The Shared Labor of Meaning Making: Peer Review as a Site for

Agentive Negotiations Across Difference

Ann Shivers-McNairUniversity of Washington

Overview

• Literature and research question

• Methods

• Case results

• Implications

Literature

Transfer as a negotiated local practice: distributed/horizontal agency in interactions

• Kory Ching (2007): “Students do not learn from teachers or from peers, but rather by engaging in the practices of writing and reading alongside both. This is a dialogic view of learning. According to Bakhtin, ‘the unique speech experience of each individual is shaped and developed in continuous and constant interaction with others’ individual utterances’ (89).” (p. 315)

• King Beach’s (2003) consequential transitions: development is fluid, relational, and horizontal, rather than stable, fixed, linear.

Literature

Transfer as a negotiated local practice: verbal negotiations of difference

Stephanie Kerschbaum (2014): “…even in the smallest moments of communication—as students debate the placement of a comma, tell stories about their high school writing experiences, try to explain their interpretation of a sentence, or write comments on peers’ essays—markers of difference make visible the dynamism, the relationality, and the emergence of difference” (p. 7)

Research Question

• What do agentive negotiations of difference look like in peer review talk? How are students making meaning?

• How might peer review conditions affect these agentive negotiations of difference?

Methods

• Year long pilot study of peer review in a two-semester “stretch” first-year writing course at a midsized university in the Southeast• Five students were observed in fall and spring in

various configurations of peer review

• Analysis of verbal interactions: • Initiation-Response-Feedback (Sinclair and

Coulthard 1975; Cf. Stubbs 1983, Black 1998)• Affective and epistemic stance (Biber and Finegan

1989; Cf. Thompson and Hunston 2000, Barton 1993, Lancaster 2014)

Case Study: Sierra (Fall)

Group: Sierra, an 18-year-old African American woman, Keisha, also an 18-year-old African American woman, and Darrin, an 18-year-old African American man, all from Mississippi

Activity: a peer review session of a draft of an image analysis with classmates in her classroom, near the end of the fall semester

Peer review conditions: Allison (a white woman in her mid-twenties who was also a PhD student) had given the group a single-spaced, page-long instruction sheet for the peer review session: students were asked to summarize and explain the parts of their paper (the introduction, the thesis, the body, the conclusion) out loud to their group, and have the group say back to the writer what they heard, then compare that data to the writer’s draft.

Speaker

Sierra What’s the point of having two papers, though?

Keisha I dunno.

Darrin I dunno.

Keisha I only put in that one, I didn’t know we was supposed to have two.

Sierra I heard it when she said print out two, but I’m like ((makes face))

Keisha I wasn’t here that day.

Sierra I wish I wasn’t here. I don’t want to know this.

Darrin My first paragraph’s long, so I’m gonna shorten this up for y’all. All right.

Sierra You gotta tell about it first.

Keisha Yeah.

Darrin What you mean?

Sierra You gotta explain what it’s talking about.

Speaker

(continued)

Keisha You gotta tell what it’s talking about and then::=

Darrin =Oh, oh. It talk about how like basketball is always changing, you know, from the way people play to how they look now, like back in like the 60s and 70s had like the little shorts and all that stuff. People had the high afros and long socks and all that. Now people got long shorts, got their all their different kinds of shoes, everything’s different from how it used to be.

(5) ((Sierra and Keisha are writing))

Darrin So I read it now?

Sierra You can read.

Darrin Oh, all right. ((reading)) Basketball world is forever changing, over the many decades since the sport was invented in 1891, the many styles of play, the physical presence of players, the courts, the rules of the game, even the things they wear. Each generation has their very own way, so how different they are from the generations before and after them.

(2) ((they look at each other))

Speaker

(continued)

Darrin All right, talking about (thesis)

Keisha Talk about what?

Darrin Gotta talk about what the aim is, right?

Sierra Well I said, when you talked about it, you said something about basketball is forever changed, you know, and then how it – like in the 60s how they wore like short pants and stuff like that, and they wore long pants and how they have their shirts like so thin and stuff, and that’s basically it. But what you, like – when you read it, and I was – I got that generations are different from like what they was then and how people talk about – people wear different clothes and stuff like that from how they used to wear and that’s basically it.

Keisha M::kay. When you were explaining it, you were talking about how the world was changing from the clothes and the high afros and stuff like that to now everything is kind of down and down, but, uh, yeah, you just pretty much saying how everything’s changed from the 70s and 80s till now. But when you were reading, you said something about basketball and the different things of that they wear and do such like the positions and the clothes that they have now, like their shorts are, like she said, now they’re kinda lower. And, they require a little bit more from you than they did back in the, uh, 70s and the 80s.

Analysis

• Focus on protocol rather than projects: of the 125 total turns in this conversation, 74 (59%) were the students and instructor negotiating (and occasionally, on the part of the students, criticizing) the logistics of the protocol

• Stance markers almost entirely about protocol• Repetition of “don’t know” (epistemic)• Repetition of “gotta” and “gonna” (necessity modals)

• No author response (for any of the students’ work) and minimal conversational uptake of peer responses

• No written comments or notes (by authors or reviewers)

Analysis

• How was difference marked and negotiated?• Mostly in their relative knowledge/understanding

of the peer review protocol

• How might the peer review conditions have shaped this negotiation?• The students’ response to the “say-it-back”

approach and the highly structured protocol (both considered best practices) seemed to shift the site of negotiation away from drafts and toward the protocol.

Case Study: Sierra (Spring)

Group: Sierra, an 18-year-old African American woman, and Jerrell, an 18-year-old African American man, both from Mississippi

Activity: a peer review session of final portfolio materials with classmates in her classroom, near the end of the spring semester

Peer review conditions: Allison (a white woman in her mid-twenties who was also a PhD student) framed the activity as an open-ended session in which students picked the drafts they wanted to discuss and what they wanted their peers to focus on.

Speaker

Jerrell Mine make you cry. Ma:::n, I gotta do my finals tonight, man. Dang. (.) Are you—do you really know FSU stand for?

Sierra ((mumbles))

Jerrell ((referring to instructor)) She know what it stand for, [she—

Sierra [I don’t know what it—I didn’t know what it stand for. What it stand for?

Jerrell You don’t know what it stand for?

Sierra Okay, come on, make the point. Make the point. The point is, you’re supposed to state what they saying, if you’re gonna keep using it, okay like the first time you’re using it in the essay, say what it is, and you keep on saying it like over and over=

Jerrell =Okay, I’m gonna spell it out if that makes you happy, I’m gonna spell it out. Florida State University.

Sierra Okay, I know that!

Jerrell I’m gonna spell it out, saying.

Sierra I woulda probably thought of the Football State University. ((smiling))

Speaker

(continued)

Jerrell Really? Football State.

Sierra Really though, but that’s the point. ‘Cause you don’t know what it stands for. ((laughs))

Jerrell ((smiling)) Football. State. Listen to what you said. Football. State. University. We got fifty states, and not one of them got ‘football’ in their name.

Sierra Okay, that’s just like MSU.

Jerrell Mississippi State.

Sierra Okay, why couldn’t it be Michigan State? Missouri State?

Jerrell ‘Cause they’re not— (.) I understand what you’re saying. ((laughs)) Leave me alone so I can do this paper. Leave me alone so I can do this paper. ((smiling))

Analysis

• Stance markers as epistemic play• Repetition certainty/doubt markers (do/don’t

know; really)

• Turn-taking similar to a conversation

• Focus on writer-reader relationship

• No written comments or notes (by authors or reviewers)

Analysis

• How was difference marked and negotiated?• By what each interactant claims to know: Jerrell teases

Sierra when she says she doesn’t know what “FSU” stands for, but this serves her point that Jerrell doesn’t seem to know what is reasonable to expect a reader to know.

• How might the peer review conditions have shaped this negotiation?• The nature of the final portfolio project (with its emphasis

on reflection and demonstrating engagement with learning outcomes) may have encouraged the students to critique each other’s work rhetorically; the unstructured nature of the peer review session may have encouraged the more playful interaction.

Implications

• Toward a non-linear, distributed, interactional model of “transfer” as a negotiated local practice:• In sharing the labor of discursive meaning making• In agentively negotiating difference

• Peer review as a site for practicing and critically engaging in this work • Cultivating awareness of the negotiation and

supporting students in engaging in negotiation• Critically considering how the conditions we set for

peer review might shape students’ negotiations