History
- 1964 – M.L.J. Abercrombie (British) discovered that “successful medical practice, is better learned in small groups of students arriving at diagnoses collaboratively than it is learned by students working individually” (636).
- 1970s – “For American college teachers the roots of collaborative learning lie … in the nearly desperate response of harried colleges during the early 1970s to a pressing educational need…[S]tudents entering college had difficulty doing as well in academic studies as their native ability suggested they should be able to do” (637). They used peer collaboration as a solution.
Thought and Writing
Bruffee argues that thinking is social because we begin with public conversation, which we take into our heads and converse with ourselves, which then leads to reflective thought.
The view that conversation and thought are causally related assumes not that thought is an essential attribute of the human mind but that it is instead an artifact created by social interaction. We can think because we can talk, and we think
in ways we have learned to talk…To the extent that thought is internalized conversation, then, any effort to understand
how we think requires us to understand the nature of conversation; and any effort to understand conversation requires us
to understand the nature of community life that generates and maintains conversation. (640)
Continuing this line of thought, “writing of all kinds is internalized social talk made public and social again. If thought is internalized conversation, then writing is internalized conversation re-externalized…Writing is at once two steps away from conversation and a return to conversation. We con-verse; we internalize conversation as thought; and then by writing, we re-immerse conversation in its external, social medium” (641). Bruffee asserts, then, that teachers should be concerned with engaging their students in conversation often and ensuring that their students are conversing in ways that match how teachers want their students to read and write (642).
Also, Bruffee argues, “Knowledge is the product of human beings in a state of continual negotiation or conversation” (646-7). See normal discourse below
Benefits of Collaborative Learning
- "Collaborative learning provides a social context in which students can experience and practice the kinds of conversation valued by college teachers" (642)
- "collaborative classroom group work guided by a carefully designed task makes students aware that writing is a social artifact, like the thought that produces it" (642)
- Students are introduced to the normal discourse of academia, while pushing the bounds of the normal knowledge by introducing new and/or contradictory knowledge.
- “collaborative learning models how knowledge is generated, how it changes and grows” (647)
Key Terms
- Normal discourse: “conversation within a community of knowledgeable peers. A community of knowledgeable peers is a group of people who accept, and whose work is guided by, the same paradigms and the same code of values and assumptions” (642).
- 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 sniffs out stale, unproductive knowledge and challenges its authority, that is, the authority of the community which that knowledge constitutes” (648).