Insert Blog Post Title Here (Kruschek)

As someone who has traditionally hated working collaboratively, this section from Writing Together was very interesting. To be fair, I hate working in groups when I have no control over whom I am required to work with. Since starting the graduate program I have actually willingly collaborated twice with two different people, so my distaste for collaboration clearly comes from the required aspect of my previous academic collaborations, or so I tell myself.
The thing that struck me most about the reading was in the first few chapters when the authors discuss the extent to which those surveyed actually wrote collaboratively in their workplace, even though they said they wrote primarily alone (70-71). This made me consider whether in my (still new) role as an instructor I should be requiring collaborative work. I am intensely hesitant to require collaborative writing based on my own aforementioned (and negative) experiences, but it would seem that I am not doing my students any favors by shying away from collaboration. I have previously assigned a collaborative video commentary, however that was not writing intensive by any stretch of the imagination. I am a strong proponent of teaching practical skills whenever possible, and introducing a writing intensive collaborative project may have to be the next thing that I add to my syllabus.
I am pretty well lost on why the authors added the gender labels to hierarchical and dialogic modes of collaboration, i.e. masculine and feminine (138). Considering these modes already have labels, and coupled with the fact that the authors’ assert on 139 that setting these modes in “binary opposition” is both “harmfully reductive…and false,” I don’t see much benefit to adding additional labels that are also highly value or judgment laden in our culture. More confusion ensued when the authors state that these modes also highlight “historical tensions between the individual and society; the psychological tension between individual cognition…and the relational…; the pragmatic tension between goal-directed work and process-oriented play” (141). Its entirely possible I’m reading into this too much, but if I am its because I was a bit surprised at the agenda I’m seeing, i.e. privileging the dialogic over the hierarchical mode.