BENSON, ALAN, Ph.D. Collaborative Authoring and the Virtual

293 Pages·2012·0.85 MB·English

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.

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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

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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.
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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
vv
LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1. The Sense of Community Loop ..........................................................................75

Figure 2. Student Assessment of Their Peers, Spring ......................................................112
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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 peers were just as reluctant to work
together, and Joan P. Isenberg, Mary Renck Jalongo, and Karen D’Angelo Bromley’s
research shows a similar reluctance among educators.
A look through the tables of contents of major journals shows that single
authoring remains the primary means of authoring in English Studies.2 Clearly, there is a
powerful resistance to working together, even by those who acknowledge the pedagogical
and productive value of collaboration. Yet in the scholarship of collaboration, there is a
tendency to position working together as an act that remains the same no matter the
context in which it takes place. As my experiences in the corporate and academic world
illustrate, this is not the case. Collaboration is context-sensitive, and the shapes of

2 This is in contrast to research into publishing practices in other fields, which shows that
“most universities undertake a substantial amount of collaboration and, in general, the
amount of collaboration has jumped substantially in recent years” (Phelan, Anderson, and
Bourke 635). Yet, as Haviland and Mullin note, the fiction of the solo academic “is
maintained in some humanities fields where single-authored texts or projects are the
norm; even though feedback and editorial comments from colleagues clearly affect the
creation of a text, these are not always acknowledged” (17).