“The first steps to learning to think better are to learn to converse better and to learn to create and maintain the sort of social contexts, the sorts of community life, that foster the kinds of conversation we value” (90).
The first time I read “The Conversation of Mankind,” I was completely floored by this quotation (my marginalia from 2017 says “OH MY GOD”). I think it’s the best exemplification I’ve ever encountered of the idea that writing is a social act. For me, it’s easy to understand the idea that you need a community of like-minded peers to best foster the kind of thinking that community engages in. This is something that’s perhaps easiest to grasp if you can imagine someone trying to do this kind of thinking without having that community–the basic idea and the desire to engage are present, but the ideas can’t quite be fully developed without those critical social conversations. You can’t get there on your own; you need outside stimulation to stir up your thinking. For example, after I got my BA, I worked at a tech company for a few years and I wasn’t engaging much with academia. When I went back for my MA, being able to re-enter those sites of discourse was so overwhelmingly inspiring because the things that were going on in my own head changed immediately. I felt like I’d gotten a piece of myself back–but I could only have achieved it by re-entering those conversations.
To briefly summarize Bruffee’s essay: for Bruffee, knowledge is explicitly collaborative; even private thought is modeled on what we’ve experienced through conversation. All knowledge is a social act that takes place in tandem with one’s community of knowledgeable peers—it occurs in a specific context and arises out of a set of shared understandings, or “normal discourse.” Basic knowledge itself is created by consensus among these communities of knowledgeable peers. Thought, then, is an internalization of the conversations among these communities. Writing, in turn, is an externalization of those internalized conversations.
Bruffee’s essay emphasizes that writing is always completely dependent on its situation and social context; it does not exist in isolation. Therefore, the job of a peer tutor isn’t simply to help students to write well—it’s to help them understand the normal discourse and conventions of their various discourse communities. Together, student and tutor can model that normal discourse, which helps them understand how knowledge is created in those community conversations.
I find Bruffee’s emphasis on knowledge and writing as inherently social really compelling. However, as is often the case for me with theory-heavy essays, I left this essay wishing that Bruffee had gone further and provided some practical applications, too. So, here are some questions I am thinking about as I try to imagine how our writing centers can best foster socially situated writing:
- What can writing centers do in tutor training courses to establish the culture of collaborative learning and discourse that Bruffee describes on page 97? How can we better help tutors understand their role as a discourse-modeling partner?
- More specifically, what are some “best practices” of a session that promotes this theory? What moves occur during these sessions?
- Bruffee argues that rather than “the blind leading the blind,” peer tutoring allows tutor and writer to work together to master the normal discourse as long as “their conversation is structured indirectly by the task or problem that a member of that community (the teacher) provides” (94). As both a tutor and teacher, I want to know more about this! What are the features of an assignment that effectively scaffolds students’ participation in the normal discourse?
Writing Center/Writing Charlotte 