Lunsford Reading Outlined

Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center

Andrea Lunsford

-Collaborative Learning should be used with caution

-Knowledge is the product of collaboration

-“The Center as Storehouse” operates as an information station or storehouse, prescribing and handing out skills and strategies to individual learners.

-“The Center as Garret” are informed by a deep-seated belief in individual genius and a deep-seated attachment to the American brand of individualism.

-Storehouse Centers see knowledge as exterior, Garret Centers see it as interior

1. 1.Collaboration aids in problem solving.

2. 2.Collaboration aids in learning abstractions.

3. 3.Collaboration aids in the transfer and assimilation; it fosters interdisciplinary thinking.

4. 4.Collaboration leads not only to sharper, more critical thinking, but to deeper understanding of others.

5. 5.Collaborations leads to high achievement in general.

6. 6.Collaboration promotes excellence.

7. 7.Collaboration engages the whole student and encourages active learning; it combines reading, talking, writing, thinking; it provides practice in both synthetic and analytic skills.

-A collaborative learning environment must have clearly defined goals in which the tasks at hand engage everyone equally.

-Suggests ongoing monitoring and evaluating of collaboration or the group process

-“Storehouse Centers” place control in the authority

-“Garrett Centers” place control in the individual student

-Writing Centers may harm professionally those who seek to use it

-Collaboration can turn into busy work

-“Burkean Parlors”: centers of collaboration

-The center Lunsford promotes is one that places control with the negotiating group, not the teacher or student.

-Presents a challenge to the status quo of higher learning