1. Kenneth Bruffee in “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” states that we in the humanities have been taught “that collaboration and community activity is inappropriate and foreign to work in humanist disciplines such as English” (554). However, he later points out that work by Kuhn, Rorty, and Fish has helped to dispel that idea by “redefining the nature of our knowledge as social artifact” (554). If knowledge creation is social, then collaborative learning becomes a place where students can enter “the conversation of mankind” (555). How do we, as teachers or even tutors, help get students into this conversation? How do we show/teach them that they have a role in a knowledge community? Does collaborative learning put this into effect?
2. In “Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of Composition”, Anne Ruggles Gere presents us with the differences between composition inside the classroom and the composition outside the classroom. She ends her essay by stating, “[t]he question remains whether we will use classroom walls as instruments of separation or communication” (1094). If we are to use the classroom walls as instruments of communication and have our students write more like the extracurriculum participants, how do we do that? How can we encourage students to write in a way that connects them to a community, allows them representation and authority in their writing, and encourages them to see writing as performance? How do we do all this while still fulfilling the objectives and requirements of a composition course? Are we limited?
-Candace Cooper