Article Review #2: "Sharing Our Toys: Cooperative Learning versus Collaborative Learning"

Article #2:

Bruffee, K. A. (1995). Sharing Our Toys: Cooperative Learning versus Collaborative Learning. Change, 27(1), 12-18.

If, as Kevin mentioned in Monday's class, we can think of composition studies in camps, then some might argue that the director of Camp Collaboration is none other than Kenneth A. Bruffee. This article, "Sharing Our Toys: Cooperative Learning versus Collaborative Learning," piggybacks on many of Bruffee's earlier works, including such seminal works as his landmark 1984 essay "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind'" and his 1985 textbook A Short Course in Writing. In his earlier works as well as in this article, Bruffee discusses the entry of students into the discourse of the academy, and he points out that teachers play a vital role in helping students navigate this transition. Although "Sharing Our Toys" is several years old, it addresses the main concern of my project: differentiating between collaborative and cooperative learning in the writing classroom.

At the heart of this article, as the name suggests, is Bruffee's attempt to parse out the differences between cooperative and collaborative learning. Although the two words both bring to mind the much-maligned notion of "group work," the differences between cooperating and collaborating reveal themselves when we consider the power relationships of the players in a given environment. Cooperative learning, which Bruffee argues dominates the landscape of primary and even some of secondary education, places the teacher in the position of power. This enables the students to learn to work with one another in a non-competitive environment, relying on the teacher as the leader and knowledge-maker. Collaborative learning, on the other hand, shifts the onus of power from the teacher to the learners, allowing (and often inviting) insecurity and sometimes conflict, but also providing an environment in which students seek and create knowledge themselves. This model, then, better serves to acculturate students to the discourse communities they seek to join in the academy. Bruffee points out, after all, that the university instructor should help students "cope interdependently with the challenges generated by and within this encompassing community of uncertainty, ambiguity, and doubt" (p. 16).

I am tailoring my project to an online first-year writing class for TCC, and these ideas certainly resonate with me as I consider how I will frame the assignments and discussions required for the unit. This article is especially applicable because of the preconceived notions that many of the students in such a class will likely bring with them. For many students, TCC's ENG 111 is their very first online class, not to mention often their very first college class period. This means that the notions they have about "group work" often stem from their experiences in their K-12 learning, experiences that, as Bruffee points out, may well have leaned more toward the cooperative model rather than the collaborative one that we seek to establish in the college writing classroom.

Bruffee, K. A. (1984). Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind'. College English, 46 (7), 635-52.

Bruffee, K. A. (1985). A Short Course in Writing. New York: Longman.