Is "Active learning" a guise for collaboration bashing?

["Clinton R. Gardner" <cgardner@englab.slcc.edu>]

Hi all!

Last week I gave a presentation at our college's "Welcome Back Week" 
seminars (we are on the quarter system here).  I suppose the purpose of this week is to bring instructors 
back into their academic setting by bombarding them with long 
speeches from administrators and shorter seminars from their 
colleagues.  The overall theme of this conference was "Good practice 
in undergraduate education."  When I saw the announcement for this 
conference two months ago I thought....hey what's better practice 
than what we do here in the Writing Center...so I immediately 
applied.  After a couple of weeks I got a terse reply saying that my 
proposal had been accepted on the condition that I securely "link" 
the presentation to the idea of "good practice."  The coordinator 
then sent me a collection of articles covering "good practice" 
issues.  One of these "practices" outlined in one of the pamphlet's I 
received by Chickering and Gamsun was "encourages active learning."  
This notion of "active learning," I might add seems to have developed 
great weight recently....what with the past disection of 
transactional education etc. etc.  And I also began to see it in the 
light of a "minimalist tutoring" perspective...i.e. the tutor does 
not take charge...the tutor becomes passive allowing the student to 
take over and show their "stuff."  (Please note that Gamsun and 
Chickering also indicate that one of their principles is to 
"Encourage cooperation among students.)

This week while I was engaged in new tutoring training I suddenly 
struck me that this "active learning" may just be yet another guise for 
collaboration bashing.  It all happened while we were discussing 
Lunsford's "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of the Writing 
Center."   While the new tutors were discussing I had a wake up call, 
of sorts when I read the following:

"A collaborative environment must also be one in which goals are 
clearly defined and in which the jobs at had engage everyone fairly 
and equally, from the student clients to work-study students to peer 
tutors and professional staff.  In other words, such an environment 
rejects traditional hierarchies" (Lunsford).

and

"The idea of a center informed by a theory of knowledge as socially 
constructed, of power and control as constantly negotiated and 
shared, and of collaboration as its first principle presents quite a 
challenge.  It challenges our ways of organizing our centers, of 
training our staff and tutors, of working with teachers.  It even 
challenges our sense of where we 'fit' in this idea.  More 
importantly, however, such a center presents a challenge to 
the institution of higher education, an institution that insists on 
rigidly controlled individual performance, on evaluation as 
punishment, on isolation..." (Lunsford).

Read this again, I began to wonder if the notion of "active" student 
learning, and more passive minimalist tutoring is not just a 
throw-back to the hierarchical separation of one student from 
another.  Whether it really is "isolating" students from one another 
so that they don't build an understanding of collaborative learning.  
Granted I can see how active learning could be recast as 
"equal" participation, but in the eyes of many it is the individual student who 
must move forward....it is the student who must take charge of the 
tutorial....

I feel I'm muddling this all together....but, after all, I only wanted to 
start a conversation, not end it. ;)
 
--clint
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Clinton Gardner (cgardner@englab.slcc.edu)
Writing Center Instructional Support Coordinator
Salt Lake Community College
Have you visited the SLCC Virtual Writing Center today?
http://www.slcc.edu/wc/
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