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The Contributions of Kenneth Bruffee

In the forty plus years of his career as a writing instructor and facilitator, he has contributed to the field of Rhetoric and Composition his ideas and models for collaborative learning, peer tutoring, and higher education reform. While best known for his articles “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” “Peer Tutoring and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” and his book Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge, Bruffee has contributed over sixty articles, responses, book chapters, and program curricula that address the needs of students in the writing classroom.

Freshman English at Brooklyn College in 1971. Faced with the task of educating a population of underprepared and un-acculturated students, Bruffee began to create a curriculum that would draw upon the diverse backgrounds and experiences of his students. The result of this curriculum is the collaborative-based learning model for which Bruffee is best known.

Mankind,’” which is credited by some scholars as changing the face of composition studies. In this article, Bruffee proposes that the model of lecture and independent study that was the norm of classrooms was in fact working against students and the natural ways students learn. He suggested that intellectual learning and activity is framed within a dialogue which creates thought from social interaction and that thought is internalized conversation. He urged that when students work together in collaborative groups they help each other to create a community in which this collaborative dialogue can occur when students agree on shared knowledge – knowledge that can be expressed through satisfactory writing. In this article, Bruffee advocated a classroom of equal peers working together to build socially constructed knowledge.

in his 1993 book Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge which is still, over twenty years later, considered the most through and comprehensive work on collaborative learning practices and theory. In this book, Bruffee builds on the foundation of his 1984 article and contests what many academics and students alike consider to be true knowledge. This questioning of the value of true knowledge challenges the authority of the teacher and the traditional student/teacher relationship, emphasizing a learning community that is co-created by both the teacher and the student that will displace the authority of the teacher and give students a greater sense of responsibility in their own learning process.

the use of peer tutoring in the writing curriculum. In his article “Peer Tutoring and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” Bruffee discusses the benefits of collaborative learning as they relate to students assisting and working with other students as opposed to an instructor-based model. Bruffee urges that the use of peer tutors in the writing curriculum allows students to become a part of the conversation of learning. Peer tutors act as knowledgeable peers that allow others to become more familiar with the values, codes, and discourses of the academic learning community. It is through collaboration with writers and peer tutors that knowledge is produced. The ideas on peer tutoring and collaboration that Bruffee expressed in this and subsequent articles on peer tutoring, in conjunction with creation of a tutoring and writing center at Brooklyn College, provided a model for other schools and learning communities to follow when instituting writing centers and tutoring programs. Thirty years later Bruffee is largely considered the “father” of peer tutoring and collaborative learning.

composition students across disciplines. His thoughts on collaborative learning, peer tutoring, and education reform have sparked controversy and influenced the way that many composition instructors think about and conduct their college classrooms. His ideas on collaborative learning, debated heavily in the pages of College English in the late 1980s, proved to create a collaborative environment that, while sometimes hostile, illustrated the very concepts that Bruffee was proposing: the need to arrive at knowledge and shared knowledge through a consensus of involved and invested peers.

conversation about the way that students think and learn and the best ways to run the writing classroom. This conversation includes peer interactions and the importance of the use of peer tutors. His contributions to the field of Rhetoric and Composition have earned him a place as a founder of American composition studies and have been highly influential in mainstreaming the use of collaborative and critical pedagogy in the modern composition classroom.