BENSON, ALAN, Ph.D. Collaborative Authoring and the Virtual Problem of Context in Writing Courses
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BENSON, ALAN, Ph.D. Collaborative Authoring and the Virtual Problem of Context in Writing Courses. (2012) Directed by Dr. Nancy Myers. 284 pp. Since the 1980s, the field of rhetoric and composition has embraced the idea of collaborative writing as a means of generating new knowledge, troubling traditional conceptions of the author, and repositioning power within the student-teacher hierarchy. Authors such as David Bleich, Kenneth Bruffee, and Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede have written about, and advocated for, teachers’ engagement with collaboration in the composition classroom. Yet in discussions of collaborative writing, scholars have tended to ignore an important element: the limitations placed upon student agency by the institutional context in which students write. We can ask students to work together in the classroom, but limitations on their choice of collaborators, their time together, and their ability to determine the outcome of their work result in an unproductive simulacrum of collaboration in which students write together but do not engage deeply with each other in the ways scholars describe. Ignoring the fact that classroom collaborative writing is embedded in different fields of power than writing done by scholars working outside institutional limitations results in a conception of collaborative writing as little more than an element of pedagogy, one that can be added to a syllabus without significantly changing the structure, goals, or ideology of the course. Rather than approaching collaborative writing as a means of pushing against the limits of institutional writing, the context in which collaboration takes place is naturalized. As a result, the assessment and disciplinary structures of the academy, the physical division of the student body into class sections, and the tools available to support (or undercut) collaborative work vanish in the scholarship. To counter this trend, I explore how the denial of context and the resulting disconnection between theory (the claims for collaborative writing) and practice (the twenty-first-century composition classroom) promote not collaboration, but a simulacrum of collaboration: academic work that mimics the appearance of true collaboration while failing to enact the liberatory possibility of working with other writers. This project explores collaborative theory on three levels: the personal, in which collaborative writing is illustrated via specific business, public, and academic contexts; the pedagogical, in which current collaborative theory and practice is deployed and analyzed to understand its limitations; and the disciplinary, in which current collaborative theory and practice is questioned, critiqued, and remediated to propose an alternative collaborative classroom praxis. The structure of the dissertation, which uses interchapters to draw connections between larger theoretical issues and my ethnographic research, interviews, and analysis, reflects these three strands as a means of illustrating the interdependence of the personal, pedagogical, and disciplinary conceptions of and engagements with collaborative writing. COLLABORATIVE AUTHORING AND THE VIRTUAL PROBLEM OF CONTEXT IN WRITING COURSES by Alan Benson A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2012 Approved by __________________________________ Committee Chair To my students, past, present, and future. ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair ____________________________________ Committee Members ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee ____________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS While my name is the only one on the title page, this dissertation was only possible because of the support, collaboration, and input of many others. I would especially like to thank my chair, Nancy Myers, whose support, advice, questions, and friendship was invaluable. She helped me shape this project, fight through problems and bleak moments, and celebrate its completion. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee: Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater, who first introduced me to collaborative writing theory and pedagogy and who has been a friend and ally through my graduate education; Kelly Ritter, whose advice and suggestions encouraged me to become a better scholar and instructor; and Sara Littlejohn, my writing partner and close friend, who helped me sharpen my argument, polish my writing, stay focused, and smile occasionally. I also want to thank Jennifer Whitaker, my other writing partner, whose probing questions and incredible kindness helped me to both reconceptualize my project and to stay coherent as I worked on it. Thanks also to Alyson Everhart, who keeps all of UNCG’s English graduate students on track. Finally, I want to thank my mother and father, my brother and sisters, and my nieces and nephews. Your love and support keep me going. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION: CONTEXT, COMMUNITY, AND COLLABORATIVE AUTHORING IN THE COMPOSITION CLASSROOM ..................................................................................................1 II. THE PRODUCTION OF REAL AND VIRTUAL COLLABORATION ..........21 Interchapter I: Institutions as Limiting Contexts ....................................59 III. THE YEAR OF WORKING TOGETHER: ENACTING THEORIES OF COLLABORATION IN THE CLASSROOM .........................................71 Interchapter II: Competing Contexts of Collaborative Authoring: Institutions vs. Disciplines .................................................................122 IV. PROFILES OF ACADEMIC COLLABORATION OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM ..............................................................................................131 Interchapter III: Audience as Context: Technologies of Collaboration......................................................................................161 V. “COLLABORATIVE” TECHNOLOGY AND THE SIMULACRUM OF COLLABORATIVE AUTHORING ......................................................175 Interchapter IV: Place as Context .........................................................209 VI. THE WRITING CENTER AS A MODEL OF COLLABORATIVE AUTHORING ENCOUNTERS ...................................................................220 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................255 APPENDIX A: RESEARCH PROJECT MATERIALS .................................................281 v LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1. The Sense of Community Loop ..........................................................................75 Figure 2. Student Assessment of Their Peers, Spring ......................................................112 vi 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: CONTEXT, COMMUNITY, AND COLLABORATIVE AUTHORING IN THE COMPOSITION CLASSROOM I came to academia from the software industry and, before that, the newspaper and magazine publishing industry. Both of these arenas have long promoted the kind of collaborative work that is valorized in rhetoric and composition scholarship. 1 Throughout these organizations, one would find people working closely together on tasks, sharing ideas, cooperatively engaging with research, and detailing their processes in texts that both documented the work at hand and laid the groundwork for future projects. At the software companies I worked at, collaboration usually took the form of engineers who regularly met to work through knotty coding problems and documentation issues; in the newsroom, groups of reporters and editors relied upon daily meetings to generate questions for sources and ideas for investigations, as well as one-on-one editing sessions in which individual reporters and editors collaborated on the final version of stories. As many advocates of collaborative learning, including Kenneth Bruffee and Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede, have claimed, these moments of working together are uniquely powerful. When writers collaborate on a piece of text, audiovisual content, web construct, or even a chunk of software code, strong feelings of connection and knowledge rooted 1 As far back as 1982, Faigley and Miller found that 73.5% of professionals engaged in some form of collaborative writing in the workplace (561), and the number of organizations requiring collaborative work remains high (Hinds and Kiesler xv). 2 not in the individual minds of the participants but in the collective “mind” of the collaborating partnership are generated. In my teaching, I have attempted to give students the opportunity to understand and experience these types of collaboration. But every time I try, I meet immediate resistance—resistance familiar to any teacher who has asked students to work together. Their complaints ran the gamut from worries that they would be the only ones who did any work, to accusations that other students were not “good enough writers” to work with them, to blatant dismissals of collaborative writing as “busy work.” This resistance was not limited to undergraduates; my graduate student