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Kenneth Bruffee Annotated Bibliography Books

In this book, Bruffee reflects on his experiences teaching students beginning with the influx of 20,000 new working-class students to the university system in 1971. Bruffee examines the problems that teachers faced in teaching underprepared students who were unsure of themselves in a new and unfamiliar academic community. Bruffee discusses the idea of knowledge in relation to these experiences and explores how knowledge is created and sustained by students and passed on in academic settings. He proposes that the university is not a place to hold knowledge to be given to students, but rather is a place that “acculturates” and creates knowledge by introducing diverse groups into conversations that create shared knowledge. In order to do this the authority figures in academic settings must reexamine their own identities and themselves not as leaders who profess knowledge, but rather as facilitators who help to acculturate students by sharing responsibility and knowledge in the classroom. In this way the teacher and the classroom environment fosters the larger goal of social change. The book is broken up into two sections. The first section “Collaborative Learning: What It Is and What It’s About” discusses collaborative learning. The second section “Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge” discusses views and understandings of knowledge. Both sections offer chapters that urge educators to look at the models that are currently at use in the classroom and explore different ways of looking at knowledge and the uses (and mediums) of knowledge in the classroom. Bruffee offers models and curricula for those interested in integrating collaborative learning into their own classrooms.