It’s only because I picked Breuch’s texts out of the stack before I left for a conference that I’m addressing her at this point. It’s been a positive happenstance.
Breuch is claiming that virtual peer review (“the activity of using computer technology to exchange and respond to one another’s writing for the purpose of improving writing”) is a different enough activity from face-to-face peer review (traditional peer review – my term) that it warrants a closer examination by writing teachers. The principle difference between traditional peer review and virtual peer review is that “computer technology must be used to interact with peer reviewers” (11). Bruech goes onto to refine the activity by claiming that computer technology must be used in three specific ways: 1) to write documents; 2) to exchange written documents electronically; and 3) to converse with reviewers about those documents through synchronous or asynchronous electronic comments.
I’m immediately struck by the similarity of virtual peer review activities to those of the modern knowledge worker (see Spinuzzi), and specifically to the fundamental activities of the modern technical communicator. Breuch notes as much in her examples of the frequently mis-identified activity of virtual peer review in professional and classroom contexts. “These examples demonstrate that virtual peer review has begun to appear in classrooms, online writing centers, workplaces, and even daily lives… Several other writing practices may already include virtual peer review; it is just that we have not recognized it in any consistent or formal way” (12).
I’m early yet into the text, so at this point I want to situate Breuch’s claim within the theoretical and pedagogical framework I’m building. She begins with Depardo and Freeman’s four categories of collaborative writing: 1) responding to writing (peer review); 2) thinking collaboratively; 3) writing collaboratively; and 4) editing student writing. She extends their first category to Ruggles Gere’s definition of peer review – of “writers responding to one another work.” Breuch also draws on Kenneth Bruffee’s interchangeable definitions of “peer criticism” and “peer evaluation” to further refine her definition of virtual peer review.
And it’s at this point that I found myself looping back to how I saw Berlin’s epistemic transactional rhetorics in opposition to objectivist theories -- those most closely related to positivistic pedagogies, the current traditional, and common Comp and Tech Comm pedagogies based on objective rhetorics. In Bruffee, in particular, we have social constructivist who claims that “knowledge is created through social interaction … peer review can be defined as responding to another’s writing for the purposes of improving writing” (10). Through Brufee, Depardo, Freeman, and others, Breuch is making a claim for a pedagogy that aligns with Berlin’s epistemic transactional rhetorics, where "all truths arise out of dialectic, out of the interaction of individuals within discourse communities” (Berlin 16-17). I now see transactional rhetorics as not oppositional to objectivist theories, but yet another useful type of rhetoric in the Comp and Tech Comm classroom. In Breuch I’m seeing that I can’t create an artificial Comp vs. Tech Comm binary in which to consider my major exam. I have to locate the principle claims and debates, and find out how and where they’ve been taken up by either discipline.
It’s likely that this early into the text I’m oversimplifying Breuch’s claim, but I see the pedagogical implications of her definition of virtual peer review on Comp and Tech Comm. More to come, I’m sure, but it seems that the ubiquity of technology-enhanced writing practices would require Com and Tech Comm teachers to employ pedagogies shaped by of inclusive of virtual peer review activities.
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