Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse

Our profession's recent focus on the social construction of knowledge and the roles that discourse and community play in this construction have made some of us aware of disturbing characteristics in our classrooms. We now notice, for instance, that the traditional forums comprising these classrooms-group discussions, lectures, teacher-student conferences, written assignments-generally support a traditional hegemony in which teachers determine appropriate and inappropriate discourse. We notice, further, that this political arrangement encourages intellectual accommodation in students, discourages intellectual resistance, and hence may seriously limit students' understanding of, and effective use of, language. As a result, we have begun to recognize the need for non-traditional forums for academic exchange, forums that allow interaction patterns disruptive of a teacher-centered hegemony. These forums should encourage students to use language to resist as well as to accommodate and should enable individuals to create internally persuasive discourse as well as to adopt discourse validated by external authority. In creating such non-traditional forums to supplement the work now going on in our classrooms, we tacitly argue for the importance of discourse in learning, the importance of students talking and writing to one another as well as to the teacher as they attempt to come to terms with the theories and concepts raised in their courses. This particular kind of learning does not take place often enough within the forums characteristic of our traditional classrooms, where interaction-at least the approved kind of interaction-is all too often dyadic, emphasizing the role of the all-knowing teacher discussing a topic with quiet, attentive students who may respond to the teacher but not directly to one another. Socrates tells Phaedrus that this is the ideal learning situation: lucidity and completeness and serious importance belong only to those lessons on justice and honor and goodness