Egalitarianism

Collaboration is an essential practice for the developing writer. As Kenneth Bruffee suggests in his studies for Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’ “Students’ work tended to improve when they got help from peers; peers offering help, furthermore, learned from the students they helped and from the activity of helping itself” (Cross-Talk, 398). Indeed, workshops and peer review are so common a part of the writing classroom as to be taken for granted.

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In some ways the classroom is the ideal environment for this sort of directed collaboration: the constraints of space and time give students a shared agenda, and the presence of the teacher encourages focused, constructive work. However, the hierarchy of the classroom setting can also interfere with true, open discourse. Bruffee outlined some of these problems amongst students when he states that “Limitations that may be imposed…by ethnocentrism, inexperience, personal anxiety, economic interests, and paradigmatic inflexibility” can constrain thinking (400).

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Even the presence of a teacher can hinder the creative expression of collaborating

students: “If we value efficiency but do not attend to how the design of texts embody values, then our texts most often will default to being efficient, and they will be efficient not only in production…but also in the visual layouts and other material choices that help us read through them quickly – and that then reinforces for us…that efficiency is good and to be repeated” (Wysocki, 13). In short, collaboration within the classroom is likely to be efficient and academically useful, but is unlikely to foster creativity or experimentation in writing.