility is a myth and possessive individualism is valid for early, not late, capitalistic societies": or, in other words, get real: "we are currently beginning to recognize how meaning is produced in social, rather than individual, processes, yet as they are currently constructed, our composition curricula seem to protect the individual right to possess meaning. this incongruity leads me to believe that without an understanding of how our rhetorics reflect economic ideologies, we may never know what we are helping our students to achieve"

Posted by ttobryan at 02:18 PM | Comments (0)

reality-check economics (collaborative writing 48.2/50)

Hurlbert, C. Mark. "The rhetoric of possessive individualism." 1988. ERIC Document Reproduction Service, ED 296 341

1 sentence summary: both the "process" and "product" approaches to teaching composition rely on constructions of students as individuals who will be rewarded individually for individually-created works in ways that promote an economy of reward and privilege that unrealistically represents the realities of our society's late capitalism.

passages
3. "according to c.b. macpherson, 'possessive individualism' is the seventeenth-centruy view that the right to possession is the keystone to human freedom. the individual is a free agent in the economic and political market place, able to enter into relations where he or she wills, capable of making his or her own decisions, sole authority for the exchange of goods that he or she produces. in this scheme, the individual possesses natural rights to liberty, privacy, self-development and self-reliance, as well as social and self-responsibility, because he or she possesses property and goods. to put this another way, just as possession is the soruce of privilege, privilege is the result of possession. failure to own is a mark of disgrace, of a lack of initiative, a reason for being powerless and subjugated." of course, the 17th-cent. is over: "in late-capitalist market places, individuals are not self-determined; they are controlled by capital relations to which most never gain access"; nonetheless "the theory of possessive individualism and the liberal democratic ideals it sanctions do not seem to be in danger of being reputed"
4. the terms of the product/process debate "have hindered useful, even necessary, discussion because, as any comprehensive survey of composition texts and theories will demosntrate, one person's product' approach to writing instruction is another person's 'process' approach";
5. even more important than their definitions & their differences are their similarities, esp. "their mutual reliance on the theory [of] possessive individualism": in the product approach, "students are conceived of as individual interpreters and creators of discourse" & "the relative success or failure of their writing is their affair. after all, they are the ones who must decide [to] apply themselves and 'fix' their errors for they are always obliged to 'own' the grades that they…'get.'" & "grades are more than mere statements of student performance, they are also harbingers of future economic success….and because ownership is linked to honor or disgrace in the ideology of possessive individualism, grades imply the extent to which students are deserving of the rights shared by all market-participating individuals. the fact is that grades are currently, however much educators profess otherwise, statements about the worth of individual students"
6. particularly in product classrooms, "grades…are based not on what students have written, but on a subjective assessment of how they have written it. this form of assessment…affronts a student's dignity as a maker of meaning because their relationship to the meaning that they make is undermined, resulting in alienation and statements like 'i can't write'"; process theories, alternately, "because they seek to authorize students to be writers…do much to restore the dignity of students by automatically inviting them to join as equal members, or at least pretending to do so, of the discourse community of the composition classroom"—yet still "with its entailed neo-kantian, romantic views of the individuality of writers, its conception of the solitary nature of the composing pfocess, and with its valorization of privacy and self-expression, the 'process' approach conceives, like the 'product' approach, though for different reasons, of students as individual creators of discourse" who "are responsible for the texts they make"
7-8. & the grades still arrive & mark students' worth. he doesn't advocate anarchy as a solution, "but we may still productively ask ourselves what sort of social order it is that we are seeking to advance," as currently "our curricula support the promise of upward mobility for possessive individualists at a time when economic realities suggest that upward mobility is a myth and possessive individualism is valid for early, not late, capitalistic societies": or, in other words, get real: "we are currently beginning to recognize how meaning is produced in social, rather than individual, processes, yet as they are currently constructed, our composition curricula seem to protect the individual right to possess meaning. this incongruity leads me to believe that without an understanding of how our rhetorics reflect economic ideologies, we may never know what we are helping our students to achieve"

Posted by ttobryan at 02:18 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2006

our background (collaborative writing 48.1/50)

Berlin, James. "Rhetoric and ideology in the writing class" College English 50.54(1988) 77-494.

1 sentence summary:rhetoric is inherently ideological; we've foregrounded different ideologies through our different approaches to teaching it.

passages:
478. "the rhetoric of cognitive psychology refuses the ideological question altogether, claiming for itself the transcendent neutrality of science"; by contrast "expressionistic rhetoric...has always openly admitted its ideological predilections" & "social-epistemic rhetoric is ...self-consciously aware of its ideological stand"
482-2. in cognitive rhetoric: "the real is the rational," "the world is correspondingly structured to foreground goals inherently worth pursuing--whether these are private or professional, in writing or in work," "the mind is happily structured to perceive these goals and, thanks to the proper cognitive development of the observer--usually an expert--to attain them"; of course, "some are better at using them than others. these individuals inevitably distinguish themselves, rise up the corporate ladder, and leave the less competent and less competetive behind."
484. & "certain structures of the material world, the mind, and language, and their correspondence with certain goals, problem-solving heuristics, and solutions in the economic, social, and political are regarded as inherent features of the universe, existing apart from human social intervention"--as "indisputable scientific facts"
485. expressivist rhetoric, on the other hand, believes in the "original language" of all writers' selves, which "can be studied by others to understand the self and can even awaken in readers the experience of their selves. authentic self-expression can thus lead to authentic self-experience for both the writer and the reader....whether the writer is creating poetry or writing a business report"; "from this perspective, power within society ought always to be vested in the individual."
487. "for expressionistic rhetoric, the correct response to the imposition of current economic, political, and social arrangements is thus resistance, but a resistance that is always construed in individual terms. collective retaliation poses as much of a threat to individual integrity as do the collective forces being resisted, and so is itself suspect. the only hope in a society working to destroy the uniqueness of the individual is for each of us to assert our individuality against the tyranny of the authoritarian corporation, state, and society" (& it doesn't really resist like it feigns to--"after all, this rhetoric can be used to reinforce the entrepreneurial virtues captialism most values: individualism, private initiative, the confidence for risk-taking, the right to be contentious with authority"
488-9. and third, currently, most relevantly, "for social-epistemic rhetoric, the real is located in a relationship that involves the dialectical interaction of the observer, the discourse community (social group) in which the observer is functioning, and the material conditions of existence," knowledge-making is an ongoing activity undertaken by "a transcendent self," & "the subject is itself a social construct that emerges through the linguistically-circumscribed interaction of the individual, the community, and the material world"

Posted by ttobryan at 08:16 PM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2006

letters from africa (collaborative writing 47/50)

Rouse, John, and Edward Katz. Unexpected Voices: Theory, Practice, and Identity in the Writing Classroom. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2003.

1 sentence summary: rouse's & katz's collection of letters documents a discussion of pedagogy & philosophy across international & cultural borders that draws attention to western assumptions about identity and individuality & their alien nature in other contexts.

passages
174. "sometimes i wonder just what moral issues might arise in the provocative class you talk about, where students are not being instructed, they're acting and reacting. or is it foolish to think that some sort of ethical awareness might arise there? among the africans there's often an ethical obligation given in their names, as i've said, so individuals are constantly reminded of what they owe the family or community. in fact, one of the african lecturers told me that when students here write 'personally,' they do not in fact tell about their individual selves so much as about the experiences of others like them in the community. they're more sociocentric than egocentric"
181. "to 'correct' the language [of a writer's narrative] would be to place both reader and writer at a considerable remove from events, as though the person speaking to us in the story were much older and looking back with a mind now educated. and yet, are there some changes in language that would improve the effectiveness of the story? these are interesting considerations, it seems to me, and taking them up with young people would get them to thinking about language in a more sophisticated way. they would be learning, for example, that there is a difference between the one who speaks on the page and the one who has written those words--words that may have once been spoken, many of them, when others were first told the story but now in writing have become a voice apart. and the writer is expected to be in control of that voice"
182. "now, even if they decide the language should remain entirely unchanged, they are evaluating it according to a different standard than that or their ordinary speech, a more formal or 'academic' standard. and they are internalizing that standard even as they decide against it. however, to internalize a different or 'higher' standard of language is to develop a feeling of dissatisfaction with one's present life situation (for a different standard of language implies a different standard for the way one is to live)."
184. "so we feel this pressure to do the safe academic thing, to teach various forms and terms--what your colleagues call the metalanguage of thesis, assumption, literal/figurative and the like--while saying in effect, this will all be useful to you later on....our work must have value in the moment if our young people are to be fully engaged with it, so we have very little talking to do and no promises to make. we work along with them, hoping to hear the unexpected voice. we are not going to hear it, however, so long as students think of themselves as lower, as those who only do as another directs. then our meeing is one-sided and alienates not only person from person but inner aspects of a single individual. the learner has no cause for drawing together various parts of the self, no particular expressive need....so let our meeting be a many-sided event, a meeting with individuals who make a difference for themselves through the decisions they make"
194. the value (& ubiquity) of narrative: "one story these young people are living is the adventure of their entrance into the symbolic system of the academic world and learning there the language of academic discourse....much academic writing is the recounting of history. or an academic article may introduce the work of some writer, then another who contradicts the first, and a drama of ideas is set in motion, often with anecdotal asides. in fact, much writing that is not ordinarily thought of as story has a narrative progression which provides a frame for the inclusion of facts, analysis, and commentary. academic discourse in general is a specialized kind of narrative"..."has anyone in composition studies noticed how important personal narrative has recently become in the social sciences? there has been a dispersal of authority, so to speak, and research reports often include the voices [of] their subjects, who become participants in the study rather than simply exhibits"

Posted by ttobryan at 09:45 PM | Comments (2)

boyz in the garret (collaborative writing 46/50)

Koestenbaum, Wayne. Double talk : the erotics of male literary collaboration. New York : Routledge, 1989.

1 sentence summary: the work of many historical male collaborative pairs involves an erotic element if not reveals more about the nature of their working & personal relationships--the interactions that made their writing possible--than would be understandable without this critical lens.

passages:
1. "certain readers doubtless believe that conceptions should spring from a single mind, and that collaborative works are promiscuous and unnatural. like bastards in king lear, these mongrel texts come from no centered position in a moral universe; they evoke uncertainty and condescension in a reader who demands to know at all moments a sentence's source"
2. "men who wrote a book together, it seemed, could not avoid an embarrassing transparency; i presumed that collaborative texts could not help spilling secrets that singly authored works had the composure to hide"; "a double signature confers enormous interpretive freedom: it permits the reader to see the act of collaboration shadowing every word in the text. collaborative works are intrinsically different than books written by one author alone; even if both names do not appear, or one writer eventually produces more material, the decision to collaborate determines the work's contours, and the way it can be read. books with two authors are specimens of a relation, and show writing to be a quality of motion and exchange, not a fixed thing. whether we call the will that produces a collaborative work inspiration, authority, or diligence, this 'will' is shared, sometimes miserably."
4. "double authorship...is not the only feature these disparate texts share. certain desires and dreads regularly follow in [its] wake"; the texts in this study reflect "not literary collaboration in general" but "a cohesive wave in literary and cultural history" mostly btw. 1885 & 1922.
5. "this system is, in essence, feminist: it questions heterosexuality's privilege and forces masculine writing to take seriously the threat of 'queerness.' deconstruction has taught us that any monolithic body of ideas and habits contains the very difference it condemns; within male texts of all varieties lurks a homosexual desire which, far from reinforcing patriarchy, undermines it, and offers a way out."
8-9. "double writing is both a dispersive and a retentive procedure..." but" i believe that double authorship attacks not primarily our dogmas of literary proerty, but of sexual propriety"; "i can describe collaboration as a disruptive act only if i retain a conservative allegiance to singular authority. however, i allow for meanings that authors might never have intended; a collaborative text exhibits (shameful) symptoms of double authorship, despite the men's desire to make the work seem the product of one mind."
139. by 1922, when the waste land had emerged, its double authorship concealed, male collaboration had already earned a reputation for perversity."
160. barrie's opinion occludes the possibility, in denial of the same key: "collaboration in fiction, indeed, is a mistake, for the reason that two men cannot combine so as to become one"
165. link btw. "group sex and group writing"

Posted by ttobryan at 08:52 PM | Comments (0)

(not really) zombies! (collaborative writing 45.3/50)

Peters, John Durham. "John Locke, the individual, and the origin of communication." Quarterly Journal of Speech. 75.4 (1989) 387-399.

1 sentence summary: our notion of the individual and the role of the individual in communicative interaction with other individuals (and/vs. with the larger social) is entirely locke's philosophical fault (but not the zombies).

passages:
387. "central to both the theories and practices of liberalism is the rift between individual and society" which "fundamental and rarely acknowledged division defines the conditions in which 'communication' can be imagined"; "for theorists, the problem of communication is how to reconcile individual creativity in meaning-making with the social and public nature of meaning's materials (culture and language)"; "communication appeals to us because of the way the concept seems to put humpty dumpty back together again"--it's "a description of the flowering of the private into the public, the overcoming of divisions of subject/object"
388. ..."the elusive betwixt-and-between quality" of which scholars dealing with have "usually retreated into a language of mystery and miracle" to discuss--dewey gives it "the job of mediating between matter and mind, nature and imagination"; according to moscovici "the individual is one of the most important inventions of modern times. individuality is a political, legal, religious, and scientific creation possible only in a constellation of specific social conditions. the individual becomes a sovereign lord over his or her own life only as the social fixation of status and station recedes."
389. "locke's individualism extends from his politics to his linguistics: for him the individual (and not society, language, or tradition) is the master of meaning, which makes common understanding between individuals both desperately urgent and highly problematic"; "central is his 'idea' idea. an idea, according to locke, is an 'immediate object of the Mind, which it perceives and has before it distinct from the sound it uses as a sign of it'"--he puts this term "to a bewildering variety of uses...but it is the basic unit of his [empiricist] epistemology": "all genuine knowledge can be ultimately traced to simple ideas that have passed into the mind through the inlets of the senses"
390. "real knowledge comes through 'complex ideas,' which people may create through a variety of mechnaistic operations....whereas the mind is passive in the reception of simple ideas, it is active in the making of complex ideas from simple ones." and language "is not a source of knowledge, a shaper of thinking, or a part of the very definition of human being. it is 'the great Instrument, and common Tye of Society" that god gave to humans, so that they could be sociable creatures (essay, III.i.1)"; "for language is ancillary to ideas, and when it intervenes in the flow of ideas, it causes amusement at best and chaos, strife, and confusion at worst"; "words do not point directly to things, or to the world, but to ideas in the minds of individual speakers and hearers."
391. "locke thus posits two parallel systems: ideas, which are the source of knowledge and yet are neither social nor linguistic, and words. words are subordinate to, and parasitical upon, ideas. the meaning of words comes, for locke, not from their interrelationships in a total system of signs (as for saussure), nor from their reference to objects in the world (as for augustine), but from their connection to ideas in people's minds....'meanings are in people.'" [this popular slogan & its concept] "could be called semiotic individualism." "in most seventeenth-century english, communication mainly referred to physical processes of transmission and metaphysical processes of consubstantiation: tangibles such as robes, fortunes, plants, commodities, as well as intangibles such as light, heat, blessings, praise, secrets, vices, thoughts, and ideas"
392. unrealistic much? locke's conception came with "a striking requirement indeed: people, in speaking, must match ideas 'exactly' or else their talk risks being mere noise and confusion....it is striking how locke expects communication to work given his commitment to the individual as the source of meaning" (& by "striking" here i think he means something more like "absurd"): "locke thus protects each individual from the tyranny of language: if another's words threaten to break through the hedge surrounding my mind, i can simply realign the 'ideas' to which those words are linked"
393. "if each individual is the legislator of signs, what is to keep society from becoming an anarchy of monads, with each person shut up in the solitude of his or her own ideas and experiences? or conversely, what is to protect individuals from being violated when the communication of ideas works too well?"; "scientific practice offered a model for the intersubjective merging of perceptions seemingly divorced from language and discourse. everybody could look through a telescope, say, and have the same 'idea' (percept)"; "locke's age saw science not only as the study of nature, but as a means to undo babel's curse"
394. i.e. science showed us God, characterized by nature's "order" and "beauty"; rhetoric, on the other hand, like metaphor, "may be employed when it is clear that amusement is the aim, but when 'we would speak of Things as they are, we must allow, that all the Art of Rhetorick...[is] for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment' (essay, III.ix.9)"; "locke understood communication not as a kind of speak, rhetoric, or discourse, but as an alternative to them"; both his "politics and his psychology...intertwine. both defend the individual as an owner of private property, whether it be the private property of consciousness ('ideas') or real property ('life, liberty, and estate')."
396. "if individuals do not control meaning, we fear, then tyranny is hovering nearby. heidegger's dictum that we do not speak language, language speaks us, for instance, is often misunderstood to mean that human beings are the involuntary zombies of language"; "the freedom of individuals may consist in their ability to compose new sentences, never before heard, that speak to their condition. it need not consist in the solipsistic reassembly of words and ideas. because we speak in the midst of language, act in the webs of history, society, and nature, and think in dialogue with the living and dead, does not mean that we cannot speak, act, or think creatively"
397. "it is incoherent to see the origins of public, intersubjective meaning in something that is not public (even though locke and his myriad disciples have taught us to do so)"; "communication sometimes masquerades as the great solution to human ills, and yet most of the problems that arise in human relationships do not come from a failure to match signs and meanings. in most cases, situation and syntax make the sense of words perfectly clear: the basis of conflict is not a failure of communication but a difference of commitment. we generally understand each other's words quite well: we just don't agree"; "to describe the social life of language as communication empowers the individual as lord of the signifier but makes any conception of public meaning both unintelligible and dangerous"; "we almost always find ourselves reenacting a philosophical and political drama first written by john locke."

Posted by ttobryan at 07:14 PM | Comments (0)

johnson in the author-cape (collaborative writing 45.2/50)

Woodmansee, Martha. "On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity." The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 15-28.

1 sentence summary: the authors of old didn't always think of their position & the work that distinguished it in ways our modern conceptions of authorship would lead us to expect; while we think of samuel johnson as an uncontested "author," his textual practices were often and in varied ways collaborative rather than solitary.

passages:
15. "will the author in the modern sense prove to have been only a brief episode in the history of writing? by 'author' we mean an individual who is the sole creator of unique 'works' the originality of which warrants their protection under laws of intellectual property....the author in this modern sense is a relatively recent invention, [one that] does not closely reflect contemporary writing practices. indeed, on inspection, it is not clear that this notion ever coincided closely with the practice of writing."
17. "for st. bonaventura, writing in the thirteenth century, there were four ways of making a book, and none of them involved the kind of solitary origination which edward young sought to promote:

a man might write the works of others, adding and changing nothing, in which case he is simply called a 'scribe' (scriptor). another writes the work of others with additions which are not his own; and he is called a 'compiler' (compilator). another writes both others' work and his own, but with others' work in principle place, adding his own for purposes of explanation; and he is called a 'commentator (commentator)....another writes both his own work and others' but with his own work in principle place adding others' for purposes of confirmation; and such a man should be called an 'author' (auctor).

but it is hardly necessary to go back to the middle ages to find so corporate a view of writing, for it was still shared by samuel johnson (1709-1784)."
23. "it is the chief object of modern textual scholarship to identify in all of this writing those words that originated uniquely with johnson so that they can be properly credited to him, and a definitive oeuvre can be established. i do not with to suggest that there is anything wrong with such activities, only that they presume a proprietary authorial impulse which johnson apparently did not himself feel."
24-5. "one comes away from [ede's and lunsford's] investigation of how people actually write in business, government, industry, the sciences and social sciences with the impression that there is but one last bastion of solitary origination: the arts and humanities." and so corrolarily "we are not preparing students for the real writing tasks that await them."
26-7. hypertexts & commonplace books: "the compiler of the renaissance commonplace book composed, transcribed, commented on, and reworked the writings of others--all in apparent indifference to the identity of their originators and without regard for ownership. this quintessentially renaissance form of reading and writing is rapidly being revived by our electronic technology"

Posted by ttobryan at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2006

diagnosis: postmodern condition (collaborative writing 45.1/50)

Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. "Beyond 'The Subject': Individuality in the Discursive Condition." New Literary History 31.3 (Summer 2000).

1 sentence summary: all hope for the "liberal values associated with individuality" is not lost; multiplicity doesn't eclipse uniqueness, because multiplicities exist in unique patterns, er, "anthemions."

passages
405. thanks to the overzealous revealing of the wizards behind all of the curtains, in "the postmodern condition" we're stuck with scary questions: "once the existence of the irreducible 'individual' is contested, what becomes of identity, autonomy, agency, moral freedom, and collective responsibility?" her answer: "a new kind of subjectivity which might refigure our sense of liberty"
406. to do this, the "first step is methodological"--we need to pay attention to literature, where the answer's been unfolding all along. "languages are out tools of thought, the essential precursors of practice. if, as saussure said a century ago, languages are above all systems, then literary texts are the most highly achieved specifications of those systems." ex: "henry james, the first author writing in english actually to situate subjectivity at the perilous margins where syntax fails"
407. chunks of his text show that character & plot don't cohere except in what the readers reconstruct; "the point is the way language operates, through uneasy referents and displaced concretia"; "whatever of importance is 'there' lies in the in-between"; & "keeping readers on that boundary...keeps alive the threat that inspires creative, liberating performances and that asserts the indisoluble bond between subjectivity and language"
408. "reconceiving subjectivity in the discursive condition involves important reconciderations of what language is and how it operates" & "the renunciation of any dualistic representations" such as it "must be either symbolic or semiotic"--"the potential for both/and is rendered tenuous by the dualistic formulation [of] such either/or[s]"; "the formulation suggests that language is a sealed system, a prison house, a sort of Truman Show of Discourse," which "obscure[s] the potentiality of language as a site of liberation from the restrictions that modernity imposed upon subjectivity": "in the discursive condition, subjectivity must be kinetic, not static; it must be multiplied, not single." "it is not necessary to conclude that we have left individuality behind," for 2 reasons: (1) "the cultural conditions of modernity remain broadly functional"--
409. --"very much part of the political and cultural practice of eurocentric societies" & (2) "because it remains applicable to more kinetic postmodern forms of subjectivity." "this emphasis upon a discursive condition has taught us to search for 'code' rather than for 'structure': a shift with substantial implications, not least for subjectivity....language as a system of differential relationships, and not a collaction of pointers."
410. "inhabiting a language means inhabiting a reality, and that so-called 'reality'...changes with the language"; "to reformulate 'the subject' as an element of such differential systems, that is, as a function of discourse, means to accept the multiplicity of what used to be called 'the subject'"; "saussure provided the clue to a new construction of subjectivity when he pointed the way toward langauge as a model of a new kind of system--a differential, not a referential one"; "this difference between the potential and the practice renders a linguistic system forever incomplete-able"
411. "the arena of subjectivity and freedom lies in this gap between the potential capacities of a differential code and any particular specification of it. this 'tender interval'" (to nick from nabokov) "between language (langue) and enunciation (parole) brings to subjectivity a set of conditions entirely different"; "the structure is always potential, never explicit" & "the explicit statement can push the limits of systemic potential without ever exhausting it." "as václav havel suggests...identity is kinetic; it is a process, an event, a particular expression of systemic value"; "identity in his terms definitely has nothing to do with reducing difference, as is the habit of identity-producing political regimes whether they are the 'retrograde' chauvinist regimes based on 'blood,' or the marxist and capitalist systems 'hypnotized' by economic indicators. rather, identity appears only in the act of specifying sets of rules. and as we operate simultaneously in several sets at once, identity appears as the series of constantly multiplied specifications of the potential provided by those rule regimens"; "we no longer have only a subject-in-process, or even a subjectivity-in-process, but something more like subjectivity-in-processes"--"'palimpsestuousness'" (--michael alexander)
412. "the unique and unrepeatable poetry of an individual life cannot at all be compassed by sociological generalizations, which confuse its crucial singularity and flatten its palimpsestuousness..... identity consists in the unique and unrepeatable sequence of a complex enunciation," & "this idea of a distributed subjectivity..allows for the actual complexity of conscious life more fully and precisely than the modern 'subject' ever did.... it seems particularly pointless, even wrong, to impose that monadic idea of 'the subject' upon a personal knowledge that is more random and radical than that traditional model allows"; "this postmodern subjectivity is the moving nexus or intersection at which a unique and unrepeatable sequence is constantly being specified from the potentials available in the discursive condition. such a subjectivity is individual in its sequence, not in its irreducible core. its uniqueness lies in its trajectory"; & "the volitility of language--its resonance, its power of poetic, associative linkage--provides precisely the varied opportunities for selective specification that constitute the unique and unrepeatable poetry of a life" (& all of this has consequences--for 1, it "radically alters our relationship to the past")
413. "given the discursive condition, we have the power to revise our acts of attention" & so history, since story is just what we choose to pay attention to--"there is no longer any possibility of realizing the neutral time of modernity" ("neutrality in time and space were possibly the most original and powerful creations of modernity; they were the necessary conditions of empiricism in science and philosophy, and of representation in politics and in art"
414. "any individual sequence of subjective specifications is palimpsestuous, involving not one but a plurality of possible specifications"; "the 'time' of history is really not possible to the extent that history is a collective event, an expression of faith in common grammars, especially a common time. discursive time is only as long as a given sequence, and those sequences are always finite. old style historical conventions of explanation, especially their causalities and their emergent forms, have little validity when they are restricted to this or that unique and unrepeatable life"
415. nabokov's "anthemion" & thus ermath's "anthematic recognition"--in his description the (made-up) term "indicates an interlaced, flower-like design where themes or patterns arrive and depart from various posting places, recurring and recrossing without exact repetition, and yet providing a kind of rhythmic iteration and patterning. between the iterations of a thematic sequence, as between the beats of a particular rhythm, lie tender intervals within which opportunity lies and the sum of which constitute memory."
418. "conscious life is reborn every three seconds, perhaps not much different from, but perhaps not quite the same as, before....this inflected sequence of anthematic recognition indicates the way experience retains value without lapsing into explanation. this is what replaces 'the subject' and its history."
419. "at the exact level of the moment we are well beyond the determinations of historical 'pluralism' and its singular subjects and projects, and well ahead in the reclamation of a discursive subjectivity"

Posted by ttobryan at 12:36 AM | Comments (0)

January 09, 2006

this isn't new, just maybe neologistic (collaborative writing 43.3/50)

Hirschfield, Heather. "Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship." PMLA 116.3 (May 2001): 609-622.

1 sentence summary writers in the early modern period participated in a variety of activities/processes we'd now identify as colloborative in a number of ways; across time, we've studied/talked about these in different ways relative to how the practices seemed to reflect then-current notions of authorship.

passages
610. scholarly history: "collaborative work, for a long time a critical and editorial embarrassment, was largely the domain of the new bibliographers, who focused, beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, on deciphering who penned what lines or who set what copy. such efforts depended not only on a notion of authorship and literary activity as a solitary and autonomous endeavor but also on a committment to, or a faith in the value of, the procedure of dividing, labeling, and identifying individual contributors as good in and of itself."; some aspects of this have changed over time & some haven't; "a number of recent monographs look to collaborative activity as a way of critiquing dominant notions of authorship. as bette london notes, studying collaboration works to 'mak[e] authorship visible' and to 'explore how authorship operates' (7)"; there's now a great "number and diversity of studies deploying the term collaboration to discuss not a precise mode or form of composition and publication but the general nature of literary production and consumption. collaboration and collaborative authorship are the terms now used to designate a range of interactions, from the efforts of two writers working closely together to the activities of printers, patrons, and readers in shaping the meaning and significance of a text."
611. in the rennaisance in general "collaborative work was an essential component in extraliterary texts; multiple hands produced some of the period's most essential scientific, historical, and religious works, which represent a wealth of collective activity relatively untouched by explicit discussions of authorship."
614. "it is possible to categorize the activities of members of the book trade, just as it was possible to categorize the activities of scribes, as a brand of collaborative literary endeavor"; "a wide definition of collaboration" can include "any kind of cooperative endeavor behind a literary performance" (<--i like how this makes literature into drama, before she goes into how drama is always collaborative)
616. in a new history of early english drama editors john cox & david kastan write "of all literary forms, drama is least respectful of its author's intentions. plays inevitably register multiple intentions, often conflicting intentions, as actors, annotators, revisers, collaborators, scribes, printers, and proofreaders, in addition to the playwright, all have a hand in shaping the text"; "drama is always radically collaborative, both on stage and in print" (2)
619-20. the point: "if collaboration, and with it the concept of collaborative authorship, appeals as a way of thinking about literary endeavors generally, then future criticism will have to be sensitive to a number of new conditions. it must insist, first, on specification of the precise mode or shape of a collaboration. then it must insist on a recognition of the integrity of individuals participating in collaborative ventures.... but if we are going to use collaboration to refer to the host of activities that support literary production, we will need a new term to designate shared writing."

Posted by ttobryan at 06:57 PM | Comments (0)

as you were (collaborative writing 43.2/50)

Inge, M. Thomas. "Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship." PMLA 116.3 (May 2001). 623-630.

1 sentence summary: the myth of the solitary genius is just that; while a few literary figures have written without the collaborative influences and interventions of others, they're exceptions; most authors have always produced as members of webs of creativity & productivity.

passages
624-5. "dickinson and kafka are the exceptions that prove the rule. most writers want to be a part of the collaborative network that brings their books to readers and occasionally earns them a decent living. exactly when the myth of solitary genius began is not clear, but it has been connected with the concept of the poet as prophet and possessor of transcendent knowledge"; "there has seldom been a time when someone did not stand between author and audience in the role of a mediator, reviser, or collaborator"--"monks copied manuscripts" & there's "the author's agent," "a publisher, the acquisitions editor at the publisher," "the primary reader," "the copyeditor," "the typesetter," "proofreaders," "the promotion and advertising director; the marketing manager and sales staff members; book reviews," "wholesalers; and finally the bookstore owner"; of course "the publishing process is not the same as a collaboration between two of more authors in the writing of a book, but it is a collaboration that involves many people with various degrees of influence on the finished text"
626-7. in practice: "theodore dreiser...needed help, and when he wrote sister carrie, he sought it out by turning to his wife, a schoolteacher, and to his writer friend arthur henry"; "the book greatly benefited from what is clearly a collaboration"
628. in other generic arenas: "from the beginning, comic art has been a collaborative project."
629. regarding the author's own text here & now "anytime another hand enters into an effort, a kind of collaboration occurs"; thus "the published version should not be considered the product of my sole authorship, although only my name will appear beneath it."
630. likewise "probably we should put pound's name beneath eliot's on the waste land because under any definition of collaboration his name belongs there....but there should be a change in attitude about how we discuss our literature and culture so that we do not constantly downgrade authors according to the extent to which they compromise with the pragmatic and economic forces of time and place....if we allow more for a social and contextual concept of authorship, perhaps we can provide a more realistic and less romantic view of literary production" (<--which, depending on the tone you read that with, either says something encouraging about accounting for the real conditions of writers as creative producers in concert w/one another, or implies that collaborating is settling, but it's settling no one in the real world can help, especially if they need the money.)

Posted by ttobryan at 06:07 PM | Comments (0)

mostly warm & fuzzy (collaborative writing 44/50)

Brooke, Robert, Ruth Mirtz, and Rick Evans. Small Groups in Writing Workshops: Invitations to a Writer's Life. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994.

1 sentence summary: small groups, if they're managed responsibly & put to good use, are good for writers; they can also help create the necessary conditions for good writing: time (groups can't actually grant more of this, but they can provide peer pressure to help students balance/create their own time), ownership, reponse, & exposure.

passages
4. the "nuts and bolts" concerns of how to conduct writing groups "only become significant in the context of a clearly articulated set of beliefs about how people learn to write and why we teach writing in the first place. only some beliefs about writing and writing instruction imply the use of small groups. in fact, we think that there are good reasons why some teachers do not want to use small groups in their classrooms, as well as well-articulated rationales for teaching which argue against their use. some teachers, we acknowledge, really ought not to use small groups at all because the beliefs that they hold about writing don't match the opportunities small groups offer."
76. small group work can be confusing for students b/c it's still part of a system of individual evaluation--if "performance and evaluation" are the goals of school activities, group evaluation threatens "injustice"--might lead to "nothing other than a watered-down version of what i could do better by myself, or it brought every member down to the lowest common denominator ('the laziest') in the group." in the authors' past experience, "group work was never perceived by teachers or students as serious learning"
77. the mixed messages of being assigned group work: "guiding and organizing a small group and being a learning, contributing member of that group" can seem like very different roles; in the authors' experience, "[school] groups had nothing to do with the group work i saw on my grandparents' farm in oklahoma. we didn't plan our time, we didn't meet over food and drink, and we didn't feel free to choose our roles"
89. an ineffective (but very common) group model: "students as substitute teachers who did some work for the teacher and supposedly had the same level of knowledge about the topics and organization as the teachers"
90. the revelation: after reading elbow "i changed from using small groups as collaborators or as critics to using small groups for response. a peer-response group acts as a group of honest, critical, yet encouraging readers. readers tell the student writer what they understood, what confused them, what they think the writer is saying or trying to say. then the writer decides what to do about revising toward those responses" <--(responders rather than collaborators: a lot of the collaborative learning/writing ppl would see this kind of response--executed while the writing was still in process & so likely reflected in the shape the writing takes on--as collaboration, not as an alternative to it. these authors don't define "collaboration," so i don't know how they'd identify it as distinct.)
93. definitions of "success" are key: "in the past, a successful group, for me, had been a group which did what i would do--responded to texts in the same teacherly ways, forming the same teacherly relationship between group members. now, instead of seeing small groups as off-task or a failure, i saw small groups as a locus for writerly behavior"--which includes getting to know one another, establishing commonality, & talking about things in many different ways.
97. authors advise keeping groups all semester whenever possible, to allow trust to develop and conflicts to be experienced, worked through, and learned from, even if/when never solved.
106. bringing groups' individual conflicts into whole-class discussions to get suggestions from others about how a conflict might be handled is also a good way to teach effective group interaction.

Posted by ttobryan at 03:02 PM | Comments (0)

January 07, 2006

being radical among the radicals (collaborative writing 43.1/50)

Cagan, Elizabeth. "Individualism, Collectivism, and Radical Educational Reform" Harvard Educational Review 48.2 (1978) 227-266.

1 sentence summary: in a country of rampant individualism, radically reforming education means making significant steps toward socially-grounded and socially-motivated pedagogies--bearing in mind the myriad ways collectivism in practice is ill-fitted to western priorities and circumstances.

passages
227. (only) che guevara's picture up in classrooms: "the cuban and chinese revolutions rekindled an interest in socialism as a viable alternative to corporate capitalism....however, the actual practice of education in china, cuba, and other socialist nations has had a surprisingly limited impact on radical education in the united states."
228. b/c most obviously "collectivist values and behavior" aren't brought through--"radical educational reform has largely retained the individualism of american culture" and "paid little attention to the necessity for purposefully fostering social skills and attitudes that lead to altruism, cooperation, and social responsibility." but "a decent and just social order, one allowing each individual to achieve self-determination and self-actualization, can be built only if individualistic models of social relationships are replaced by more communal or collective ones"
230. the state of things: "the american preoccupation with the individual self has escalated dramatically in the past few years, reaching the point at which it may be more accurately described as narcissism. the remaining fragments of the social bonds of responsibility, loyalty, and caring are under assault by those purportedly concerned with healing psychic wonds and liberating us from oppressive guilt....many of these criticisms [of family/community life] were originally raised by the feminist movement and represent serious attempts to free women from oppressive roles and relationships in the family. however, those seeking to embrace new roles may find it difficult to move beyond the individualistic image of the detached, self-oriented adult into other, more communal alternatives....we seek refuge in self-absorption, comforted by an ideology that claims this to be the only route to self-fulfillment"
231-2. "we are faced with the paradox of living in a society that generates an image of encouraging individualism while ensuring a destructive conformity"; "in our encounters with social institutions, such as school and the workplace, we feel ourselves dehumanized and robbed of personal identity. our response is to withdraw as much as possible from these public arenas, investing our energies instead in personal projects and relationships which appear to reveal our uniqueness and individuality....society, politics, the economy, and public life are shunned for personal enclaves of intimacy. social action is thereby aborted."
233. to change the world: "children must be raised and educated so that they have the skills to work together cooperatively as well as the capacity for independent thought and action, so that they develop a strong sense of communal as well as personal identity, and so that concern for the other is as strong as concern for the self."
237. in education: "unlike liberal educational reformers, who argue that existing schools are dysfunctional for society, radicals see that education reflects the nature of relationships inherent in american society....schools are viewed...as instruments of the state to socialize children to fit into and perpetuate an oppressive status quo. radical reformers seek to alter and undermine this role of schools"
239. a point she keeps returning to: idealized socially-concerned/committed "behavior does not arise spontaneously, even in nurturant group settings, but rather must be deliberately cultivated"--this is b/c "true freedom and individuality are not necessarily ensured or defined by the absence of constraints and controls. it is in the nature of being human that we can group and develop only in a social context, only by participating in a human community."
240. the role of context: "the negative effects of schooling are to be found in the larger culture as well. however, it does not follow from this that meaningful educational reform is futile. radical school reformers must define their work as part of a larger political movement that seeks to change society as well as the schools"
241. progressive movements made some collectivist-influenced suggestions & instituted more group activities in our classrooms, not always used to the ends they envisioned.
242. "collectivist education must be self-consciously oppositionist; it must take a clear stand against the mainstream of american ideology and institutions and ally itself with a more comprehensive movement for social change. otherwise, not only will this effort fail, but it may be subtly transformed into a means of increasing conformity to existing social institutions and arrangments."
243. moving toward collectivist pedagogy means (scary as it sounds to us) "deliberate intervention into moral and character development"
244. "to be effective and authentic, the moral code that one adopts must be congruent with personal beliefs and conceptions and must derive from intelligent reasoning, not from blind obedience....to the extent that collectivist education obstructs this dialectic, it is not suitable for the kinds of moral development that is necessary for a just society"
246. in china & cuba "independence and autonomy are sacrificed for the greater good" in ways we can't understand from our position as having "the enormous advantage of living in a society in which scarcity is not a major problem"--what works there "would be excessive and inappropriate for an american socialist movement"
248. limitations on/caused by how we do it now: "independence and competition rather than interdependence and cooperation prevent true collectivity. if children are rewarded for their private accumulation of knowledge and come to see each other as competitors and not collaborators, that fragile consciousness which dewey terms 'the social spirit' will not be supported, even though children work side by side."
249-256. 7 conclusions about collectivism's effectiveness & what it can offer: (1) cooperative experience; "if students have rarely experienced a goal structure other than competition in school, they will tend to form competitive goal structures when left to their own devices" (johnson & johnson) (2) "in contrast to the highly inconsistent nature of the socialization influences on american children, socialist schools present a uniform and clear set of expectations for children" that "are in harmony with norms of the society as a whole" (3) a "high degree of unity of purpose allows adults to exercise their authority and control without hesitation or ambivalence" which leads to an "absence of agressiveness and restlessness" in schoolchildren observed in china (4) "an atmosphere of warmth, acceptance, and caring"--"adult control arises not from a negative conception or fear of children, but rather from the view that all children--not just bright, middle-class youngsters--are essential for the construction of a new society"--little to no punishment is required, too, since "the confident expectation of competent and constructive behavior, followed by its manifestation, which, in turn, evoked appreciation and praise" (5) "both the structure and content of collectivist education are developed to enhance social bonds and solidarity between children" (6) there's a "pervasiveness of morality and politics in the classroom"--"children might display selfishness or meanness, but they can be persuaded--not through punishment, but rather by a combination of gentle guidance, group pressure, and self-criticism--to mend their ways" (7) "children in these societies have important, concrete roles to play" & "the helpfulness and selflessness which children in socialist nations are encouraged to display are typically related to concrete situations or difficulties. personal heroism is seen as necessary to promote the well-being of people, not to serve some distant and abstract ideal"
257. "perhaps the most important thing, however, is that children in socialist societies are raised in an atmosphere of warmth and respect in which moral behavior is highly valued"
258. "in a society in which normative roles tend to emphasize privacy, self-interest, and noninvolvement, taking risks for others or for larger social objectives is an anomaly. thus, a collectivist pedagogy for american children must be concerned with encouraging them to be independent and in some ways even rebellious. to oppose the dominant values and institutions demands courage, self-confidence, and the ability to endure the criticism and censure of others, many of whom are in positions of authority and power."
259. "groups are not merely a convenient way to organize learning and play but in themselves contribute to the kind of values and social relationships to be achieved. group experiences need to be structured so that participation in the group offers the child a level of satisfaction unattainable by working alone. principles of reciprocity, fairness, and mutual respoect should be fostered; the group provides a necessary setting for this, but the adult must take responsibility for drawing the apporpriate lessons and intervening when necessary"

Posted by ttobryan at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)

cellular structures (collaborative writing 42/50)

Damrosch, David. We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.

1 sentence summary: the isolationist habits/institutional structures of the academy are bad for us--both "us" as individual scholars, who have to be solitary and to some degree curmudgeonly to succeed/survive and "us" as a group, whose ability to know the world is limited by our inability to put our heads together and collaborate either on our departments' projects or the interdisciplinary work we extoll but rarely practice.

passages:
5. "every argument about the material scholars should study, and every argument about the methods to be used, is at the same time an argument about the nature of the community that is to do the studying"; "the growing dominance of specialization in modern times has contributed to a process of homogenization on college and university campuses alike, where support for certain modes of scholarship often leads to the devaluation of most other kinds of academic work."
7. "social science articles that are written by multiple authors are certainly collaborative, but often this collaboration is of a circumscribed sort. the authors are frequently based within a single field, each doing part of the interviewing or statistical analysis for what is fundamentally a project developed from a single perspective by one or two primary authors. as a result, often in the social sciences and almost always in the humanities, interdisiciplinary work ends up being folded within the values of individual production"; also, "identity politics is...a sort of social corollary of academic specialization"--it offers great areas of examination but also "carries with it the danger of a new kind of conformity"
8. specialization isn't all bad; it allows "the american academy" to be "in a real sense 'the home of the free,' and this freedom offers exceptional choices and opportunities for students and faculty alike. at the same time, it must be said that we do freedom better than we do home, and indeed the persistent weakness of community in our country leads to pronounced limitations on the freedom of the less powerful members of our society and its institutions."
10. "'oh, yes,' a colleague once remarked when i raised this point, 'i went to graduate school because i flunked sandbox.' over the years, we have built up a system that gives high marks to people who flunk sandbox; professors who are themselves more comfortable when working alone have come to assume that their students should adopt a similar mode of work. the very structuring of our graduate training emphasizes an increasing isolation.... [and] we make no direct effort to assist [students] in this change; still less, in many fields, do we provide for more collaborative modes of advanced work that might better suit our more intellectually sociable students"
14. goals of the study: "to convert people away from the wish to convert people; to envision disciplines as not primarily engaged in the production of disciples; to talk against the almost universal tendency of scholars to talk across one another rather than with one another; to propose a scholarship and teaching practices that can be simultaneously generalizing and specialized; to recover the breadth of the great generalists" that he also calls "synthetic thinkers": durkheim, freud, dewey.
77. "it is the individual scholar who most directly embodies the alienation and aggression endemic in the system as a whole, and it is those individuals who in turn reinforce the system through their hiring decisions, their treatment of students, their departmental activity or inactivity, and their modes of work in teaching and research."
107. an increasing number of academic topics "would benefit from sustained discussion among people with different expertise and perspectives, while relatively fewer topics are best worked through by single scholars meditating on their favorite authors. we should not remain content with a state of affairs that leads sociologists to compare universities as a matter of course to prisons and mental asylums; we will do better to improve relations with our soulmates--or cellmates--in our own institutions."
148. "when people acculturate themselves to academic life by enhancing their tolerance for solitary work and diminishing their intellectual sociability, they reduce their ability to address problems that require collaborative solutions, or even that require close attention to the perspectives offered by approaches or disciplines other than one's own. the structuring of graduate education quietly but pervasively discourages such close attention, fostering instead a culture in which people work alone or within the perspectives and expectations of a small group of like-minded peers."
158. w/respect to change at the local level, "requirements are as much a glass ceiling as a safety net: they establish the range within which good and bad work alike will be done....[but] merely tinkering with requirements in the absence of a larger vision and a sustained commitment to change will have little effect. the general tenor of an organizational culture exists in an intimate synergy with the seemingly neutral particulars of the ways in which business is transacted. if we really press the question of what would be entailed in fostering collaborative learning at the graduate level, we are likely to be led to alter every aspect of our programs"
162. b/c students (required-to-be) specific interests are less & less likely to precicely match up with faculty's, perhaps rather than one mentor they should have an array; perhaps rather than a book-length diss they should produce collections of articles touching on these different specificities.
188. "the myth of the scholar as isolated individual has harmful consequences in two opposite ways: first, it inhibits people from working directly together; equally, it conceals the extent to which individuals do bear the marks of the disciplines and departments in which we live. a herd of individuals is still a herd....individual and pseudo-collaborative work alike...reinforce the circulation of tendentious trusims that too often set the tone and the terms for the work being done" that isn't collaborative/interdisciplinary in ways it could/purports to be.
193-4. "too often, present-day collaboration has one of only two bases: authoritarianism or close personal friendship"; in the first "the director...often sets the research agenda for the entire department" and the second, while good in each instance of its enactment, "is a very selective basis for work: the requirement that the collaborators be friends eliminates most of the potential combinations that can be found on a typical campus."
197. compilations & conferences don't cut it, either--they're "sad parodies of collaborative work" wherein individuals speak to dubious audiences & little to no interaction takes place, partially b/c institutions only compensate participants for going if they speak, so everybody has to speak, even if nobody's listening & they have little to say. if we went to 2 or 3 conferences a year & listened & talked together, rather than going to 5, talking at all of them, & listening to nothing--and if our departments paid our way for listening too--we'd have more chances for genuinely collaborative exchange.

Posted by ttobryan at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2006

gradual negotiation (collaborative writing 35.3/50)

Greene, Stuart, and Erin Smith. "Teaching Talk about Writing: Student Conflict in Acquiring a New Discourse of Authorship Through Collaborative Planning." Teaching Academic Literacy: The Uses of Teacher-Research in Developing a Writing Program. Ed. Katherine L. Weese, Stephen L. Fox, and Stuart Greene. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999. 149-174.

1 sentence summary: students' conceptions of what authors are/do, evinced by the language they use to talk and write about writing, are among the things they negotiate & come to better understand by working collectively in supportive groups on their writing.

passages
151. "it is one thing to create conditions of authorship by providing a supportive social context in which students write and share their writing. however, studies of collaborative writing reveal that it is quite another thing for students to enact the sort of strategies that will enable them to be authors in a mindful, principled way....how students negotiate these roles [as authors] is shaped by what they feel it means to read, write, and talk in school....a legacy of remedial education in the united states has often prevented beginning writing students from learning how to position themselves within an academic argument"
153. "students' attempts to make sense of and use a new discourse of authorship often involved a struggle between beliefs they currently held about writing and those they were being asked to adopt--a struggle influenced by competing institutional, social, and cultural concerns"; "acquiring a new discourse of authorship is marked by a complex interplay between new ways of speaking and the ways students are accustomed to talking about writing"
154. in initial responses, "TJ's imagined author" is "someone who will expand, change, get down to the facts, just play, see an overall picture, talk, compare and contrast, and who will balance the positive and negatives. moreover, the writer exist[s] not in the present tense, there in the company of his collaborators, but at some time in the future--away from the group"; his constructs influence not only his own work but the advice about authoring he gives to the other authors in his group.
163. "writers...may learn to adopt a new discourse, in this case the discourse of collaborative planning, before they are actually able to fully link this discourse to such literate acts as writing academic arguments....students' abilities to fulfill the promises of a new discourse hinge on their abilities to critically evaluate both what they know and what they need to know. if students have difficulty learning new discourses, it may be because neither writing nor the discourse of authorship are monolithic"

Posted by ttobryan at 02:48 PM | Comments (0)

December 31, 2005

electric co(llab) (collaborative writing 40/50)

Inman, James A., Cheryl Reed, and Peter Sands, eds. Electronic Collaboration in the Humanities. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003.

1 sentence description: this essay collection takes as its project an examination of the "issues and options" that electronic resources offer for collaborative student work and that electronic collaboration offers for pedagogy and scholarship, taking particular interest in critically examining the lofty & at times false promises electronic media offer.

passages:
(jami carlacio: "what's so democratic about cmc?: the rhetoric of techno-literacy in the new millennium") 31 "computer technology may change the level of literacy among our population, but it will not change the ratio of literate to nonliterate people…we must first understand the conditions that have made possible existing socioeconomic inequalities before we can adequately remedy them….computers alone cannot address the social and economic issues that result from global multinational capitalism."
(james inman: "electracy for the ages: collaboration with the past and future") 50 "people do not have to interact in the same era for their work to be bidirectional. i can learn a great deal from people i've never known, just as they can benefit from my attention to and interactions with their ideas or prospective ideas. in this way, collaboration is transactional, as well as interactional, and thus able to span generations"; "the act of collaboration, then, comes from thinking about more than individual ideas without context; to collaborate with the past and future, individuals must develop detailed context-based understandings of any idea they consider, and they must further influence and be influenced by those ideas."
(radhika gajjala and annapurna mamidipudi: "collaborating across contexts: rethinking the local and the global, theory and practice") 76 the global context & a little realism: "how do we resolve the contradictory sentiments of seeing the internet as a panacea to the problems of the south [i.e. india]; of thinking that on the contrary, it may even be bad for us; and of asserting that this doesn't mean we don't want it?"
(nancy knowles and wendy hennequin: "new technology, newer teachers: computer resources and collaboration in literature and composition") 96 other/general benefits of collaboration: "inability to work with others is the primary reason talented workers lose jobs....second, because poor interpersonal skills can ruin otherwise successful communication, inability to colaborate can have more impact than the loss of a single job; during a treaty negotiation or a shuttle launch, for instance, the inability to collaboratie can cost lives....third, collaboration values diversity because it values diverse skils and experience, if not actual social, economic, or cultural backgrounds, and it does so in an environment of equality; members of a team may have different skills but equal responsibility for group success"
109. "neither the technology nor the collaboration need be feared. neither one is...anything new....because collaboration represents a primary means of professional work, we believe helping students to succeed means providing opportunities for them to practice. what may be unexpected is the idea that we may now collaborate with our students in the classrooms"
(mary fakler and joan perisse: "voices merged in collaborated conversation: the peer critiquing computer project") 111 "collaboration has become a buzzword in academic cirlces; other terms being used interchangeably with collaboration are coauthored writing, cooperation, and peer work"
119. the magic secret to their peer response work--students are responding to peers from another class--to strangers. consistently all semester, & developing relationships by doing so, but only w/people they don't "have to deal with...in class"
(timothy allen jackson: "imagining future(s): toward a critical pedagogy for emerging technologies") 285 "as academics, we are in the consciousness business. this is the end game of our efforts, if we are serious about the impact of ideas onto the body public as opposed to purely instrumentalist motivations driven by market forces that ultimately produce supply-side pedagogies. this is what it means to profess."
(anne ruggles gere: afterward) 379 "even though technology has helped me participate in many types of collaboration throughout my academic life, it has also presented obstacles. programs that will accept only one name on a given line, protocols that work only within the range of a given server, and research tools designed without coauthors in mind all disappoint as much as they support"
381. "community is another term that is used frequently in this collection, and it, too, merits questioning," as there's a lot of variability in what authors use it to do/refer to.
383. inman's definition of collaboration as "temporally constructed" & much more useful long-term than in semester-break bounded segments; time's also always a factor, especially in how technology intersects with collaborative ventures. "how do time constraints shape the kind sof electronic collaborations we construct? how might we use time differently in these constructions? what does time mean in the context of collaboration? what might it mean?" <--questions to proceed with.

Posted by ttobryan at 02:12 PM | Comments (0)

December 30, 2005

2nd grade in 1975 (collaborative writing 39/50)

Johnson, D.W., and Johnson, R.I. Learning Together and Alone: Cooperation, Competition, and Individualization. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

1 sentence summary: all 3 modes--cooperation, competition, & individualization--have their place in the classroom as effective learning tools; the key is learning when & how much to do each.

passages:
2. "knowing how and when to structure students' learning goals cooperatively, competitively, or individualistically is an essential instructional skill all teachers need. each way of structuring interdependence among students' learning goals has its place."
14-15. "cooperative learning is the most important of the three ways of structuring learning situations, yet it is currenctly the least used. in most schools, class sessions are structured cooperatively only for 7 to 20 percent of the time....the research indicates, however, that cooperative learning should be used whenever teachers want students to learn more, like school better, like each other better, have higher self-esteem, and learn more effective social skills."
169. "students often feel helpless and discouraged. giving them cooperative learning partners provides hope and opportunity. cooperative learning groups empower their members to act by making them feel strong, capable, and committed. it is social support from and accountability to valued peers that motivate committed efforts to achieve and succeed."

(yes, those overly general observations are all this mid-70s textbook has to offer. it's very encouraging, but very general--they're talking about "students" as everyone from kindergarten through college, learning anything at all--& so not very informative.)

Posted by ttobryan at 12:20 AM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2005

far from heaven (collaborative writing 35.2/50)

Corder, Jim. "Tribes and Displaced Persons: Some Observations on Collaboration." Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing: Rethinking the Discipline. Ed. Lee Odell. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. 271-288.

1 sentence summary for all its promise, collaborative writing--especially if it becomes a tribal mantra--has the potential to overrun the ways of working of those who do work best alone, to dominate individual interests in the interest of the state; it's not necessary that it reach such extremes, but neither is it necessary that this way become the way for all.

passages
272. ..."about the writer-reader relationship...of course it's collaborative, thought we're not sure just how....for example, is it a collaborative relationship...or a competetive relationship, author and reader wanting to occupy the same place, each rhetoric seeking to displace the other?"
273. definitions: "by the phrase collaborative writing, i believe i intend to designate writing done jointly by two or more persons, where each person participates in the response to an occasion or need, the conception of the project, the discovery of its sources and possibilities, its design, style, and presentation to an audience"; examples from his own life/work: "i collaborated with one colleague in the production of a textbook, and with another in writing three articles....many times with editors....with the enemy, that is, those who have assigned or expected me to participate in the composition of work that i could not regard as my own....with the world, because that's not to be avoied, and with myself, pirating lines from earlier work, vandalizing passages i had intended to use elsewhere."
276. "i keep coming upon attacks against the 'myth of the great artist as solitary genius.' i don't want to hold on to...great or artist or genius, but i do want to hold on to solitary"; "tentative conclusion: why does it have to be one way or another? either collaboration or solitude? if we paid attention, we'd know: you're always with other, but sometimes you're desperately alone."
277. "on monday, we go to our literature classes and agree with barthes that 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author,' but on tuesday, we go to our composition classes and tell student writers to show themselves to us in their personal essays"; "perhaps i'm angry...at what i read as recommendation that we submit to the group....it is clearly a possible consequence of excessive devotion to collaboration: eventually the group is privileged, and then perhaps the corporation, and then perhaps the state."
280. "to oppose arguments for collaborative writing is odd, in the first place, because collaboration is probably the prime hope citizens have for survival on the planet....[and] to set myself against collaborative writing is strange, in the second instance, because my own log shows that i was always collaborating in some way"
281. "i am at best a member of my classes, not a teacher, and the classes ought to be participatory, experimental, and collaborative, for there is no one who knows, and that is true and always was. when i write, i do not write, for what i write is intertextual and collaborative as all past language writes me, and that is true. when i have written, i disappear as readers create the only self that they can find"; all this postmodern worldview aside, "some of the arguments for collaborative writing exhibit problematic features and predict, i think, disasterous consequences."
less significantly, the readings of history used to justify these arguments are inconsistent & sometimes unclear; more importantly:
283. "some arguments fail to distinguish among writers and among kinds of writing"--a lot of writing is collaborative, but also "some people write when there is no one else in the room save the inescapable monologues and dialogues inside the head, the solo voices and choral ensembles that ring and echo around us."
284. "the composing i is always plural, but the responsible i is typically singular"; "when the decision for collaboration is made beforehand, a program begins to take shape. its end is not collaobraive writing. collaborative writing is a mode, not the end. the ultimate consequence...is the dimunition or elimination of the individual as a source of meaning in order to seve whatever collective is at hand"
286. potentially highly distructively, "arguments for collaborative writing, like many academic arguments, evince the power of the tribal" ("academics will do tribal dances."): "tribal magic is powerful and wrong. when you join the tribe and accept the tribal rhetoric, therby the tribal magic, then any outsider who does not immediately accede is already a fool and may be a villain"; "some of us take our pleasure, our strength, and our energy from others, learning with them and through them, seeing with them and through them. some of us take our pleasure, our strength, and our energy from what we catch inside our private headbones, turning our experience, looking at it this way and that, trying to see what sense we can make of it. why should we ever imagine that any one conceptualization of writing would serve us all? we are too various, too lovely, for any single vision to hold us."

Posted by ttobryan at 04:01 PM | Comments (0)

December 27, 2005

rocky climbs to grand vistas (collaborative writing 38/50)

Peck, Elizabeth G., and JoAnna Stephens Mink, eds. Common Ground: Feminist Collaboration in the Academy. Albany: SUNY P, 1998.

editors' framing claim: "might we assume...that collaboration is a magical merging of hearts and minds? and that women, because of their other-directed socialization, are likely to be able to work together without conflict? we think not" (4).

passages
33. (nesbitt & thomas--"beyond feminism: an intercultural challenge for transforming the academy"): "authentic collaboration is 'chronologically messy'; mutual respect and trust must develop before the fruits of collaboration can be harvested for publication. requisite openness by the partner with a greater stake in the dominant paradigm is needed for her to radically question how she constructs her assumptions and conclusions. while transformative, this can wreak havoc on a tight research schedule."
37. collaborators originate in different places & bring these places with them, always; "doing collaborative research is likely to be more costly to the woman of color than the white woman. but, the woman of color has the advantage of knowing subjectively and emotively about categories of knowing and meaning from her experience of being marginalized. this is critical information for those interested in transforming the academy"
39. "part of any collaboration involves doing one's own work. in my case and in that of my european american colleagues, it involves doing my 'white' work. naming this represents an embarrassment, a recognition that what i've percieved as scholarship in general is in fact a very particular perspective through the lens of racial dominance"
41. "it is important to understand what the dominant system establishes as authoritative. as a black woman living in the united states, i must understand the structures of the dominant culture and decide what expectations i will fulfill and which ones i will not....there are times when i must take my own authority and move out into the deep."
66. (singley & sweeny--"in league with each other: the theory and practice of feminist collaboration") term/title from a previous work they co-edited: "anxious power" = "both the ambivalence women feel about claiming their rights to language and the ways in which they express this ambivalence through their work....[since] throughout history, women have been discouraged from expressing themselves in written discourse" and, when they did it anyway, "reviled by others or [led to] judge [themselves] as either coldly masculine or uncontrollably hysterical"
71. van pelt & gillam "identify four kinds of conversation in collaborative composition: procedural talk, substantive talk, talk about the writing process, and social talk. we find that we engage in all four modes, shifting easily and instinctively from one to the other. we now conceive of the writer not as an isolated figure in a garret but as two people--each holding a telephone receiver to her ear."
73. "we switch back and forth easily between the roles of dictator and recorder. when one of us comes up with a good idea or an effectively worded phrase, the other instinctively writes it down. we discover or invent meaning in the process of negotiating"; "so far we have described the collaborative process as if it involves relatively little conflict. that is not the case. indeed, conflict is an important, volatile, but often ignored issue in feminist interaction in general. collaborators must face differences in moods, methods, schedules, and energies....[they] may also find that assumptions about women and competition--which many women internalize--make feminist collaboration even more difficult. as adrienne rich puts it:
'women have always lied to each other.'
'women have always been in secret collusion.'
both of these axioms are true. ('women' 189)
74. "these essentialist notions....ignore women's actual differences as well as their ability to overcome them. indeed, they say more about a hostile patriarchal climate than about women"; helena michie...coins the term sororaphobia to describe the ambivalence, even hostility, that women may feel toward their literal and figurative sisters."
174-5. (leiby & henson--"common ground, difficult terrain: confronting difference through feminist collaboration") "the 'common ground' of feminist collaboration--with its 'distinctive pleasure'--exists simultaneously with feminist collisions; common ground is also difficult terrain." back when women in the academy were fewer & so female collaborators "thus were more isolated," "their 'pleasure' of collaboration came, in part, from the greater sense of security and belonging it afforded them"--in today's academy the external pressures are different & so have different effects on collaborations.
179. "in the academy, collaborative ground is not merely difficult terrain, but virtually uninhabitable....does the academy see those who collaborate as 'collaborationists,' enemies of the academy itself? it is clear to use that this resistance to collaboration is also resistance to a pedagogy of and for difference"
181. students' & evaluators' read on classroom appropriateness & authority for these women as coteachers revealed prejudices & distorted impressions left by expectations--the lesbian in the duo was critiqued for spending too much time talking about "women's issues" when most of this content had actually been led by the other member.
220-1. (o'meara & mackenzie--"reflections on scholarly collaboration") "collaborating scholars not only share the research, writing, and meaning-making processes but also serve as an audience for each other; when one is collaborating there is always at least one other person who is willing and interested in reading and talking about one's work. collaborating...doesn't make outside readers unnecessary, however. we found that after producing a text we sometimes lacked the necessary distance and objectivity to evaluate its clarity and emphasis, in much the same way as we did when we wrote single-authored texts" (although or maybe and other pairs have reported feeling less possessive of & so more flexible regarding proposed changes to collaboratively-authored texts).

249. (karls & weedman) & this one's just for mommy: "we share an office smaller than most federal prison cells, and with less light, located in the basement--excuse us--the 'lower level' of the fine arts building on our campus."

Posted by ttobryan at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)

which doesn't really mean (collaborative writing 37/50)

Graham, Peg, and Sally Hudson-Ross. Teacher/Mentor: a Dialogue for Collaborative Learning. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1998.

brief summary: a description detailing a cooperative program designed to revamp teacher-training by combining forces at both the university where the training took place and 6 local schools where teachers currently in classrooms were able to mentor university students.

by "collaborative" they mean that people at these varying levels at this handful of institutions worked together toward the improvement of this system, & everybody learned more about teaching & mentoring in the process.

c'est tout.

Posted by ttobryan at 06:10 PM | Comments (0)

the flaw in the metaphor (collaborative writing 36/50)

Roskelly, Hephzibah. Breaking (into) the Circle: Group Work for Change in the English Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2002.

1 sentence summary: theorizing classrooms as circles presents them as both equilateral and closed, giving students the job of breaking into academic environs & representing them/ourselves as unified in ways we aren't; students' work in small groups enables them both to work toward increasing proficiency in real, meaningful ways and involves them in a multitude of circles with real power-differentials to negotiate.

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."

Posted by ttobryan at 03:40 PM | Comments (0)

writing centers on (collaborative writing 35.1/50)

Eodice, Michele. "Breathing Lessons, or Collaboration is..." The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship. Ed. Michael A. Pemberton and Joyce Kinkead. Logan: Utah State UP, 2003. 114-129.

1 sentence summary: theoretically, collaboration is what we do all the time, just like breathing; pragmatically, keeping this in mind will enable us to make much better--and bolder--use of the rare opportunities for truely collaborative work that writing centers offer, especially in terms of their ability to build/be bridges to/with the rest of university communities.

passages:
114. her mission statement (literally): i believe...that collaboration is like the 'air we breathe,' like many travelers who sometimes wish for fresher, healthier air in a cabin full of strangers, or like a poor swimmer gulping and gasping, i often have my moments of distress: wishing for breathable air, for a writing partner, for voices of collusion; longing for the better angel of my nature."
115. "i find fascinating those who insist that this alchemy of collaboration is an 'inexplicable or mysterious transmuting' which is too scary to engage in, or, when it is in fact a practice for some, there is no effort to make it visible or valued. one result: institutional resistance to collaboration gives students permission to ignore, dismiss, or cheapen learning and writing with others"; another = "writing centers themselves practice one of the most powerful forms of collaborative learning (and yes, collaborative writing) embodied in the peer-consulting model. however, when asked, many writing center directors will say that their peer relations, their relationships with their institutions, their identity politics, are anything but collaborative, and they may even say that what happens in consulting sessions is not really collaborative writing." but it is: "collaboration (in, over, during) text production--the writer-to-writer talk, the mix of handwriting coloring a document, the shared excitement about a simple (re)construction, the alternate achievement of clarity or chaos in the feedback, the way time passes differently, the un-aloneness of work--all of these embody our centers"
118. me's "friend and assitant director, emily donnelli, says, 'collaboration is not collaboration only when it is with those who deserve it or with those who are sufficiently enlightened.'"
119. one necessary step: "recognizing and studying the collaboration...the collaborative writing as well as the collaborative learning about writing--that takes place in our centers" in light of not only their difference but their inherent "sameness"--"what we do with student writers is much more like the collaborative writing we practice when we academics, writers, or teachers seek feedback, participate in peer review, or work with editors; it is much more a form of intrusive caring about texts; it is much more an exchange than a one-way service"
121. moving outward: "i want to talk back to the pervasive attitude that faculty collaborate but student writers cheat....ironically, it seems collaboration is the only practice to which academics do not want to acculturate their students"--& when they do talk about it, "collaboration is most often framed as a qualifier in relation to an official writing center position on plagiarism"
123. to really become "good citizens" of the academic community, writing centers & what they know about collaboration need(s) to bleed out into "campus life"
126. sosnoski's term is "concurrence" for what binds working-groups where "a common ideal or telos does not hold the group together. intellectual compassion and care hold the group together."
129. so, the message: "professional and social networks are already formed and formidable within the writing center community; these are powerful and productive and ferry our goodies back and forth to each other, but to go beyond this we need to become a 'smart mob'--a homegrown initiative that utilizes our workaday knowledge to reach others in ways that can impact policy, influence administrative and institutional leaders, and help us grow leaders from among our writing center fellows. we can and should demand collaboration and continue to work toward boundarylessness, even with the knowledge that these actions will never be fully accomplished, completed"

Posted by ttobryan at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)

December 25, 2005

the music of disharmony (collaborative writing 34/50)

York, Lorraine. Rethinking Women's Collaborative Writing:Power, Difference, Property. Toronto: U of Toronto P., 2002.

1 sentence summary: idealized models of women's collaboration as undifferentiated examples of harmonic concord deny the real generative power of dischord & the interaction of discrepant voices.

claims:
3. "the act of collaborating on texts does not in itself determine a specific or consistent ideological stance, feminist or any other"; although "all collaborations are, in some miniscule measure, challenges to the status quo at this particular historical moment in many countries and cultures," the project sets out to "theorize women's colaborations as ideological projects that harbour various ideological potentials, some more hierarchical, some more liberatory and subversive."

defining terms:
4. "for the methodological purposes of this study, collaboration will mean any overt co-authorship or co-signature of a work of art."

passage:
6. "expressions of difference in...collaborations can be...grating and uncomfortable, but they also may allow the collaboration to run, to engage the gears of dialogue and exchange. so without denying or forgetting the very real sustenance and pleasure that collaborating on texts has given literary women, i will nevertheless resist idealizing those relationships as necessarily revolutionary, sisterly, or morally superior."
10. "in the face of so much suspicion and at times, open hostility" it "can hardly be surprising" that "the unhealthy, shameful collaborative relationship has become, in reaction, an idealized lighting of torches."
13. the famous elizabethan playwrights did it too.
15. coe in ede & lunsford highlights "the association of multiply-authored works with a type of grass-roots political activism that many publishers might wish to avoid seeming to take seriously": "the real social tendency is toward collective writing. this is especially true of progressive writings. a union leaflet is rarely the work of one person"; & "the association that coe makes arguably functions within the ideological discourses of publishing, government granting bodies, and academia"
19. in nesbitt & thomas's definition, "authentic collaboration" is "a collective working arrangement that is 'naturally egalitarian rather than mediated by vigilant awareness of status difference' (32). that is, they do not regard scholarship that maintains the dominance of a senior academic as authentically collaborative; neither does research that pays lip service to various perspectives without actually incorporating multiple voices"
20. at least they acknowledge that this is impossible, but they project it as "a horizon to work toward"--ly disagrees.
22. stillinger's work is to foreground the behind-the-scenes collaborations in a lot of heretofore recognized as independent works & is "valuable as a querying of single authorship as a normative social and historical practice"
29. atwood's conception of foucault's author: "a kind of spider, spinning out his entire work from within"
37. overview: "the discourse that is contemporary women's collaborative writing has many, many placements: ways of expressing not only the moments of harmony and fusion that many of its critics have discovered, but also the differences, property issues, and negotiations of power that i find when i read these texts. when i come to the supposedly cramped and overcrowded quarters of two or more women authors 'in a birth,' i find, instead of an easy harmony, the much more absorbing cultural spectacle of women who are differently engaged."
42. cixous and clément as an example of "two collaborators inhabiting one conventionally singular author position...without ceding to a fusion theory of collectivity. this provides a space for intellectual disagreements to occur and be recorded without creating the impression that the collaboration is a failure."
47. gilbert and gubar as the flagship american duo whose "fact of friendship is of more than circumstantial interest; north american collaborators tend to see their collaborations as correlates or extensions of friendship. this is a telling sign of hot they tend to encode critical collaboration as mutuality rather than adopting a more strictly professional demeanor as the italian feminist groups do"; it also "often does suggest comfort with acknowledging difference and disagreement, but all too often...such complexities are overshadowed by the need to present a unified front," or what holly laird calls "'coalition collaborations' wherein 'women acknowledge their differences both in the immediacy of trying to write together and in their retrospective meditations, yet their more conscious aims and desires are to bridge those differences and to achieve solidarity with each other' ('preface' 15)"
53. the american academy system's "lack of respect" for collaborative efforts only encourages this, of course.
60. leonardi & pope on proper behavior: "'one of the problems with the conversation model is that conversation and dialogue, at least as they are practiced by 'good girls' seem so often repressed by social convention. one shies away from serious disagreement, one doesn't interrupt, one doesn't too obviously stake out one's territory, one tries not to digress. one never, ever screams' (267). as a result, leonardi and pope are explicitly wary of any fusion theory of collaboration"
61. (::snicker::) "this is what i have found in north american critical collaborations: a combination of institutional pressures and internalizations of conventional theories of critical authorship. the Author whose death Roland Barthes was conventionally said to have heralded is alive and well and seeking tenure and promotion at a university"
67. o'neill and limbert "suggest the term 'composite authorship' to describe" the efforts of "co-creators" whose work was begun by one author but is then picked up at a later time and added-to by another.
74. the difficulties--or playful tendencies--shown by the efforts of "michael field" to represent themselves in pronouns can also be read "as a sign of cultural anxiety, a joke which at least partly relies on a sense of two women collaboratively writing as an authorial circus trick."
184. york reflects on her own entrenchment: she delayed discussing the material with her graduate students "until [she] could ensure that [she] would complete a draft of this book, because [she] has always felt uneasy about teaching topics that [she is] currently writing about to graduate students. what if [she] were to unconsciously reflect [her] students' work in [her] own writing? how could [she] by sure, if a parallel were to arise between [her] own work and a graduate colleague's, that [she] had not clossed the line that [she's] been analysing in this book--the line between 'mine' and 'yours'?"
188. the whole project is motivated by "a persistant concern that women, in particular, not jump to the conclusion that collective work needs to be seen as productive only when it proceeds on the basis of agreement and likeness of opinion....ultimately...the fault lines that run through women's collaborations make them all the more compelling."

Posted by ttobryan at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)

everybody sing 'biko' (collaborative writing 33/50)

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy in Process. NY: Seabury P, 1978.

1 sentence summary learners need to be actively involved in creating knowledge about the things they need to know, in ways and via materials relevant to the problems they face and the realities they participate in, not preached-to about others' concerns and curricula in the name of education; viewing knowledge as a process rather than a product makes this not only possible but necessary.

passages:
9. "our political choice and its praxis also keeps us from even thinking that we could teach the educators and learners of guinea-bissau anything unless we were also learning with and from them. if the dichotomy between teaching and learning results in the refusal of the one who teaches to learn from the one being taught, it grows out of an ideology of domination. those who are called to teach must first learn how to continue learning when they begin to teach"
42-3. his ideal is not "instruction in a school that simply prepares the learners for another school, but about a real education where the content is in a constant dialectical relation with the needs of the country. in this kind of education, resulting in practical action, itself grows out of the unity between theory and practice. for this reason, it is not possible to divorce the process of learning from its own source within the lives of the learners themselves. the values this education seeks are empty if they are not incarnated in life. they are only incarnated if they are put into practice. thus, from the earliest cycle of instruction...participation in common experiences stimulates social solidarity rather than individualism. the principle of mutual help, practical creativity in the face of actual problems, and the unity of mental and manual labor are experienced daily. the learners begin creating new forms of behavior in accordance with the responsibiltiy they must take within the community"
54. "in the dialectical unity between teaching and learning, the saying 'whoever knows, teaches the one who doesn't' takes on a revolutionary meaning. when the one who knows understands first that the process by which he learned is social and, second, that in teaching something to another he is also learning something that he did not know already, then both are changed."
89. "knowledge is always a process, and results from the conscious action (practice) of human beings on the objective reality which, in its turn, conditions them. thus a dynamic and contradictory unity is established between objective reality and the persons acting on it. all reality is dynamic and contradictory in this same way. from the point of view of such a theory and of the education which grows from it, it is not possible:
a) to separate theory and practice;
b) to separate the act of knowing existing knowledge from the act of creating new knowledge;
c) to separate teaching from learning, educating from being educated"

Posted by ttobryan at 04:37 PM | Comments (0)

constructing with vygotsky (collaborative writing 32/50)

Lee, Carol D., and Peter Smagorinsky, eds. Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Research: Constructing Meaning through Collaborative Inquiry. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000.

1 sentence summary using vygotsky's theoretical approaches as frameworks for field work about language, meaning-construction, and literacy will enable researchers to address current gaps and misunderstandings.

vygotsky's "core assertions include these principles":
1. "learning is mediated first on the interpsychological plane between a person and other people and their cultural artifacts"
2. and "often involves mentoring provided by more culturally knowledgeable persons, usually elders, who engage in activity with less experienced or knowledgeable persons in a process known as scaffolding" wherein, importantly, "meaning is thus constructed through joint activity rather than being transmitted from teacher to learner"
3. "the mediational tools...that are drawn on in the act of meaning construction, are constructed historically and culturally; thus cognition is 'distributed'....people, tools, and cultural constructions of tool use are thus inseparable....[which] suggests that learning is inherently social, even when others are not physically present"
4. "the capacity to learn is not finite and bounded"

passages:
35. [vera p. john-steiner and teresa m. meehan: "creativity and collaboration in knowledge-making"] "knowledge...is both reconstructed and co-constructed in the course of dialogic interaction. it involves agentive individuals who do not simply internalize and appropriate the consequences of activities on the social plane. they actively restructure their knowledge both with each other and within themselves. such reconstruction can occur as the outcome of positive shared dialogue and joint activities. it is also a consequence of criticism, rejection, and resistance to events that occur on the social level"
37. some of the more "useful aspects of creative apprenticeship": "when interaction across generations are successful and the mentor conveys his or her style of thought to the learner, their joint activity is meaningful to both parties. it provides renewal for the mentor and shared knowledge for the novice"; "long-continued collaboration between a more and a less experienced partner may lead to the beginner's becoming imitative as a result of too much internalization. the novice can resist that danger by remaining exposed to more than one mentor or distant teacher"
38. "an essential part of the dialectic of creativity is intellectual interdependence" & "just as interdependence with mentors is crucial during formative years, sustained interaction with one's peers is essential thereafter"; for successful creative peer groups "emotional support was no less essential than the intellectual stimulation" working together produced.
43. "the book" in a particular study "required many reworkings, a process that would have overwhelmed either person working alone. the power of their collaboration is in the complementarity of their disciplinary training and vision. it is also in their mutual support during this long project. it let them share risks and take artistic and emotional chances."
46. in a recent study of collaborators finishing each others' sentences, john-steiner & meehan found that "collaborators more deeply ingaged in joint thinking produced the largest percentage of co-constructed utterances. in contrast, those in complementary relationships managed their interaction somewhat differently, taking longer turns to produce their ideas and having fewer co-constructed utterances"
65. [g. wells: "dialogic inquiry in education"] "the teacher should be involved as a coinquirer with the students in the topics that they have chosen to investigate. to be able honestly to say, in response to a student's question, 'i don't know. how could we find out?' is probably more important, in creating an ethos of collaborative inquiry in the classroom, than always being able to supply a ready-made answer....to be able to wonder out loud about these issues and to take action to understand them better not only provides an excellent model for students to emulate, it also demonstrates t