Thomas on Bruffee

The first point to prick me in Thomas’s presentation of Bruffee was Bruffee’s assertion of an influx of nontraditional students in the 70’s and 80’s. Other articles have made that same observation of a university overwhelmed by students who weren’t prepared for academic work—but those articles put a different date to this event which signals a need for a different type of pedagogy. Some of the articles we’ve read for this class locate the event in the late teens and twenties after WWI, some in the late forties after WWII, others now identifying the shift from tradition to the advent of modern information systems. If I couple these observations with one from the other class I’m taking (research methods and theories)—that the designation of scholarship as “recent” now means that which is less than five years old—I’m stuck with trying to define exactly what this “tradition” is that each pedagogical theory is rebelling against.

In one sense, this changing notion of tradition might prove Bruffee’s point that knowledge is part of a social context—each generation defines itself in opposition to the one that preceded it. But from my perspective, the hypothetical time span between knowledge and its decay into irrelevance is showing an ever decreasing half-life. It begs a question to Bruffee’s assertion that knowledge is “common property” within the social context—common to whom? I might ask.

Feminists posit a gendered tradition, ethnology defines a multitude of cultural traditions, Marxists have a conception of tradition as the hegemonic power of economic control. For Bruffee, rewriting and interpreting the past into the present is a function of some larger process than is modeled on the interaction of peers within a tutorial, a social transaction that is as much a generation as it is an analysis of traditional knowledge and means of expression.

But I would just like to have a little more perspective on what exactly Bruffee meant by “tradition.” Maybe some elaboration on “ontogenic cognitive development” might have helped—but probably not.