Kenneth Bruffee

Kenneth A. Bruffee ( September 1, 1934 - January 20, 2019 ) was an American English graduate and professor at Brooklyn College . Bruffee took particular care of didactic issues of writing skills and collaborative learning . The development of writing centers in the 1980s and 1990s and the introduction of organized peer tutoring at American universities, in which students trained as peer tutors support their fellow students with academic writing through discussions, can be largely attributed to him .

Bruffee graduated from Wesleyan University and received his PhD in English from Northwestern University in 1966 . His first book on peer tutoring - A Short Course in Writing - appeared in 1972 and in 1976 he was first chairman of the newly established department for teaching writing at the Modern Language Association . In 1977 he co-founded the National Council of Writing Center Administrators and two years later became the founding editor of its magazine. In 1979 he founded the Institute for the Training of Peer Tutors at Brooklyn College and directed the FIPSE-funded institute from 1979 to 1982. In the decades that followed he was a frequent keynote speaker at events for writing training and received various fellowships.

Collaborative Learning Theory

Although the idea of ​​writing groups and learning together go back centuries, they only played a marginal role in the university landscape of the 20th century. The boom that theories of collaborative learning took in the 1980s is largely due to Bruffee's theoretical influence. Bruffee was one of the first to deal with the theory and basic principles of collaborative learning. He showed himself to be an advocate of social constructivism . Building on ideas from Thomas S. Kuhn , Richard Rorty and Clifford Geertz , among others , he developed the idea of ​​teaching as a social transaction in which equals work together in the production of academic discourse . Knowledge is generated socially and is based solely on dialogue. What determines the knowledge in a field is not a collection of facts, but the result of a collaboration in a group that exchanges ideas, tests, discards, inherits and develops them further. The determining technique in this discussion is writing, because this is the technique scientists and academics use to exchange ideas. His defining essay in this context is Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind'

Practical work at writing centers

Writing centers developed in American universities in the 1970s in response to the development of the mass university. A significantly larger group of students than before with more heterogeneous learning, reading and writing skills poured into the universities. Initially as a supplement to the other lessons, the universities founded Writing Centers, at which the basics of academic writing were taught. In the beginning these worked like other teaching units, the lessons were given by lecturers and tutors. The results from these centers often did not meet expectations. Various researchers, including Bruffee, concluded that it was related to their resemblance to existing college education. From the analysis of data from medical students, he came to the conclusion that students who studied as a group achieved their goals faster and more effectively than those who worked individually with a teacher. Bruffee advocated developing the monitor model in which a knowing teacher confronts an ignorant student through a collaborative model in which the student participates in the discourse as a full partner, and thus learns to develop knowledge collaboratively in writing.

Particularly in his earlier texts from the 1970s, Bruffee understood collaborative learning as part of a larger movement away from traditional authorities and hierarchical learning in competitive situations towards participation and democracy , non-hierarchical organization and anti-authority learning. In the position surrounding the Writing Center in the university landscape, Bruffee's texts form the basis for the point of view that the Writing Center saw as being on an equal footing with other institutes, while at the same time successfully challenging academic customs.

Works

• Elegiac Romance: Cultural Change and Loss of the Hero in Modern Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983).
• A Short Course in Writing , 4th edition (New York: Addison-Wesley Longman, 1992).
• Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence and the Authority of Knowledge , 2nd edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990).

Remarks

1. ↑ Obituary. In: legacy.com. February 3, 2019, accessed February 6, 2019 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Thomas: Notes on Kenneth Bruffee , English 501 March 29, 2009
3. ^ Charles Bivona: John Trimbur on Kenneth Bruffee ( Memento August 27, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) , The Writer's Notebook March 4, 2010
4. ↑ Tom Truesdell: Problems with Bruffee: Post-Process Theory and Writing Center Opposition ( Memento of the original from November 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in: Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, Spring 2008 (Volume 5 Issue 2)

Web links

• Brooklyn College website