Reading Charlotte Brammer and Mary Rees’ “Peer Review From the Students’ Perspective: Invaluable or Invalid” with a bit of unease at first, not sure where this was going to end. As someone who graduated high school before peer review became a commonplace in classrooms, I first encountered this process in a literary survey class after returning to college at the age of 42 to finish my B.A.
I must admit that, at first, I did worry I might not give or receive adequate (or appropriate) feedback from the other students who acknowledged they felt as lost as I did. In the end, though, it made a difference in my comfort-level in both understanding and delivering on the expectations of a composition classroom. Now, as a teacher myself, peer review and collaboration are the backbone of my own pedagogy.
As a teacher myself, I absolutely get that “establishing a productive community of collaborative writers is anything but easy” (72). My question, I guess, is – is it supposed to be?
It also makes sense that L1 students respond better than L2 students who more than likely begin at a much different comfort-level; however, even with L2 students, if the teacher is able to take the time to teach the students what to look for and to help them “build rapport among classmates,” any student might be made comfortable with the process.
That students who are required “to complete in-class peer reviews,” tend to place more value on this collaboration than those who aren’t is not surprising as, for the most part I believe, they come into the classroom with the idea (maybe the ideal, obviously sometimes unrealistic) that the teacher’s mission is to demonstrate for them things of value they do not already possess.
I was relieved to discover that Brammer and Rees were not exhorting teachers to abandon the practice, but, instead, challenging teachers to “take the necessary steps to allow students to learn to trust their classmates as ‘true peers’” (82).
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Rhonda,
ReplyDeleteI, too, was relieved that Brammer and Rees were not calling for teachers to abandon the practice of peer review, but challenging them to take steps in order to insure that students viewed it as the form of collaborative learning that Bruffee originally set out to establish rather than an exercise in proofreading and editing. In fact, having both worked on Bruffee as my major presentation and served as a tutor in the Writing Room here on campus, I see just how truthful and important such a call is. Over the past few decades, the concept of peer review has been boiled down to nothing short of an editing process. Such a concept, in turn, directly goes against that notion of like-minded tutoring that Bruffee called for as students collaborate together in order to develop their writing skills and enter the larger academic dialogue. We need to get back to this original stance because, as I see it, this, rather than that of proofreading and editing, is the more beneficial version of peer review.
Thomas