Bruffee Reading Outlined

Collaborative Learning and the “Conversation of Mankind”

Kenneth A. Bruffee

-Collaborative learning coming to the forefront

-Some teachers don’t know how or when to use effectively

-“Written on the assumption that understanding both the history and the complex ideas that underlie collaborative learning can improve its practice and demonstrate its educational value.”

-Emerged from the attempt to remove socially destructive authoritarian social forms

-Success in process discovered originally with med students practicing diagnosis (one consensus)

-Many students who don’t do well in college have trouble adapting to the “normal” college classroom

-Needed help that was “not an extension of, but an alternative to traditional classroom teaching.”

-Peer tutoring

-Classroom groupwork

1. Conversation and the Nature of Thought and Knowledge

-takes place within us as well as between us

-“reflective thought” is public or social conversation internalized

-to understand how we think, we have to understand conversation

-reflective thought does not serve the community

2. Educational Implications: Conversation, Collaborative Learning and “Normal Discourse”

-“Writing is internalized social talk made public and social again”

-Normal discourse: writing to members of a common community of knowledgeable peers

-Members or different academic communities can use their specific knowledge as a resource for other disciplines

-If tutees do not bring the information necessary, than it is the tutors job to help them start from the beginning

3. Collaborative Learning and the Authority of Knowledge

-In class discussion, most of the talking is done by the teacher

-Knowledge is a “social artifact”

4. Collaborative Learning and New Knowledge

-People have always, although maybe not prompted to, written using the help of their peers

-The discourse involved in generating knowledge cannot be normal discourse

-“Abnormal Discourse occurs between coherent communities or within communities when consensus no longer exists with regard to rules, assumptions, goals, values, or mores.”

-Abnormal discourse cannot be taught

-Authority itself is a social artifact