howard and collaborative writing

Rebecca Moore Howard – Collaborative Pedagogies
Becky Howard is an accessible scholar. That’s why I like her research and her teaching. When she discusses collaboration as a pedagogical activity, she notes how collaborative exercises are common in the composition classroom, but collaborative writing less so. This absence is clearly frustrating to social constructivists, but it highlights a fundamental divergence in Comp/Tech Comm pedagogical relationships.

Collaborative writing is a central activity of the practicing technical communicator and perhaps the most valued instructional activity in the Tech Comm classroom. For Howard, the debate about collaborative writing is clear: “… the very notion of collaboration contradicts a long cultured tradition [within Comp] that privileges the individual agent and especially the solitary author” (55). In Tech Comm, we do not find the solitary author. Rather, we find the author in opposition to the humanist tradition of the “sanctity of the literary ownership” and solitary writing. In Tech Comm, “collaborative pedagogy is not so much an alternate pedagogy as it is a true mirroring of the true nature of writing” (55).

More critical to its association to Tech Comm, collaborative pedagogy offers students practice in common forms of work-place writing. Practice is the critical term here; too often associated with the model-and-drill exercises common to current-traditionalism. In the context of collaborative writing, practice has a currency in the Tech Comm classroom not always valued in the Comp classroom. “When collaborative pedagogy aims to prepare students for work-place tasks, it [is] designed not just on general precepts but also with a well-developed conception of work-place writing” (57). Arguably, this conceptualization is what makes highly contextualized writing instruction to occur. And there is no more common a place for such contextualization than the Tech Comm classroom.“… collaborative writing dominates the work place and many academic disciplines, and critical theory increasingly insists that all writing collaborative” (62).

I do like how Howard places collaborative pedagogies clearly within the social constructionism, as it exposes other pathways for Tech Comm into transactional rhetorics and related pedagogical traditions. “Knowledge conceived as socially constructed or generated validates the learning part of collaborative learning because it assumes that the interactions of collaboration can lead to new knowledge or learning” (56).