Note: The Useful Links menu contains some additional information about John Trimbur, Richard Rorty, and two of Trimbur's articles, as mentioned in this analysis.
John Trimbur
John Trimbur supports the pedagogy of collaborative learning. At the same time, he is a critic of the traditional definition created by scholars such as Kenneth A. Bruffee and Harvey S. Wiener. In his article "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning," Trimbur articulates the conventional explanation of collaborative learning:
The aim of collaborative learning, its advocates hold, is to reach consensus through an expanding conversation. This conversation takes place at a number of levels- first in small discussion groups, next among the groups in a class, then between a class and the teacher, and finally among the class, the teacher, and the wider community of knowledge. (602)
Trimbur supports the pedagogy of collaborative learning, but critiques the idea of consensus and the pedagogy's limited focus on the internal workings of discourse communities rather than the wider social forces that structure the production of knowledge. Instead, his essay focuses on the redefining of the term consensus in conjuncture with a collaborative pedagogy. After all, consensus can be "a powerful instrument for students to generate differences, to identify the systems of authority that organize these differences, and to transform the relations of power that determine who may speak and what counts as a meaningful statement" (603). Trimbur's argument fits well with Burke's definition of dramatism and the idea of a type of "competitive cooperation." The main thing students should understand is that many of the terms that are used to define the relationships of objects are socially constructed to fit the needs of the time. By questioning these constructions in an open discourse, new strategies of identification can be formed. John Trimbur fully believes that collaborative learning is the way to transfer this knowledge into a classroom. However, the traditional sense of collaborative learning needs to be revamped.
Bruffee's work is important because it became the foundational point for insisting that the classroom and the culture of teaching and learning is a social text that needs to be critiqued. Trimbur acknowledges that it was "not accidental that collaborative leaning emerged initially within open admission programs, as part of a wider response to political pressures from below to extend literacy and access to higher education to black, Hispanic, and working-class people who had formerly been excluded" (605). What Trimbur asks is that society critically analyzes and questions how and why collaborative learning developed in response to a social need.
What I find most interesting about some of the articles I have read by John Trimbur is his emphasis on the competing and contradictory issues prevalent in the academic world. His critical analysis is reminiscent of theories in postcolonial studies, an area of interest I want to study. For instance, Trimbur insists that students should learn "not how consensus is achieved through collaboration negotiation but rather how differences in interest produce conflicts that may in fact block communication and prohibit the development of consensus" (611). Using a colonial example, Hernando Cortez was successful in his campaign against the Aztecs because he seized control of the communication of language. His interest lay in conquering the indigenous people, not understanding them. However, in The Empire Writes Back, Montezuma's weakness was inherent in his lack of understanding of the information presented to him:
Montezuma's problem was that no basis existed for an adequate understanding of the information he received about the conquistadores because no place existed for them in Aztec reality- the Other was always that which could be foreseen. The only explanation was that they were gods, in which case opposition would be futile. (78)
Cortez, of course, did not want to dissuade Montezuma from this understanding of his people's reality because, in order to conquer them, it was easier to work under the umbrella of complacency and miscommunication rather than defiance and war. Although this is an extreme example, it does demonstrate Trimbur's point that it is important for students to understand the conflicts and manipulation that occur within the socially constructed world of education. Of course this only raises the complicated issue of abnormal discourses and how those function within a community.
Abnormal discourses represent, at any given time, the set of power relations that organize normal discourse. In his article on "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning," Trimbur describes it as "the acts of permission and prohibition, of incorporation and exclusion that institute the structure and practice of discourse communities" (608). This definition refers to marginalizing one voice of discourse over another, an interpretation that is very prevalent in postcolonial literary studies, which seeks to overthrow the societal valuing of canon literature with universal themes over dissenting, multicultural pieces of literature. Trimbur furthers his point by explaining how abnormal discourses are used in the relation of power to "determine what falls within the current consensus and what is assigned the status of dissent" (608).
Trimbur further develops this argument in another article entitled "English Only and U.S. College Composition." In that article, he and his fellow coauthor, Bruce Horner, question the formation of U.S. college composition courses that are based "on a chain of reifications of languages and social identities" (594). Their goal in writing their article is to "call for an internationalist perspective on written English in relation to other languages and the dynamics of globalization" (594). I don't want to go into too many details about globalization, a topic I wrote about on my 600 website, but I do want to acknowledge the perspectives of the author:
The fact that U.S. writing instruction is conducted in English seems commonsensical. After all, though English is not the official language of the U.S., this is an English-speaking nation. As everyone from politicians and educational policymakers to non-English speaking immigrants knows, in the U.S., a knowledge of English is virtually required to get an education, to develop professionally, and to participate in civic life. As a consequence, a first-year course in written English, along with basic writing and ESL courses that point students toward fluency in written and spoken English, seems not only to make sense but to be inevitable in the design of writing programs and curriculum. The purpose of this essay is to raise some questions about this familiar state of affairs. We argue that a tacit language policy of unidirectional English monolingualism has shaped the historical formation of U.S. writing instruction and continues to influence its theory and practice in shadowy, largely unexamined ways. (594-95)
The main issue that both articles by John Trimbur raise is the necessity of people to critically analyze and question the status-quo of how our lives are influenced by the natural, consensus way of doing things. This consensus is developed by the cultural influences prevalent in our life and the way we are taught to write and express ideas. Professors of composition need to recognize these influences and teach their students, through collaborative learning, to ask the questions Robert Connors raised in his article "Dreams and Play:"
- Why are things around me as they are?
- Why do I see and judge things around me as I do?
Trimbur's suggestion on how this can be accomplished is by rehabilitating "the notion of consensus by redefining it in relation to a rhetoric of dissensus" ("Consensus 610). This means that the classroom we as future professors in the field of composition should promote are those in which students discuss collective explanations of how people differ, where their differences come from, and whether communities can live and work together with these differences. Personally, I like how Richard Rorty explained it best:
"Learning is a shift in a person's relations with others, not a shift inside the person that now suits him to enter new relationships" (Rorty 187).
Although I do not agree with all the ideas Rorty lays out in his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), I do agree that people, and students most especially, need to see learning as a shift in their relationship with other communities, not an individual experience. Communities influence how identities are created, and that is what Trimbur suggests professors of composition teach- the differences within these communities that lead to the creation of new identities.
Works Cited
Kirsch, Gesa and Patricia A. Sullivan, eds. Methods and Methodology in Composition Research. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1992.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Horner, Bruce and John Trimbur. "English Only and U.S. College Composition." CCC 53:4 (2002): 594-630.
Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979.
Trimbur, John. "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning." College English 51:6 (1989): 602-16.