Reading Response - Do Your Own Work

Our readings and class discussions have made me evaluate how working in digital environments challenges traditional viewpoints on what constitutes ethical and academically valuable writing. The writing classroom has traditionally focused on the single author worked as the pinnacle of academic achievement. However, in the workplace, employees are frequently required to participate in activities either devalued or condemned in the traditional classroom environment. In order to fully educate students, the question we must reevaluate in the face of our changing educational ecology is “what does it mean to do your own work?”

Collaboration
In “Interaction Between Learning and Development,” Vygotsky makes the argument that students are able to accomplish much more in collaboration with one another or with an adult’s guidance than they can individually, making a student’s zone of proximal development (the distance between a student’s actual developmental level and level of potential development) a much stronger indicator of the student’s capabilities than his/her actual development.

However, much of our traditional schooling system invalidates the idea that any problem solving that can be completed with assistance, but not individually, has any value and actually “counts” towards a student’s current level of development. This idea of the all-important measure of individual learning is so pervasive that even innovative teachers such as Anne Moege (a middle school English teacher who now uses wikis to teach her students to write summaries) struggle with the concept of accepting collaboration and peer scaffolding as legitimate learning tools. After observing that her students were able to produce better summaries when working collaboratively, Moege is quoted in Because Digital Writing Matters as realizing, “I had to get rid of the mind frame that if they are not doing it on their own, they’re not learning. ‘Each kid has to write his or her own summary’ might have been my mind frame a while ago. Now, it’s ‘They can learn a little bit more from each other. They can all offer insight to a chapter. The can collaborate, and they are still learning the same skills” (Devos, pg. 44).

As adults in the workplace, new employees learn the skills they need faster by collaborating closely with experienced coworkers. When learning a new task at work, employees can accomplish much more if they’re given a small amount of guidance on a task they’ve almost mastered than by struggling to complete it alone. In order to capitalize on this learning potential, it’s important that students are taught that collaborative work is as valuable or, potentially, more valuable than individual work. In Moege’s classroom, she found that her students could create much better projects working collaboratively than by themselves. This is a skill set that translates directly into the workplace . If we in our teaching structure work within a community of practice and value collaborative work, our students will also value this type of collaborative work and take that attitude into the workplace.


Sources
1. DeVoss, Dànielle Nicole., Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks. Because Digital Writing Matters: Improving Student Writing in Online and Multimedia Environments. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010. Print.

2. Vygotsky, Lev S. "Interaction Between Learning and Development." Readings on the Development of Children. Ed. Mary Gauvain and Michael Cole. 2nd ed. New York: W.H. Freeman and, 1997. 29-36. Print.