Collaboration and Critical Pedagogy

In Chapter 4, “Collaborating on Multimodal Projects,” Anne-Marie Pedersen and Carolyn Skinner make some valuable and (in retrospect) obvious points about students pooling their resources to complete an assignment that involves multimodal discourse. Two benefits of collaborative work seem to ring particularly true for me are the sharing of knowledge between students (be it technical or otherwise) and the effective use of time and resources. Indeed, the emphasis of students teaching each other (and, in many cases, the instructor) harkens to Paulo Freire and bell hooks notions of critical pedagogy whereby “The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” (Freire 61). It seems to me that multimodality, or any course with a technological bent, yields the greatest opportunity for a type of problem-posing education simply because of the pace at which technology develops (teachers can’t possibly be expected to have a working knowledge of every new or updated program, nor can students. But collectively, there’s hope).

Also, as I mentioned in my previous post, I teach a multi-genre paper and I recently modified the assignment to be a collaborative work. On the practical level, this change reduced my grading load from twenty-four papers to eight (which is a blessing around finals time if you’re a graduate student), but more importantly it allowed students to draw upon each others academic strengthens and utilizing a variety of technological resources (this was particularly true or groups that had both PC and Mac users). In short, collaborative work is highly recommended from a pedagogical and practical standpoint.