Re: Is "Active learning" a guise for collaboration bashing?

[bobbie silk <bsilk@keller.clarke.edu>]

This raises some interesting points, Clinton.  Although I haven't found
myself checking under the bed for collaboration-bashers, I have once or
twice drifted off to sleep thinking (in that twilight moment) that I can
hear the raspy breathing of something else under the bed.  My vague
monster is the mirror-twin of yours.  I wonder sometimes if an (over?)
emphasis on collaborative learning doesn't ignore two hard realities:  1)
a psychological reality--that collaboration is really a negotiation among
individual minds which may or may not have similar social conditioning;
2) a socio-political reality--that collaboration *can* (whether or not it
does) play to the human ethical weakness that makes us unwilling to accept
personal responsibility for our actions.

I suppose there's a beast at either extreme.  I've often thought, however,
that writing center work tends more toward the center of the continuum
that stretches in those two directions.  In many of the writing centers
with which I am familiar, minimalist tutoring is a goal but not a law.
(This is part of that flexibility we've been discussing on the assessment
thread.)  Also, in minimalist tutoring, we have a tutor who turns over
control to the client *with guidance.*  Thus, the tutor prompts responses
without prescribing them.  To me, this acknowledges both collaborative
theory and the need for individual responsibility and learning.

I suppose I'm the worst sort of "intellectual"--I like thinking about the
beasts in abstract ways, but I'm not going to go poking a stick at them
under the bed to see which ones bite.

  --Bobbie
    bsilk@keller.clarke.edu

On Fri, 27 Sep 1996, Clinton R. Gardner wrote:

> 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
> +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-++-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-++-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
> 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/
> +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-++-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-++-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
>