Kathleen McCormick
Prof. of Literature & Pedagogy
School of Humanities
Purchase College, SUNY
Purchase, NY 10577
“In Other People’s Mouths”: Nested Peer Mentoring for Collaboration in First-Year Writing Classes and Beyond
Short Version of Keynote Address
For students to engage and succeed in complex reading, thinking, writing, and research in first-year college writing classes and beyond, they need to work collaboratively (Barkley, Bruffee, Fontaine and Hunter, Lunsford and Ede, Trimbur)in authentic learning environments (Fitzsimmons, Hannafin, Herrington, Reeves, and Oliver) that are constructivist in epistemology (Honebein, Tobias and Duffey, Wilson) andthat scaffold (Belland, Dennen, Molloy)their work in multiple ways.Bycreating a system of nested peer mentoring in which advanced or “cross-level”(Falchikov) peer mentors (PMs)work with students individually and scaffoldthree different stages of co-peer collaboration, I develop classrooms that spark and sustainstudent learning in manifold ways.
Students engage in long-term small co-peer research/writing groups (2 separate research projects or “guides” in 2 different groups for approximately half of the term each); short-term co-peer workshop groups; and co-peer research group “expert” teaching. For the first guide, I provide students with four different research packets on two novels. Students work in different groups for the second guide,choosingtheir own research area which can be a literary or a media text and doing all of their research themselves, with support from a designated librarian, their PM and the teacher. Once students decideon a research focus, they must still collaboratively negotiate how to divide up areas of emphasis anddetermine over time how their research and writing will complement each other’s to create a relatively coherent, though not consensus-driven (Trimbur),20-25 page piece of writing.So students gradually revise, often reconceptualizingtheir work, both individually and together, knowing that what they ultimately create will be given to the rest of the class to read, study, and respond to for homework. Guides are the only secondary source the class uses on the primary texts we are studying.
Eventually, each co-peer research group teaches the whole class for a full 100 minute period by guiding discussions based on their written work, and, suddenly the people with the expertise shift from the PMs or the teacher to the students in whateverresearch groupis running the class.This kind of repeated shifting of who has advanced knowledge is vital for the maximum amount of learning to occur.
The stages of the assignment are designed to help students establish trust and respect in thePMs and the teacheras well asamong each other.Thus, common criticisms of students not acting on or having faith inpeers’ advice or finding group work a waste of time rarely occur (Savery, Spears, Spigelman).Each co-peer group is significantly changed because of the presence of cross-level peer mentors working with them.PMs are usually always there to help the group if they are floundering or go off topic, preventing any one student from dominating the group, and encouraging students to fully develop their ideas and to learn a language of helpful critique of others which they can then apply to their own work. Further, and perhaps most importantly, PMs offer meta-commentary that highlights the strengths of individual members of a group, potentially increasing their status in the group and their self-confidence. Often, for example, co-peers will make the same comments about a student’s work that the PM or as the teacher has, but if studentsfail to trust each other, they don’t even recognize the similarity, so they won’t see that they can genuinely learn from each other. When the overlap is pointed out by the PM, students begin to take reviews from their own classmates much more seriously.
The goal of nested peer mentoring is to create an overdetermined set of opportunities for each student to reach what Lev Vygotsky calls the “zone of proximal development”: helpingstudents develop reading, writing, thinking, research, and oral skills that are within their grasp, but that they could not develop on their own. And the tasks of writing toteach one’s peers and organizing class discussions creates incredibly strong motivation in virtually all students, particularly when they are researching topics of their own.Students want their classmates to find their work interesting, compelling, and often controversial. So students are highly receptive to and grow significantly from all the scaffolding they receive in all of thedifferent nested peer mentoring contexts.
Lunsford argues that“[c]ollaborative environments must demand collaboration,” and that “students, tutors, teachers must really need one another to carry out common goals” (7). I suggest a research assignment that I’ve used successfully in collaborative classes from the freshman to the senior level. It is highly adaptable to different disciplines and levels of students and is sufficiently large in scope that each student is needed to in order to complete it;it has multiple sections, and there are a number ofpossible directions within each of thesesections thatstudents will discover during their research and from which they will have to choose.Ideally, the assignment should have a component that prevents the possibility of students’ simply seeking consensus; students should, rather, focus on negotiating what facets of the topic they will cover.
The assignment I use requires students to write on three aspects of a literary or media text: its style; its history of production—which can be anything from the author’s biography, to artistic movements occurring at the time, to world events that influenced/are referenced in the text, todominant and emergent beliefs of the time, etc. and could never be “fully covered” because of its breadth; and the changing history of the text’s reception in both popular and academic circles from when the text was first created until the present, which, as with production, is so vast that students must choose to focus on a selection of interpretations. All texts we discuss have had significantly shifting responses over time.Students are also requiredto include their own readings of the texts they are researching, but they need to try as much as possible to explore why—at this particular historical moment—they are able to develop their particular ideas about the text. So while they have come to understand from their research of the text’s changing reception that no one interpretation is either universal across time (as they often seem to have thought in high school), they have also realized that no single interpretation is predetermined at any given point in time. While they learn about the dominant ideology, they are well aware that there are always alternative spaces and that the dominant is contradictory and that, in those contradictions, different ways of reading a text emerge.
Everyone benefits from a good guide and a good discussion: the writers/leaders can see all that they’ve done right and the rest of the class admires good work because it engages them. A well-done guide and discussion causes the class to pay attention to much more than the text being discussed. Students are highly attuned to the clarity of writing, the guide’s organization, to whether the writers have asked interesting and provocative questions andrelated differing interpretive perspectives to particular historical conditions, etc. As students begin to respect each other and themselves more, they becomemore receptive to what their peers can teach them
and to their own potential for learning. The class discussion istruly the best feedback students can receive on their writing.
Students also become more responsible as the semester develops and increasingly invested in their own work and the work of their group. This is exactly what Vygotsky would predict, which usually enables the PMs’ scaffolding to begin to be reduced or to “fade” as students start finding ways to help each other and themselves. This kind of assignment requires social interaction, and more than Iwould have realized. Students talk about issues from your class at parties—and yes, I have definite evidence that this does happen quite regularly which increases the embeddedness of your course in your students’ lives and supports Vygotsky’s notion of the social constructivist nature of learning.
I know this method works when I watch my students in my freshman composition classes develop their abilities. I know it works when my colleagues tell me what good writers my freshmen are when they’ve become juniors and their strong writing abilities have transferred from one class to another. I know it works when I use this same methodology in an upper-level class—such as my course in James Joyce’s Ulysses where we have a guide a day and I let some students into the class who’ve been in my college writing course the previous year and who, as sophomores, might not have the breadth of reading or writing experience thatmore advanced students do, but who nonetheless excel because they know how to draft, they know how to do research, and they know how to work collaboratively to learn more together than they ever could have alone.
Works Cited
Barkley, Elizabeth F, K P. Cross, and Claire H. Major.Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005.
Belland, Brian R. "Scaffolding: definition, current debates, and future directions." Spector: 505-518.
Bruffee, Kenneth A. "Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation Mankind.’” College English 46.7 (1984): 635-652.
Dennen, Vanessa Paz. "Cognitive Apprenticeship in Educational Practice: Research on Scaffolding, Modeling, Mentoring, and Coaching as Instructional Strategies." Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology: A Project of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT Series). David H. Jonassen and Marcy P. Driscoll, Eds. Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004: 813-828.
Falchikov, Nancy. Learning Together: Peer Tutoring In Higher Education. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Fitzsimmons, J 2006, "Speaking Snake: Authentic Learning and the Study of Literature. " A. Herrington and J. Herrington, eds. Authentic Learning Environments In Higher Education. Hershey, PA: Information Science Pub: 162-171.
Fontaine, Sheryl I. and Susan M. Hunter.Collaborative Writing in Composition Studies. Boston: Thompson Wadsworth, 2006
Hannafin, Michael J., Jeanette R. Hill, Susan M. Land, and Eunbae Lee. "Student-centered, open learning environments: research, theory, and practice." Spector: 641-651.
Herrington, Jan Thomas C. Reeves, and Ron Oliver."Authentic Learning Environments."Spector: 401-412.
Honebein, Peter C. "Seven Goals for the Design all Constructivist Learning Environments." Wilson, Brent G., ed. Constructivist Learning Environments: Case Studies in Instructional Design. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Educational Technology Publications, 1996: 11-24.
Lunsford, Andrea. "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center."WritingCenter Journal 12.1 (1991): 3-11.
Lundsford, Andrea and Lisa Ede.Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives On Collaborative Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.
Molloy, Elizabeth K. and David Boud."Feedback Models for Learning, Teaching and Performance."Spector: 413-424.
Savery, John R. "Fostering Ownership For Learning With Computer-Supported Collaborative Writing In An Undergraduate Business Communication Course." 103-127. In Bonk, Curtis Jay and Kira S. King. Electronic Collaborators: Learner-Centered Technologies For Literacy, Apprenticeship, And Discourse. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988.
Spear, Karen. Sharing Writing: Peer Response Groups in English Classes. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1988.
Spector, J M., Ed. Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology.Fourth edition. New York, NY: Springer, 2014.
Tobias, S. and T. M. Duffy. "The Success or Failure of Constructivist Instruction: An Introduction." S. Tobias and T. M. Duffy. Constructivist Instruction: Success Or Failure. New York: Routledge, 2009: 3-10.
Trimbur, John. "Collaborative Learning and Teaching Writing."Perspectives on Research and Scholarship in Composition.Ben W. McClelland and Timothy Donovan, Eds. New York: MLA, 1985.
Spigelman, Candace. Across Property Lines: Textual Ownership in Writing Groups. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000.
Vygotsky, Lev S., Eugenia Hanfmann, GertrudaVakar, and Alex Kozulin.Thought and Language. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2012.
Wilson, Brent G., ed. Constructivist Learning Environments: Case Studies in Instructional Design. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Educational Technology Publications, 1996.
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