Kenneth Bruffee

Bruffee is a major advocate of collaborative learning and believes this process contributes to significant benefits in the attainment (or invention) of knowledge. In addition, Bruffee supports the use of collaboration in writing centers, the composition classroom, and in writing in other disciplines as well. Bruffee’s collaborative theory is grounded on social constructivist epistemology which asserts that knowledge and even reality do not exist until they are socially constructed. In some ways Bruffee’s ideas seem to coincide with Graff’s well-known decree to “teach the conflicts” in that students are learning to situate themselves in a larger academic discourse. However, Bruffee’s ideas are not purely based on argumentation; instead, he sees the collaborative process as a time of creating knowledge.

I agree with Bruffee in that collaborative learning has many benefits: it is a way to attain new points of view, it challenges students to develop their own position, and it engages students in the dialogic academic setting. My major contention with Bruffee is his assertion that learning can only take place socially. While I concede that all knowledge is ascertained through some sort of interaction between ideas, I argue that this can be done by an individual. A student can go to the library on their own, pick up a book, and engage with the author of that text. Though many people may benefit from having a group discussion about the contents of the book, why is it impossible for the individual to develop his own opinions and to attain knowledge without the collaborative process?

I would like to learn more about the specific methods that Bruffee advocates for the collaborative process in terms of composition. This collaborative process seems to include, though is not limited to, the peer review process. But how else does he socialize the learning process? Furthermore, in a model like this, how does the instructor ensure that groups are engaging in higher order thinking rather than conversing on trivial points on a text and making superficial corrections to writing?