Peer Response in the Composition Classroom: An Alternative Genealogy

Abstract

This article reexamines the historical emergence of peer response as a pedagogical technique in composition classrooms. It first reviews Anne Ruggles Gere's influential account of that history, focusing on how that account was shaped by process pedagogy, collaborative learning theory, and ideologies of classroom authority and student autonomy. Then the author explores an alternative genealogy in which peer response emerges out of classroom practices of recitation and correction. The purpose of this rereading of peer response's history is to reconfigure teacher and student agency and also to suggest how historical analysis can enable or constrain present-day practices.

Notes

¹I thank RR peer reviewers Andrea Lunsford and Duane Roen, who provided valuable and useful feedback on this project. Special thanks go to Peter Mortensen and Paul Prior, who guided me through earlier versions of this piece.

²I use the term peer response to denote any context in which students in a writing course respond to the work of other students. Gere uses the term writing groups to encompass both this activity and any other extracurricular context in which writers respond to each other. Because this essay focuses on the introduction of peer response into composition classrooms, I employ the more pedagogically oriented term.

³Gere's history has been and continues to be influential in discussions of peer response, such as 2004's Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom, whose editors use Gere's account of the extracurricular origins of peer response as the “organizing principle” for their book (7). A search of the Arts & Humanities Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index hints at the broad impact of Writing Groups. It has been cited at least forty-six times in the journals covered by those indices since its publication in 1987. Of course, this kind of citation history is only an index of general influence and does not elucidate the ways in which a work has been taken up.

⁴Though Gere acknowledges there was some amount of “faculty support and participation” in these literary societies, she is also careful to mention that “on some occasions faculty became too active, leading to student complaints” (11). In this way she minimizes the importance of faculty participation, and even frames it as a problematic threat to the autonomous operation of these groups.

⁵Some subsequent scholarship has also called certain elements of collaborative learning theory into question. Both Joseph Harris and John Trimbur critique this theory's reliance on an idea of community built around consensus. Gail Stygall has argued that collaborative group work can perpetuate the hierarchy and authority it seeks to replace, especially in terms of gender dynamics.

⁶This idea that learning happens best among “status equals” or “peers” is a departure from Vygotsky, who emphasized the role of either “adult guidance” or “more capable peers” in collaborative problem-solving (Mind in Society 86). It is uncertain whether Vygotsky would characterize hierarchy or authority as a necessary hindrance to learning. In general, for Vygotsky, there is usually only one learner in a given collaboration.

⁷For example, see Nancy Sommers' seminal “Responding to Student Writing” and Lil Brannon and Cy Knoblauch's “On Students' Rights to Their Own Texts.”

⁸See note six, above, on the use of Vygotsky's concept of the “zone of proximal development.” My use of Vygotsky's framework here emphasizes the difference in knowledge or skill of participants implied by the concept.

⁹Interestingly, Gere also presents her view of learning as dialogic, since it involves conversation between writers and their (peer) audience. This is a “horizontal” view of the dialogic. I have understood “dialogic” here as the historical shaping of language practices through dialogic exchange, whether along a student-student axis or a student-teacher axis.

¹⁰Like individual student-teacher conferences, which also depend on meeting students outside of class, instructor-led peer conferences are time consuming and difficult to manage in contexts with a high teaching load, or large class sizes. See Lerner for a discussion of the way the desire for individualized instruction has historically been at odds with the practical time constraints of many classrooms.

¹¹Dene and Gordon Thomas in “The Use of Rogerian Reflection in Small-Group Writing Conferences” do discuss this kind of response context, but they focus on promoting Rogerian responses to student writing from both teachers and students. Susan Miller, in “Using Group Conferences to Respond to Essays in Progress,” offers some strategies for implementing these kinds of conferences.