Assessing collaboration: Techniques, technologies, and cultural reproduction in the composition classroom

Abstract

Despite proponents' claims of its embodying and enabling democratic action, collaborative learning in the composition classroom often functions to reproduce the privileged discourses and knowledge of dominant cultures, effacing and denying differences in race, class, and gender. Moreover, such functions are masked by normalized structural and discursive conditions of education and routinized pedagogical practices that rarely face critical scrutiny---what this dissertation refers to as the techniques and technologies of collaborative learning. If teachers and students in composition studies can engage in what Pierre Bourdieu calls epistemic reflexivity (a critical effort to unmask the social and intellectual unconscious embedded in routinized procedures of knowledge production), the collaborative classroom can become a site for resisting and critiquing, rather than reproducing, the status quo.