Bruffee (1995). Sharing our toys: Cooperative learning versus collaborative learning.

Bruffee, K. A. (1995). Sharing our toys: Cooperative learning versus collaborative learning. Change, 27(1), 12–18.

“Some people call this rediscovery cooperative learning. Others call it collaborative learning. Is there really any difference between the two? If so, what is it, and does it matter?” (p 12)

“By reacculturation I mean renegotiating membership in groups or cultures we already belong to and becoming members as well of other groups or cultures.” (p 14)

“… reacculturation … It is complex, painful, and, in most cases, forever incomplete. It involves modifying or renegotiating our participation in the language, values, knowledge, and mores of the communities we come from, as well as becoming fluent in those same elements of the communities we are trying to join.” (p 14)

“We can now state this same case positively in a way that includes, but goes somewhat beyond, Dewey’s doctrine that ‘school is primarily a social institution’ and that experience is education. We can now identify the particular experience that educates: constructive conversation. Students learn by joining transition communities in which people construct knowledge as they talk together and reach consensus. What teachers do is set up conditions in which students can learn. And one of the most important ways teachers do that is by organizing students into transition communities for reacculturative conversation.” (p 14)

“College and university students too may openly acknowledge their teachers’ authority, and by resisting it tacitly acknowledge it. But what college and university students should not do is take their teachers’ authority and the authority of what they teach for granted. … Teaching students to come to terms with doubt is the second way that college and university education is nonfoundational.” (p 15)

“What students do first in collaborative learning is construct knowledge socially in small groups. Then they test socially the knowledge they have constructed, first in the larger community of the class as a whole and then in the much larger professional community represented in the classroom by the teacher. This nesting of smaller knowledge communities within increasingly larger ones both constructs the authority of knowledge and is the principal tool for evaluating, confirming, and, when necessary, revoking that authority.” (p 17)