Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2014
Journal / Book Title
Composition Forum
Abstract
This essay considers the long-standing challenges, in both practice and theory, to collaborative writing in the first-year classroom. I argue that Hannah Arendt’s concepts of plurality and natality are useful frameworks for thinking constructively and practically about teaching argumentative writing through collaboration. I explore these concepts in terms of foundational scholarship on written collaboration, such as Candace Spigelman’s work on writing groups and intellectual property, as well as recent considerations of evolving technological resources (Howard). Ultimately, thinking through Arendt, I offer examples from my own classroom practice, and also generate a series of questions designed to support instructors’ incorporation of collaborative writing and thinking across their own diverse contexts. My goal here is not to suggest that there is a singular “best practice,” but rather to demonstrate the ways in which Arendtian concepts can foster complex and scaffolded pedagogies of collaboration in the first-year classroom.
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Restaino, Jessica, "Writing Together: An Arendtian Framework for Collaboration" (2014). Department of Writing Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works. 10.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/writingstudies-facpubs/10
Rights
© Copyright 2014 Jessica Restaino. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.
Published Citation
Restaino, Jessica. “Writing Together.” Composition Forum, vol. 30, 2014, https://compositionforum.com/issue/30/writing-together.php.