Agree to Disagree

"The Writer's Audience Is Always Fiction"

I had such high hopes for Ong's article. I find this piece a little too, well, literary--if I may say such a thing. I feel odd even saying it that way because I feel the divide between com and lit studies is more imagined than ordained, but none-the-less I had no idea what three-fourths of Ong's article had to do with the writer as imagining an audience. He made excellent points in the beginning and then went on to prove them; all of that is well and good, but the pages upon pages of Hemmingway were more than a little excessive. I acknowledge the necessity of the proof and that this section was not the thrust of the article, but I felt as if Ong got off topic. I didn't feel that his extreme deconstruction of Hemmingway's writing style supported his point of the writer's audience as fiction as effectively as he imagined it to. Obviously he fictionalized me and could not account for the reality. But that is why we read and respond.

And that is, perhaps, what I felt was missing from the discussion, sacrificed on the altar of literary reading techniques and scholarly proof. He states that each reader makes her own text, and even ostensibly attempts to prove it, but his article, purportedly about freshman writers, would have been significantly more helpful to freshman writers if he had kept it in the realm of the writer. Did everyone follow that sentence? Ong appears to engage here in what I would call academic self-pleasuring. He is so excited to discuss how all these texts have fictionalized writers that he fails to bring his argument full circle, and meet the promises of his first few pages. What does fictionalized audience mean for the teaching of freshman writers? Why is this worth knowing or discussing? What is your point in explicating this? The knowledge that all audiences are fictionalized is not enough, it needs to go further than that.

But I acknowledge the date of 1975 on this article and it seems this was new knowledge then. For that reason I am appreciative of my chance to fill in another gap in my knowledge of the scholarly debate.

"Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversations of Mankind'"

Fantastic. Stupendous. This is totally the stuff I want to write when I grow up.

I found Bruffee's article one of the most insightful and helpful articles we have read thus far. My reason for this is because it keeps all of its discussion in the realm of what it purports in the beginning--the teaching of comp--and it explicates his own thought process even as it challenges the readers. There is no hidden agenda here. Bruffee is not challenging the authority because he can or because he hopes to upset the equilibrium. Rather, operating from the standpoint of knowledge as "social artifact" (427) he works outward to discuss the implications of that for the composition classroom and how better to teach to writing.

And that is, I think, what is missing from much of the scholarship we have read, or at least, not discussed as much as I think would be helpful. How better to teach writing. This is the issue around which composition pedagogy revolves and yet, often we are derailed by talks of cognitive processes, scientific studies, etc. These are all important issues but instead of discussing them in relation to how to teach writing we discuss them as answers in and of themselves. I think part of the reason for that is our own acceptance of teacher (scholar) as authority.

"Our authority as teachers, accordingly, has had its source in our nearness to one of these secular versions of the mind of God" (431). I love that Bruffee takes this issue on. How often do we stifle conversation and, therefore, learning because we are uncomfortable with the possibility of losing control? Of being found out? Of being challenged? How often do we dismiss abnormal discourse specifically because it is abnormal? I feel these are all incredibly important issues to think on. My irritation with the blog article the second week of class stemmed specifically from this issue. Teachers in that article vaunted the computer over the personal because it "empowered" the student, but in fact it does the opposite. It distances the student from the teacher thereby reinforcing the power structure in place by creating a false sense of empowerment. The teacher can then control the student at no risk to him/herself that might be had in face-to-face interaction. Here, in an article written in 1985, Bruffee anticipates that.

I think, and I have no proof of this actually, that to be a good teacher you must be willing to look the fool. A willingness to learn is always precluded by a willingness to be challenged, or proven wrong. And as a teacher, shouldn't one of your goals be to learn from your students even as they teach you? Perhaps that's a naive standpoint, but I think I might stand by it for now. I am, though, willing to be proven wrong.

I think.


"Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning"

This is why you read all the articles before you discuss them. I have realized after reading Trimbur that I read into Bruffee's article all the meanings and answers that I thought should be there, instead of reading critically everything he was (might have been) saying. Trimbur brings up several incredibly important points in regards to consensus I believe, acknowledging the criticisms, Bruffee's own weak points, and offering a more sensical possibility, but I would like to discuss the possibility of more Bakhtin informing this conversation.

First of all, much of what both Bruffee and Trimbur describe is identified in Bakhtin as the critical interanimation of discourse. This idea that everyone speaks in different discourses to different people (discourse communities) and once one becomes aware of this the critical interanimation begins. This ties in directly with the idea of struggle, as brought up by Timbur which is illuminated better, I think, in Lu's "From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle." The idea here is that we all unconsciously move from discourse to discourse, but real control, knowledge, what-have-you, is achieved when conscious knowledge of that movement is gained. Furthermore, Bakhtin's ideas of the internally persuasive discourse (everything that is me) and the authoritative discourse (everything that is reified and defies challenge) would further illuminate this idea of consensus. What I mean by this is that everyone is in a constant struggle as their internally persuasive discourse seeks to assimilate the outside, which includes authoritative discourses. Thus, Bakhtin tells us, we are only half-ours and half-someone else's.

All of this goes to affect my reading of collaborative learning and the idea of knowledge as social. It was because I went ahead and read Bakhtin into Bruffee that I didn't see some of the gaps in his argument Trimbur discusses, but I felt as if Trimbur would be on more solid theoretical ground if he had pulled in significantly more Bakhtin. This ideas of struggle and critical interanimation of discourses very simply (as anything in Bakhtin is simple) answer this question of consensus and students agreeing/disagreeing all the while to shape their own internally persuasive discourse